What The Pro-Abortion Movement Gets Right

The following speech was delivered at the National Students For Life Summit in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, January 2, 2022

Forty-nine years. It has been forty-nine years since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. Since that time there have been forty-nine marches for life. Now many pro-life advocates are asking themselves if there will be a fiftieth, not because the pro-life movement has lost momentum, not because pro-life fighters have lost courage, but because the national license to abortion may finally be abolished.

I do think there will be another March for Life next year. I think there will be another Students For Life summit. Not because I think the Supreme Court will necessarily shirk its responsibility to abolish this fictional constitutional “right,” but rather because there will be so much more work to be done.

Abortion advocates accuse pro-lifers of having more ambitious goals than we let on. They warn their supporters that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will not mark the end of the pro-life movement but only the beginning. They warn that we will not be satisfied with merely overturning Roe and Casey and returning the issue of abortion to the states. They warn that we will not be satisfied if conservative states, such as Tennessee, decide to protect babies in the womb and more liberal states, such as New York, continue to permit abortion up until the moment of birth. Abortion advocates believe that pro-lifers will view the overturn of Roe and Casey as only the first major victory in a crusade to banish the scourge of abortion from our country forever. And they are absolutely right.

There is no right to abortion. There is no constitutional right, and there is no other sort of right either—at the state level or anywhere else. The disgraced former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, might pretend that there is some sort of right to abortion. He might push such a “right” through the legislature. He might sign the bill. He might even light the World Trade Center up pink to celebrate the occasion. Even then, there is no right to abortion—in New York or anywhere else.

“Human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. […] In so far as it deviates from right reason, it is called an unjust law; [and] in such a case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.” Those are the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor 

Now if I’ve learned anything over the past couple of years, it is that we are supposed to trust the doctors. And as far as I can tell, there is no doctor more deserving of trust than St. Thomas Aquinas. Unjust law is no law at all. It is only a species of violence.

This concept can be difficult to grasp in the abstract. It becomes clearer when we see it applied in the matter of abortion, which is tangible in that it involves the killing of a helpless baby. From this unjust law, which is no more than a form of violence, comes the supposed “right” to abortion. But this supposed “right” violates other rights—most importantly, the right to life of the baby. Abortion advocates cannot really refute this right. They sometimes try, usually by denying either the baby’s life or humanity. But those arguments fail to persuade because we know that babies in the womb are alive, not dead, and human, not marsupial. So rather than trying to argue the inarguable, the more sophisticated abortion advocates will not attempt to refute a baby’s right to life but will instead simply ignore it.

This is why the abortion movement relies so heavily on euphemism. The intentional killing of a baby in the womb becomes “reproductive rights”—ironic, because abortion is neither right nor reproductive. (It’s wrong, and it stops reproduction.) They will refer to “women’s health.” Women’s health. You know, when you call your grandmother, and you say, “How are you, Grandma?” And she says, “Well, the roof’s leaking, and the oven broke, and my hip hurts. But at least I have my “right to abortion.” (Is that what she says? I don’t think so. That’s not what she means by “health.”)

Abortion advocates use euphemisms because the reality of their butchery is repellant to all right-minded people. They can only justify the supposed “right” to abortion by denying the reality of what exercising that “right” entails. And “rights” disconnected from reality are no rights at all.

The denial of reality lies at the heart of the abortion movement. You don’t need to take my word for it. You can read this admission for yourself in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court decision that upheld Roe. The legal arguments in Casey,

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