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

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.