AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan
Following oral arguments in last week’s landmark Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Democrats and the left-wing media appear to have dispensed with the last remnants of pretense that they have any qualms over abortion or concern for the lives of unborn babies.
The Dobbs case has been widely heralded as the most significant challenge to abortion law precedent in decades. During oral arguments, five of the nine Supreme Court justices signaled they may be prepared to revisit the precedents of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey—the Supreme Court decisions that have cumulatively recognized and upheld expansive rights to abortion in the United States for nearly half a century. The left’s vitriolic reaction to the December 1st oral arguments demonstrates the extent to which progressives hold abortion as an inviolable cornerstone of their political identity and platform.
Not too long ago, Democrats’ stance on abortion by and large adhered to the guideline championed by former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare.”
The “rare” part has long since been dispensed with. The 2020 Democratic National Committee platform noticeably omitted “rare” when it called for “safe and legal abortion,” which it deems to be “vital to the empowerment of women and girls.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs arguments, Democrats and progressive activists took it one step further, suggesting that abortion should not just be legal, but essentially encouraged. Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO), for example, took to Twitter to say that mere “legal” abortion is not enough: “I want a world where I’m not harassed when I got my abortion. Where I’m not shamed. Where I’m not considered lucky to be able to get one,” she wrote.
The extreme language didn’t stop there. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) echoed others in his party who celebrate abortion as “a fundamental right,” going as far as to claim that abortion is “essential.” Schumer’s colleague, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) warned the justices on the High Court that a “revolution” will take place should they fail to preserve Roe and Casey. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asserted that the United States is “not even in a democracy” if women can’t have abortions.
Perhaps most disturbingly, outside the Supreme Court as the arguments were taking place, several pro-abortion protesters gleefully swallowed abortion pills while proudly displaying a banner that read, “We are taking abortion pills forever.” As Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, correctly observed, the “old line” that “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” has quickly developed into the “new line” that “abortion should be safe, legal, and celebrated in verse and song.” Such actions seemed to virtually glamorize abortion as a sort of right of passage for women, reminiscent of actress Lena Dunham’s 2016 statement that “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.”
The left’s campaign to justify abortion as “fundamental” and “constitutional” has always rested on hollow legal and scientific foundations. Pro-abortion legal scholar and dean of Stanford Law School, John Hart Ely, has written that Roe “was not constitutional law and gave almost no appearance of an obligation to try to be”—a sentiment echoed by liberal constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who asserted that “behind [Roe’s] own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” Even Edward Lazarus, a former law clerk to the justice who authored the Roe opinion, Harry Blackmun, conceded that no one has “produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.”
Democrats’ pro-abortion extremism also betrays their purported “pro-science” worldview, as they perpetually turn a blind eye to emerging mountains of research and ever-improving technology about the life of the child in the womb.
Despite the left’s doomsday rhetoric last week, if the Court ultimately decides to overrule Roe and Casey next June, it would not only override decades’ worth of precedent and reverse two of the most constitutionally suspect decisions in the Court’s history, but it would also take a long-overdue step in protecting human life at its most innocent and defenseless stage.