Katherine Beck Johnson is Research Fellow for Legal and Policy Studies at Family Research Council. This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on January 25, 2022.
When moving homes recently, I had a conversation with the mover that cut through a lot of what passes for sophisticated discourse about abortion. He asked me what I did for a living, and I said I was a lawyer who focuses on pro-life policy. He was confused and asked what that entails. I told him I work to make abortion illegal.
“My sister showed me a video of an abortion once, that baby had eyes and everything!” he replied. “I was like, ‘Dang!! That’s murder!!’”
He’s exactly right, and nearly everybody knows it. When the justices consider in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health whether to end a constitutional right to an abortion, they must keep this simple and indisputable fact in mind.
The Supreme Court has already read pages and pages of legal briefs. The justices listened to oral arguments on Dec. 1, peppering attorneys on both sides with lots of legal questions pertaining to stare decisis, viability, substantive due process, and the undue burden standard. In the legal weeds of party briefs, amicus briefs, and oral arguments, the justices should not lose sight of the fact that the unborn child is a baby. Preventing states from outlawing abortion only prevents states from doing the obvious — preventing the murder of an innocent human life.
The Left can use all the carefully curated language they want to minimize the enormity of abortion and dehumanize the unborn child (“clump of cells,” “fetus,” “potential life,” et cetera), — but they are not fooling the public, and they should not try to fool the Supreme Court justices. Even the Left knows the humanity of the unborn child. While they use language such as a “woman’s right to choose” or even “women’s rights” to try to place a positive spin on abortion, at the end of the day, the emperor has no clothes. They are simply attempting to hide the fact that the unborn child is a baby, and they are advocating for the murder of the child.
But while the Left shouts loudly and launches threats at the justices, they are ultimately few in number. Most of America thinks like my mover, a man with ordinary moral sensibilities who recognizes abortion for what it is: murder.
The justices inside the Beltway need to take a step back from their wonky legal arguments and take a minute to remember just what Mississippi is fighting for: the legal protection of life inside the womb. This isn’t some arcane property dispute where nothing more is at stake than esoteric legal doctrines spelled out in Latin. This is a case over the fundamental right to life and the ability to prevent the greatest civil rights abuse of our time: the legalization of killing our most vulnerable brothers and sisters.
The Supreme Court should never have mandated a so-called right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. There is nothing the court can do to bring back the lives lost to abortion in the past almost 50 years. They can, however, take a step forward and reverse their previous wrong by overturning the deadly decision of Roe v. Wade. Mississippi and every other state should be protecting the unborn from the deadly practice of abortion. No state should allow the most vulnerable to be killed.
Our country is missing around 60 million people today as a result of abortion. These are brothers and sisters who would have been husbands and wives, friends, and cousins. Our country is far poorer today without our lives touched by the children in the womb that were deprived of the fundamental right to life. That long and poorly reasoned legal opinion of Roe led to 60 million deaths. Its consequences have been devastating. When the justices are writing their Dobbs opinion this year, may they remember what is common knowledge — the unborn are babies and abortion kills them.
