This is it... Supreme Court finally appears ready to protect life!

The Supreme Court is in a strong position to overturn Roe v. Wade. It appears likely to many experts the court will not entirely eliminate the practice of abortion, but will significantly curtail it by allowing states to exercise their rights to limit abortion to earlier terms. If not an absolute victory, it is at least significant. 

Highlights

By Marshall Connolly (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
12/2/2021 (2 years ago)

Published in Marriage & Family

Keywords: Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court, abortion

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) - The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The case centers on a new law in Mississippi that protects life after the 15th week of pregnancy. To be clear, 15 weeks of pregnancy is a time when the unborn child is nearly halfway to a normal, natural birth, and getting close to the time when a child is viable outside the womb. Viability is generally possible after 24 weeks. 

A majority of the justices are pro-life, at least this is the understanding of them based on extensive interviews and vetting. They were also appointed by pro-life presidents. As such, most experts agree they will outweigh the anti-life justices on the court and finally rule to defend life. But what does that mean? 

Unfortunately, it does not mean the end of abortion in America. Instead, it allows states, like Mississippi, where the people have elected to protect life to the greatest extent permissible under the law, to pass bans against abortion after a certain period of time. In Mississippi, that will be 15 weeks. Other states will protect life at earlier, or later dates. 

Fundamentally, this is an issue of states' rights. Obviously, states have the right, and in fact --an obligation, to protect human life. The problem is, this rarely happens. That a new, human life begins at conception is literally beyond all dispute. Questions over the circumstances of conception, viability, the mother's bodily autonomy, and when a person is legally considered a person are outside this question that is one of science. The state therefore either has a a right, and an obligation to protect human life, or it doesn't. While extenuating circumstances may exist for individual persons, leading them to ask doctors to participate in extinguishing human life (another fact), if the state exercises its power to defend life, it may do so. 

States do this all the time by employing police, imposing mandates for public health, and other standards and laws that protect people all the time. Many of those laws also apply to the unborn, such as a provision that a person who commits homicide against a pregnant woman commits two counts of murder. 

Given this, it makes logical sense that the law should be consistent when it applies to protecting unborn children. 

There exists another angle on this case, which is the defense of a child's life before he is viable outside the womb. It is correctly reasoned that if a child can be defended at 15 weeks, before viability, then why not six, or fewer? And this is precisely the point. States have the right, as per the Constitution, to set this limit where they choose. States like Texas may choose six weeks. Mississippi 15, and California or New York, none. 

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Again, a state either has an obligation to protect human life, or it does not. This is not a matter of debate, and should not be a court case. Yet it is, and hopefully the Supreme Court will establish that the responsibility to defend life includes life in the womb, right from the moment of conception.