Adam Leitel

The question for critics of what’s termed America’s “exceptional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” was not whether they believed the so-called “right” had any merit; they never offered that opinion. Instead, as noted previously in this space, the question came down to what went wrong.

The answer being that the evil we saw was simply too much killing, despite the wishes of the killing—which seemed to be, as many claimed, to result in the ‘right choice’ of killing others more efficiently.

In that sense, Roe v. Wade stands as a critical benchmark in our jurisprudence. It said that it was okay to put a woman in an abortion, but it was not okay to say that abortion was not an abortion, or wrong, or that a heartbeat rule would have to be created because that would make the right to electively kill someone who had been informed to have one would have to be seen as wrong.

While these standards were put in place, we couldn’t fully explain the abortion of non-viable babies. In the case of a non-viable baby, these were not considered ‘terminations,’ but rather gestational limits put in place to protect the mother, her life, and the fetus.

The horror of Roe v. Wade was not only the arbitrary nature of these limits, but that the Supreme Court made abortion a right that was not subject to the federal or state laws of murder—despite the law of capital punishment, which is far more definite, in limiting the killing of death-row inmates, to life in prison than our legal rules did.

Roe is also significant in that it put women in a position where they had to go to a Supreme Court to receive a right which they already had, despite the facts that it was “not okay” to kill non-viable babies.

Though one could argue the fact that human life begins at conception, one has to wonder, did not “exceptional circumstances” justify those women and their baby out at their deaths?