"The Unbearable Wrongness of Roe"

Here, at Public Discourse, is Prof. Michael Stokes Paulsen, reflecting on the Roe anniversary and on today's March for Life:

Today, thousands of people at the March for Life in Washington, D.C., are commemorating the thirty-ninth anniversary of a legal and moral monstrosity, Roe v. Wade, and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton. . . .

. . . It is important . . . to view reality with eyes wide open, focus clear, and gaze not averted. On this thirty-ninth anniversary of Roe and Doe, I would like simply to set forth what Roe and Doe held, in as clear-headed and straightforwardly descriptive legal terms as possible, and to lay out its human and moral consequences. My brief tour of Roe’s unbearable wrongness begins with Roe’s radicalism—its extreme holding creating a plenary right to obtain or commit abortion—proceeds with Roe’s legal untenability, and concludes with Roe’s immorality and the moral problem of our seeming passivity and quiescence in response to the greatest legal and moral wrongs of our age. . . .

God bless all those, in Washington at the March for Life and around the country, who today (but not only today) are not only bearing witness to Roe's wrongness but also reminding us of the what-should-be-very-uncomfortable fact that most of us have made our peace, perhaps with regret, with a culture and with a legal regime in which it is not only permitted, but regarded as a moral, fundamental right, to be protected and celebrated, for some people to cause the death of other people who are vulnerable and dependent.  Lord have mercy.

For another view, here is President Obama's statement, on the occasion of the Roe anniversary.