Editor's DeskEditor's Desk

Last night a bombshell dropped: a draft majority opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was leaked that indicated the highest court in the land will soon be overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in this country. In the draft, Alito writes, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” and “We hold that Roe and Casey [the 1992 case that further enshrined legalized abortion] must be overruled.” If true, this would be the most significant overturning of a court decision since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and made racial segregation in public schools illegal.

A few initial take-aways from this news:

  • The need for Catholics to pray and fast for the overturning of Roe has only intensified. No doubt the demonic forces that prop up the abortion industry will work overtime to ensure this draft never becomes reality.
  • If Roe truly is overturned, the number of innocent babies saved from death will be incalculable. No matter the lies the Left has told for over a generation about “millions of back-alley abortions” in pre-Roe days, the reality is that, like legalized divorce, making abortion legal made it much more practiced as well.
  • This opinion would not make abortion illegal in the United States, but would instead throw the abortion issue back to the individual states. This is a huge improvement over our current legal landscape, but pro-lifers would need to battle in their own states to make abortion illegal locally.
  • A leak of this magnitude is unprecedented, and likely indicates an attempt to undermine the direction of the Court. Perhaps it is an attempt to change the outcome of the decision before it is released, or to prepare blue states to enact legislation to ensure access to legalized abortion, or perhaps even to begin the process of packing the Court.

Also at this time we should not forget the many pro-life heroes who have been battling abortion for almost 50 years—longtime warriors like Joan Andrews Bell, Joe Scheidler, Jack Willke, Randall Terry, and Monica Miller, as well as the newer wave of pro-life activists like Lila Rose, David Daleiden, and Abby Johnson. And of course we should remember the countless and nameless soldiers who have prayed and counseled in front of abortion clinics across the country for years. Their work—our work—is not over, but we should be grateful for all those who worked to stop child-killing and soften the hearts of a hardened country to the evil of abortion.

We should also not expect the abortion-crazed Left to take this quietly. Abortion is the chief sacrament of their demonic cause, and they will stop at nothing—nothing—to keep it legalized. If Roe and Casey are truly overturned in June, we should expect civil unrest in the summer of 2022 that will make the summer of 2020 look like a picnic. Expect attacks against the institution of the Supreme Court, and perhaps even against individual justices. While Catholics should rejoice at the news of the toppling of Roe, we should also prepare ourselves both spiritually and physically for the pro-abortion response.

Finally, it’s quite possible that the overturning of Roe will be the final nail in the coffin of the American experiment. Our country was founded upon life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but in 1973 we attached the “pursuit of happiness” with an attack on life. Such a Faustian bargain cannot hold, and the unravelling of the abortion regime might very well lead to the unravelling of a nation. Such a result should be lamented, of course, but at the same time no nation that wants to kill its own babies deserves to survive.