Dobbs Is Magnificent
On the day that the decision of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was to be made public, I was standing outside in a Target parking lot on a beautiful summer day in Minnesota, staring at my phone. I was watching live updates of SCOTUS decisions as they came across, knowing that if the decision was anything close to the draft opinion that was part of an unprecedented leak by a SCOTUS staffer, Roe v. Wade (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey), after almost fifty years of being the “law” of the land, was about to be overturned. I was glued to my phone. History was about to be made.
Some Backstory
I became a Christian in 1992 when I was twenty-five years old. I unwisely left home at eighteen and lived mostly on my own working as a model, as an Admin for various organizations, and in fine dining. I experienced a lot of good and a lot of bad, and the bad wasn’t always someone else’s fault; most of the time it was mine. In fact, the book of Titus describes the former me in exact detail: “For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.”
And then this happened to me: But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior…. (Titus 3:3-6)
Notice the words, “not because of works done by us.” It wasn’t until the above work had been done in me by Jesus Christ that I began to care about people. All people. Before, I mainly cared only about myself, but after believing in Him, my fellow human being had a lot more value in my eyes. When you go from denying Christ to believing in Him, light comes to you forcefully like a silver bullet dropping into your brain (as Flannery O’Connor would say) and I was helpless to resist it. And with light comes knowledge, and I immediately knew that things that were to me a given and no big deal were either right or wrong. Abortion was one of those things that my conscience and the scriptures told me was most definitely wrong; just as sex before marriage, stealing, lying, etc., were also wrong. (Exodus 20) I became pro Ten Commandments and that made me (if you must put a modern day label on it,) “pro-life”.
The Magnificence of Dobbs
The decision was released. I was alone, but I felt like the entire world had stopped. Roe v. Wade was overturned. A court case that had existed almost my entire adult life, and one that no one thought would ever go away was now no more. If I would’ve thought of it right then, I would have bowed my head and worshipped. (Gen 24:26)
I remember going home and pulling up the opinion. After the first paragraph describing the merits of the case, the next glorious words on the first page of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health were:
“Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives. ”
Michael Stokes Paulsen is Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. I’ve not met him, but he is a man I admire very much because of how clearly he writes on matters of Constitutional law. Two days after Roe and Casey were overturned Professor Paulsen wrote a wonderful article about the Magnificence of the Dobbs decision that I think, gives strong and lucid reasons why “Dobbs may be the most important, magnificent, rightly decided Supreme Court case of all time.” In the article, he gives four reasons why this would be true:
As Justice Alito says in the first few words of his opinion, the U.S. Constitution contains no constitutional right to abortion. Roe created a right for human beings to kill a certain category of fellow human beings by abortion. Since Roe, sixty three million human beings have been killed as a result of this fabricated “right.” Dobbs did not end abortion, but it ended Roe that made millions of abortions possible. “Overruling Roe is a giant, historic leap for humanity.” (Paulsen)
Dobbs is a triumph for restoring faithful constitutionalism. The Dread Scott decision, Paulsen argues, is perhaps the nearest rival to Roe in how Roe was so lawlessly anti-constitutional. Dobbs rejects [the Roe and Dred Scott] methodology of decision making in favor of a path of reasoning marked by fidelity to the text, structure and history of the Constitution making it the exact opposite of Roe.
Dobbs is a triumph of judicial courage and principle. In Dobbs, the Court overruled two beloved precedents: Roe and Casey. In the face of vehement (even potentially violent) opposition, this takes fortitude and courage. I must admit, when I heard the leak of what the Dobbs opinion might be, I was surprised, elated but also in awe of the plurality! I didn’t think they had it in them and I’m so glad I was wrong. Their backbone and adherence to principle is “notable and rare.” (Paulsen)
Fourth, “Dobbs is, potentially, a positive, transformative moment for American society. Just as Brown [v. Board of Education] propelled the civil rights movement, Dobbs lays the legal groundwork for social and moral change.” Our real work is to change hearts and minds, and that won’t come via judicial decisions. But because of Dobbs, our work has been given a more broad opening. We no longer have to contend with a blanket, constitutionally indefensible legal opinion that gives every state in the Union a legal “right” to kill other human beings. Now, each state legislature is where we can focus our energies as well as individual relationships.
Roe Killed People
How do you think of Roe v. Wade? Is it some off-in-the-distance legislation that is paid attention to only on Sanctity of Life Sunday? Did you think nothing could be done about it anyway because, after all, it’s a Constitutional right, isn’t it?
Roe v. Wade (along with its companion case, Doe v. Bolton) was not just bad law. As Professor Paulsen has said elsewhere: “Roe v. Wade authorized unrestricted private violence against human life on an almost unimaginable scale, and did so, falsely, in the name of the Constitution.” When we hear the words, Roe v. Wade, we should remember the consequence of the opinion. Not only that it was falsely constructed, but that it killed people; over sixty million people and still counting. There is no other Supreme Court case where the consequence of the concurring opinion is the death of over sixty million Americans. That’s how you should remember Roe: a killer of millions.
I’ve written this post because Dobbs is Roe’s magnificent destroyer. Dobbs has not outlawed abortion, but it has removed the legal permission given to all fifty states that they can kill unborn children. Now it is up to each state to decide if they will protect human life or if they will find new, more barbaric ways to destroy it. For now, we can thank God for the people that brought the Dobbs case to SCOTUS, and we can be thankful for Justices on the Court who were unmoved by anything except their duty to interpret the Constitution to the best of their ability.