LewRockwell Today, January 22, is National Sanctity of Human Life Day. The first such day was proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. The date was chosen because it is the date in 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in the infamous case of Roe v. Wade, held that a woman’s right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. States may no longer ban abortions before the fetus is determined to be “viable.”
Many churches celebrate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday on the third Sunday of January—the Sunday before the anniversary of the Roe decision. On this Sunday, sermons were preached on the national sin of abortion, literature was passed out regarding the evils of abortion, gruesome pictures were shown of dead fetuses and botched abortions, the horrors of partial-birth abortion were explained, the further liberalization of abortion laws in states like New York was denounced, and Planned Parenthood was singled out for condemnation (but probably not the “pro-life” Republicans who continue to fund the organization).
But of course, this is all just preaching to the choir, as most girls and women in Catholic, conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist churches—the kind of churches that observe Sanctity of Human Life Sunday—who take their religion somewhat seriously are not likely candidates to have an abortion.
More than 200 members of Congress (39 senators and 168 House members—all of whom are Republicans) are urging the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade when it takes up the issue of Louisiana’s admitting privileges law in the consolidated cases of June Medical Services LLC v. Gee and Gee v. June Medical Services LLC.
The members of Congress have filed an amicus brief in support of the respondent and cross-petitioner, Dr. Rebekah Gee, the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health. As reported by Kevin Daley, a legal affairs reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation:
“Forty-six years after Roe was decided, it remains a radically unsettled precedent: two of the seven Justices who originally joined the majority subsequently repudiated it in whole or in part, and virtually every abortion decision since has been closely divided,” the brief reads.
“The Supreme Court’s 1992 Casey decision exemplifies the permanent flux of abortion jurisprudence,” the brief argues. Casey involved a Pennsylvania law requiring doctors to counsel patients about abortion 24 hours before the procedure and obtain parental consent if the patient is a minor, among other things. The high court upheld those requirements. In so doing, it overturned two decisions from the 1980s that blocked comparable regulations.
A similar sequence preceded the 2007 Gonzalez v. Carhart decision, the lawmakers note. In Gonzalez, the high court upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. That law banned an abortion method called intact dilation and extraction. Just seven years earlier, however, the justices struck down a Nebraska law much like the federal PBA ban.
“These incessant retrenchments show that Roe has been substantially undermined by subsequent authority, a principal factor the Court considers when deciding whether to overrule precedent,” the brief reads. “Casey clearly did not settle the abortion issue, and it is time for the Court to take it up again.”
Elsewhere the lawmakers wrote that abortion case law is “characterized by Delphic confusion and protean change.”