If Court reverses Roe v. Wade, we’re facing a social tsunami

By David McElroy · May 2, 2022

If the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade later this year, I don’t plan to talk about it publicly.

That doesn’t mean I won’t have thoughts about it. That just means there will be nothing useful for me to say. If you thought the country was divided by opinions about Donald Trump or George Floyd, wait until you see this.

If you think social media is polarizing now, just wait until what such a decision will bring. And I have nothing to say that would make any of the extremists — on any side — happy. In fact, I can’t imagine an opinion such as mine being read at that time. So if that happens, I won’t be talking about it.

Why?

Because either extreme on the issue brings about an end result which I believe is morally wrong and is socially destructive. But in this social and political environment, you are required to be on one side or the other — in the extreme — without fail. If you express concerns about what either result will bring us, you will be shouted down as a heretic.

The actual legal opinion in Roe v. Wade was nonsensical. As a matter of legal reasoning, it made zero sense. Even if you want abortion to be legal, an honest person would admit this if he or she read the actual decision and applied that logic to all of human life.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court simply made up constitutional law to say something that it did not say. If you grant the justices’ reasoning, you would have to also assume that every individual has a fundamental right to make every decision about his or her own life.

Instead, the decision allows governments to make choices about almost everything — except whether to kill an unborn baby. The legal reasoning was nonsense. The justices pretended to find a fundamental right to abortion — in privacy rights, of all things — but they found no other fundamental individual rights at the same time.

But I don’t want us to head down the other path — that of allowing state governments to criminalize anything which their politicians find immoral. I want people to have the right to make their own decisions about their own lives — and if a state can ban abortion, what else can it ban that will trample the natural rights of individuals?

I see no good legal position. I see no good practical outcomes. I see only more anger, more hatred, more conflict and more deaths.

Most people would agree that there is nothing morally problematic about hormonal pills that prevent an embryo from forming. Most would also agree that there’s nothing wrong with a similar hormonal pill that prevents a fertilized egg — in its first days — from ever turning into an embryo.

Most people would agree that it is murder to rip a baby from his or her mother’s womb in the moments before birth, cutting the baby into pieces to intentionally kill it.

But the extremes of this political issue have forced people to pretend that if you accept either of these obvious thoughts that you must also accept the rest of their extreme positions.

Pro-abortion people pretend that if you don’t support a woman’s right to kill her baby — right up until the moment of birth — you are “controlling her body.” This insane position requires you to believe that a fully formed baby can be legally and morally killed at one moment by doing things which would be murder just moments later after the baby has passed through the birth canal.

Some anti-abortion people demand that you accept the conservative Catholic position — that any intervention that stops a fertilized egg from growing into a baby is murder. And that seems equally insane to me.

There is a point at which a fertilized egg has developed enough to be given the protection that is given to a baby which has already been born. We’ve argued for decades about when that point happens, and I’m not about to settle it here. But we’ve stopped looking at this messy middle ground for the most part, because extremists demand that you go all one way or all the other.

You have to either oppose any form of hormonal birth control (even birth control pills, for some) or else you have to support murdering babies which are ready to be born. Neither position makes any sense to me.

If Roe v. Wade is struck down, you’re going to hear years of angry slogans which oversimplify a complex issue. In such an environment, there will be no room for people who want to find honest and reasonable solutions.

And that’s why I won’t be participating in such debates.

The things which are going to be said during such arguments are going to be emotional and angry. They will be extreme and irrational. There will be no room for people who don’t hate their opponents. There will be no venue for a voice such as mine at that point, because I don’t hate the people of either group.

There’s a lot more than I could say about this issue, but I don’t see any point. And I certainly won’t see a point when the levels of angry hatred are cranked up to the levels which I think we’re about to see.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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