Reformation of Abortion Law and the Nature of Roe v. Wade.

John C. Rankin

(January 17, 2013)

In order to win the legal protection of the unborn, first the hearts and minds of the nation must be won.

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Roe v. Wade

In the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and its companion Doe v. Bolton decision, the U.S. Supreme Court invents a “right” to human abortion. In First the Gospel, Then Politics …, 1999, Vol. 2, not published, I examine Roe closely. For here, it can be critiqued in a nine-point summary:

  1. Roe chides the “emotional” nature of the debate and pretends to rise above it, all the while conforming to its own unstated biases;
  2. Roe sanctions a war between the mother and unborn child, by first setting up a war between the mother and father of the same unborn child;
  3. Roe invents a “penumbra” of undefined shadows in which to avoid an accurate definition of terms;
  4. Roe dispenses with the history of Hippocratic and Christian medical ethics that opposed human abortion;
  5. Roe dispenses with the American Medical Association’s original history of opposing human abortion;
  6. Roe dispenses with the biological facts of conception which would inform the discussion, claiming their irrelevance;
  7. Roe invents a broad then narrowly applied “right of privacy” to allow a woman to abort an undefined “potential” life; and
  8. Roe further wages war on the unborn by denying them their constitutional personhood. This is Roe’s greatest fear and weakness – the Court knows that the unborn child is human, and that abortion destroys a human life. Roe constructs a relentless artifice to get around the obvious, to adopt every conceivable angle to deny the humanity and civil rights of the unborn. But the Court has yet to convince itself – that is why it has conducted such a remarkable fishing expedition. Thus the Court now reveals its true theological colors, which the biblically literate will recognize: Roe appeals to the weakest form of moral argument there is – the pretension of ignorance, the “I don’t know” argument – rooted in Cain’s response to Yahweh, which the religious elitists also used with Jesus. Thus, the Court’s final point:
  9. Roe pleads ignorance about the humanity of the unborn, and rationalizes their legalized destruction – its tendentious goal from the outset.

The Roe Court follows the logic of Cain and the Pharisees, its spiritual forefathers:

  1. when dishonest elitists do not have the courage to admit true definition of terms and then make their case; and
  2. when they cannot market a false definition of terms, because they know they cannot fool the common people with it; then
  3. they pretend to be ignorant of reality.

As Cain killed his brother while pleading ignorance, as the devil always sought to kill the Messianic lineage, and as the religious elitists sought to kill Jesus while pleading ignorance, so too does Roe serve the agenda of the ancient serpent – to allow the killing of the most vulnerable image-bearers of God in our midst. And as the religious elitists feared the common people who believed in Jesus, so too does the elitist Roe Court majority fear the “consent of the governed” – the grass roots opinion of the people.

The Court thus makes a pretension of ignorance under the rubric of posing a non-existent “non-consensus.” Yet, in law, when central facts cannot be agreed on, no ruling can be made. Yet, Roe ruled nonetheless.

Theological Diagnosis

   Roe violates the ethics of Only Genesis at every turn:

  1. It rejects the goodness of God as the Creator of human life, rejects the power to give, and instead it supports the power to take and destroy human life, where a war between man and woman, then between woman and child, is sanctioned;
  2. It rejects honest communication and the power to live in the light, and instead supports the penumbras of the dark, and adopts occultic ethics in a process of manipulating words to serve self-aggrandizing power;
  3. It rejects the ethical and biological needfulness in the nephesh of human nature, which the unborn share fully, and instead supports a Darwinian aggression of the strong over the weak;
  4. It rejects true human freedom as expressed by the ethics and power of informed choice, and instead supports an idolatry of misinformed choice;
  5. It rejects the power to love hard questions, and instead supports bias and ignorance;
  6. It rejects the goodness of human sexuality as found in the unity of man and woman in marriage, and instead supports an autonomous sexuality that is the basis for promiscuity and the playground for male chauvinisms, thus augmenting a war between the sexes;
  7. It rejects science and the scientific method for determining fact, and instead supports a non-relevance of scientific fact;
  8. It rejects verifiable history, and instead supports the deconstruction of history to suit its bias;
  9. It rejects the history of the United States as rooted in biblical covenantal law, and instead supports the deconstruction of law to suit its bias; and
  10. It mocks the unalienable right to life as given by the Creator, acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, thus truncating the meaning of religious liberty in the First Amendment as it highlights its anti-biblical bias, and instead supports the choice to destroy life.

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