The Full Meaning of Pro-Life

There is a profound article in National Review’s special edition of November 29, 2021, “End Roe,” by O.C. Snead, professor of law and bioethics at Notre Dame, on the vision underpinning Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade — a vision totally disconnected from the Constitution, and in no way dictated by it. It is a vision of atomized human beings, unbound by any unchosen duties arising from natural relationships, in constant competition with one another.

For the late Justice Blackmun, the fetus is merely an uninvited intruder in a woman’s body, against whom she is entitled to employ lethal force to remove. That contrasts sharply with Professor Snead’s own description of a “woman and her biological offspring, one inside the other and utterly dependent on [her], intertwined to a degree found in no other human relationship.” (Reading Snead, I was reminded of the shiurim of Rav Moshe Shapira on the men of Sedom, whose great evil derived from their denial of the complex interrelationship and interdependences of all beings.)

Blackmun effectively divided the world into two categories: “persons,” who bear rights; and “non-persons,” who live at the sufferance of persons, according to the latter’s interests and desires. Without explanation, he consigned the legal and moral standing of the unborn child to the exclusive private judgment of the mother. From there it was as simple matter of tallying up the interests of the woman — freedom from the emotional and physical burden of raising a child, the possible stain of illegitimacy, the threat to maternal health, the suffering of an unwanted child (ignoring the millions of those couples eager to adopt).

To Blackmun’s list, the Court in Casey v. Planned Parenthood added the freedom of the mother to make choices based on “her conception of her spiritual imperatives and place in society,” which calls to mind Justice Antonin Scalia’s acid quip about constitutional reasoning at the level of messages in a fortune cookie.