You have more power to protect the children in the womb in 2023 than you have had for fifty years. That’s because when the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision reversing Roe vs. Wade, it decided to stop setting policy on abortion, and instead returned that important task “to the people and their elected representatives.” The Court had wrongly put severe limits on what laws our lawmakers could pass to protect the unborn, claiming falsely that the Constitution prevented such protection prior to viability, while unable to point to where in the Constitution such a limit came from. But now the limitation is gone, and everything is back on the table. The reversal of Roe should be thought of not so much as a vertical move “from the federal to the states,” but rather a horizontal move from the Courts to the legislatures. The Court in Dobbs went out of its way to point out that it would not substitute its own judgment for that of the legislatures. Quoting a past decision, the majority invoked more than once the principle that “courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies” (Ferguson v. Skrupa). Stated another way, the Court said that when the people, through their lawmakers, put in place various measures that protect the unborn, those measures should be honored. “A law regulating abortion, like other health and welfare laws, is entitled to a “strong presumption of validity” (Heller v. Doe). It must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests”(p. 77). continued on page 68... “Many pro-abortion lawmakers were all too content to say that the Court took the issue out of their hands. In that way, they could vote in a pro-abortion way and tell the voters not to hold it against them.” Fr. Frank Pavone
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