Pro-life justices will ban interracial marriage?

Vice President Kamala Harris implied the Dobbs decision somehow threatens “the right to interracial marriage.” The pro-life, constitutional ruling “calls into question other rights that we thought were settled, such as the right to use birth control, the right to same-sex marriage, the right to interracial marriage,” Harris said during prepared remarks in Illinois on Friday afternoon.

While Harris is not the first Democrat to make this charge — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) claimed without evidence that “Republicans want to ban interracial marriages” in March — her assertion cannot be substantiated based on any of the opinions associated with the Dobbs ruling. Justice Clarence Thomas, whose forceful concurring opinion eviscerated Roe, is married to a white woman. There is no indication the former Catholic seminarian wishes to dissolve his union with Ginni Thomas.

Abortion is a broad consensus supported by people of all faiths?

On Friday, President Biden called Roe v. Wade “a decision with broad national consensus, that most Americans of faith and backgrounds [sic] found acceptable.”

Biden made the same erroneous assertion just last month. In reality Christianity, and to degrees Orthodox Judaism and Islam, reject abortion-on-demand. Nor did Americans hold a “broad national consensus” in favor of abortion at the time Roe was decided. In 1969, only 40% of Americans believed abortion should be legal during the first trimester. The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who founded the group now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America but later became pro-life, admitted the abortion lobby “simply fabricated the results of fictional polls” showing “60% of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion.”

Abortion pills “safely end early pregnancies”?

“My administration will also protect a woman’s access to medications that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration — the FDA — like … mifepristone, which the FDA approved 20 years ago to safely end early pregnancies and is commonly used to treat miscarriages,” said Biden on June 24.

Mifepristone, part of a two-drug cocktail used to induce early medical abortions, certainly isn’t safe for the baby. But as abortions have shifted from surgical to medical abortions, mothers have also suffered an increasing number of side effects and injuries. Women who take the “medications” touted by Biden run a 53% greater risk of visiting the emergency room than those who have a surgical abortion. “Women who had a chemical abortion followed by a second abortion of any type within the next 12 months were more than twice as likely to wind up in the emergency room,” the authors of the study, who are associated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said in a statement to The Washington Stand. “Consistent with CDC reports, we found the percentage of abortions performed by means of mifepristone and misoprostol increased from 4.4% of total abortions in 2002 to 34.1% in 2015. Similarly, ER visits following mifepristone abortion grew from 3.6% of all postabortion visits in 2002 to 33.9% of all postabortion visits in 2015,” the peer-reviewed study concluded.

“The safety of the abortion pill is greatly exaggerated,” said its lead author, Dr. James Studnicki.

Abortion-on-demand is a constitutional right?

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) claimed, “Six radical Supreme Court Justices have overturned nearly 50 years of precedent, stripping away the constitutional right to an abortion.” Biden likewise said, “I believe Roe v. Wade was the correct decision as a matter of constitutional law.” Numerous Democrats made similar remarks.

First, only five justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Chief Justice John Roberts’s concurring opinion upheld the Mississippi law protecting unborn children from abortion after 15 weeks but would not overturn Roe.

Second, it’s impossible to fact-check an opinion but, if Biden sincerely believes Roe v. Wade is good constitutional law, he is in the smallest of minorities. The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg once described Roe as “heavy-handed judicial intervention.” A former clerk to the justice who wrote the Roe decision, Harry Blackmun, said, “Roe borders on the indefensible,” because “it has little connection to the constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent.”

The Roe decision hardly pretended to root the judicial activists’ desired outcome in the language of the Constitution. The justices explained their creative approach to the Constitution in a prior ruling: “The Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance,” they wrote. Roe v. Wade asserted that these emanations created a constitutional “right” to “sexual privacy” which, they discovered, included the right to an abortion. Abortion is “protected by the Bill of Rights or its penumbra,” they said.

“To hell with the Supreme Court. We will defy them.”

Shortly after justices released the Dobbs decision, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) responded by saying, “To hell with the Supreme Court. We will defy them.”

While nothing requires people to endorse any Supreme Court decision, few politicians since President Andrew Jackson or former segregationist Democrat George Corley Wallace have called for actively ignoring its rulings. While dissenting from a decision may be the right choice at times, some believe it straddles the line of undermining the High Court’s legitimacy. “Sounds very insurrectiony for a member of Congress,” retorted the principled conservative group ForAmerica.

Honorable mentions

Other statements worth noting:

• Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said pro-life advocates base their actions on unbridled misogyny. “Republicans seek to punish and control women,” she wrote. “This cruel ruling is outrageous and heart-wrenching [sic]”;
• Pelosi invoked motherhood in her defense of abortion-on-demand. “American women today have less freedom than their mothers,” she said;
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told Fox News the judicial majority voted to “endanger the lives of all women and all birthing people in this country.” She tweeted, “People will die because of this decision” before retweeting a link to a pro-abortion rally hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America;
• Failed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton deemed abortion-on-demand “sacred,” a term usually reserved for human beings created in imago Dei. “Most Americans believe the decision to have a child is one of the most sacred decisions there is,” she said, claiming the Dobbs ruling “will live in infamy as a step backward for women’s rights and human rights.”

As outrageous as these statements may be, none matches the fundamental lie that the most innocent human beings are “clumps of cells” or “parasites” who deserve to lose their God-given right to life based on a 49-year-old piece of judicial fiction.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand. Image by SaadiaAMYii from Pixabay. Article cross-posted from Washington Stand.