Why We Should Not Honor Established Precedent

The National Abortion Federation(NAF) has said that we need Supreme Court justices who will honor established precedent meaning that the abortion decision, Roe v. Wade, should never be overturned. National Abortion Federation, “We Need a Supreme Court Justice Who Will Honor Established Precedent.” July 9, 2018. NAF Blog, https://prochoice.org/need-supreme-court-justice-will-honor-established-precedent/. Those that espouse a duty to honor abortion precedent are mistaken and hypocritical. When abortion was legalized, the Roe court abandoned long held legal precedent that protected unborn life to the celebration of abortion advocates like NAF. What about honoring legal precedent? I see a double standard. There is nothing wrong with upsetting established precedent if the precedent is morally wrong.

History is a great teacher, though very few pay attention to the lessons that can and should be learned from it. The statement about honoring precedent by NAF echoes a similar argument America heard back in the 1800s. When the moral issue of slavery was tearing apart our country, slavery proponents argued that it needed to remain legal, honoring the precedent set in the Dredd Scott decision. I doubt any person in NAF today would say it was wrong for anti-slavery advocates to upset established legal precedent founded in Dredd Scott.

The laws back in the South effectively treated African-Americans as subhuman. It was okay to abuse them, enslave them, deprive them of their rights, and suppress their efforts for equality because after, all, they were “lesser” than whites.

We have a similar law today. The unborn are considered a subhuman class. It is okay to abuse them, to murder them, and to take away their right to live because, after all, they are “lesser” than born humans. This kind of thinking and reasoning is wrong and evil. People that are different than us are not subhuman. Just like skin color does not make someone less human, someone’s size, level of development, environment, or degree of dependency also does not make someone less human. The greatest injustices in history were considered by many people at the time to be good, moral aspects of culture. But future generations looked back and rightly found those social institutions like slavery to be wrong. Likewise, future generations will look back and condemn abortion as a gross moral evil that was permitted to flourish for far too long because it was faithfully advocated as a cultural necessity. When are we going to learn?

The argument that appeals to precedent being established is a bad one. It doesn’t matter how established a law or Supreme Court decision is. If it is a bad law that infringes on human rights, then it should be overturned. Precedent has nothing to do with it. Slavery was precedent and was established through many laws in the South. That in no way made it something good that should have been protected and kept legal. When current laws support injustice it is our moral obligation to stand against those laws. Let us do everything we can to change them so that justice and goodness are promoted for every person from the womb to the nursing home. 

Book Review: Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade by Daniel K. Williams [Clinton Wilcox]

Special thanks to Oxford University Press for the free copy to review.

Daniel Williams has done a great service to the pro-life field by researching and compiling this volume regarding the history of the pro-life movement. There are now two books on abortion history that I would suggest grace every pro-life advocate's bookshelves: Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History by Joseph Dellapenna, and now Defenders of the Unborn by Daniel K. Williams.

This book is meticulously researched and sourced. It tells the historical tale of how a movement of pro-life advocates, who were largely Catholic and Democrat, tried to work against the liberalization of abortion laws, which eventually culminated in Roe v. Wade, ending the ultimate safety of unborn children in the womb. It recounts not just how they fought against these bills, but also the progression of their arguments, from making Natural Law arguments, to Constitutional rights-based arguments, to showing abortion victim photography, to arguing that women are victims of the abortion culture. It shows how, even though the movement started as mainly Catholic Democrats, eventually it became a much more diverse movement.

I've been doing work in the abortion field for a long time now, and there's a lot of false information regarding abortion history and the history of the pro-life movement out there. I've heard much of it over and over again. One glaring historical error I hear is that there was no pro-life movement until after Roe v. Wade was passed. Williams shows that it simply isn't the case. There was much pro-life work being done before Roe v. Wade, in order to ensure that unborn human lives were protected.

It's also worth noting that Williams is very even-handed in his approach. He doesn't insult either side; in fact, he uses language that both sides use in the course of writing his book. So even though this book is written by a pro-life person, a pro-abortion-choice person can read this as a history book without getting offended by inflammatory language.

If there is one negative point to this book, it would just be that it's very matter-of-factly written, with a lot of information given to you, so it's pretty dry reading. It's not the kind of book you'd just sit down and finish in one or two sittings. But if you read it through, study it, and take notes, it will greatly benefit you, especially with all the false information regarding abortion history and the history of the pro-life movement is out there.