By Dave Andrusko
Peggy Noonan’s “The End of Roe v. Wade Will Be Good for America” preliminarily assumes that the leaked first draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion on Mississippi‘s abortion law is what the final version will essentially look like: Roe (and Casey) are overturned! As many have pointed out, that may or may not be true, although pro-lifers fervently pray that it is.
While Noonan covers numerous aspects of Roe’s awful impact on our culture, what I find most inspiring is her explanation for why she is pro-life:
I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We cannot accept as a society—we really can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting—that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. Another reason, and maybe it veers on mysticism, is that I believe the fact of abortion, that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that the children grow up hearing this and absorbing it and thinking, “We end the life within the mother here,” “It’s just some cells”—that all of this has released a kind of poison into the air, that we breathed it in for 50 years and it damaged everything.
Yes, Roe changed everything. Roe undermined the moral obligation mothers—and fathers!—have to their unborn children. Like acid, Roe ate away at the foundations of our culture making abortion seem to be an acceptable “solution.”
Yet, in season and out of season, pro-lifers are the eternal optimists. Why? Because we believe the better angels of our nature will not –cannot–be forever silenced. As a nation, we are better than turning a blind eye to almost 900,000 abortions a year would have you believe. Reminding our fellow citizens of this tragedy is among the most important tasks you do, day in and day out.
Noonan’s conclusion is immensely powerful:
And if Roe is indeed overturned, God bless our country that can make such a terrible, coldhearted mistake and yet, half a century later, redress it, right it, turn it around. Only a thinking nation could do that. Only a feeling nation could do that. We’re not dead yet, there are still big things going on here.