Roe At 40: 55 Million Abortions. No Reason To Celebrate

January 22nd marks the 40th anniversary of the notorious Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions which struck down abortion laws in all 50 states, made abortion legal throughout pregnancy for almost any reason and led to 55 million abortions. There are 1.2 million more abortions every year. And with less than half of one percent of all abortions for rape, incest, and a small number for when the life of the mother, almost all abortions are for personal, not medical reasons. 

This is nothing to celebrate. Roe is to be condemned as the most unjust, dark, most reprehensible decision in American history. Pro-lifers oppose Roe and abortion because the right to abortion comes and is exercised at the expense of innocent unborn human beings.

The unborn is not a mere blob of tissue, products of conception or a human non person or any other dehumanizing terms abortion advocates use to justify killing the unborn. The unborn is one of us-someones, not somethings-a unique, alive, whole human being, an unborn baby boy or girl who-from the first moments of their existences-possess a fully human nature with inherent capacities of fully functioning adults, who share completely in our humanity.

Roe is unjust because it tramples upon and stripped the human rights and right to life from a whole class of people. It is the most unjust decision in American history because the unborn is the weakest and most helpless member of the human family whose weakness demands our care, protection and compassion. Their weakness and inability to defend themselves, their absolute dependency on their mothers is no more an argument that they are human non persons who can be disposed of than any other class of human beings who are dependent upon others. The unborn's weakness demands greater compassion since societies are judged by the way they treat its weakest members. It is impossible to be a compassionate and just society when we kill our weakest members. (Compare this to Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger who said, "The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.").

Abortion violates the self-evident principle that all humans are created equal and are endowed with the unalienable right to life. Abortion undermines universal human rights because it means that human rights and the right to life are no longer inherent or unalienable rights. It says that there are certain classes of human beings without human rights who are disposable for others and that being human is not enough to have human rights and the right to life. When human rights are denied anywhere, they are threatened everywhere. When anyone becomes expendable, we all become negotiable.

This will be especially true for the generation that tolerated Roe. They are on the verge of a bankrupt nation deciding they are expendable for the same reasons they thought the unborn were-that they are expensive, burdensome, in the way, and can no longer defend themselves.

It is impossible to truly celebrate the dark nearly absolute abortion right granted in Roe because those seeking liberty and equality through abortion do so by crushing the weakest members of our society and depriving them of their equality and liberty.

The injustice of abortion and the nearly unlimited right to abortion granted by Roe, the 55 million abortions that have ensued (55 million is equal to all of the people in Oregon, California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah), the 1.2 million additional abortions every year-these have fueled the pro-life movement for 40 years and will energize us until Roe and abortion on demand are ended.