“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled…The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.” Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U. S. ____ (2022)
With these words, Justice Sam Alito and the U. S. Supreme Court at long last ended the travesty that was Roe v. Wade, an egregiously wrong decision that built out of whole cloth a right to abortion that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. Justice Alito’s words seem almost too good to be true. For those of us who have labored in the pro-life movement all of our adult lives, it seems surreal. We have lived through decades of Supreme Court nominees who shirked their solemn obligation to uphold the Constitution. Names such as O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter, who together formed the plurality that decided Casey, will go down in history as judges—Republican appointees all–who failed faithfully to discharge their duties and who, as a result, facilitated the slaughter of 30 million innocent, unborn children. The Supreme Court released the Casey decision on June 29, 1992, almost exactly 30 years prior to Justice Alito’s glorious Opinion released on June 24, 2022.
I remember the release of Casey very well. I was a young attorney then, and Kathy and I had just welcomed our 4th child into the world. I remember being so outraged by the lack of courage the Casey justices showed that, just two months later, on August 28, 1992, I formed a non-profit corporation, Tennessee Attorneys for Life, Inc. A number of pro-life attorneys in Tennessee and I used that group as a platform to advocate for the unborn at all levels of our judicial system. The group was so successful that just one year later, October 29, 1993, a wonderful pro-life attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, Mario Mandina, and I formed the National Lawyers Association, to do the same work all across the country. That group, the NLA, remains today as the pre-eminent group of attorneys in the United States who advocate for the unborn and for the protection of all of the freedoms and liberties guaranteed in our Constitution.
Now that the battle is finally won, in significant part thanks to President Trump’s steadfast resolve to place true constitutional conservatives on the Supreme Court, the fight moves to the state houses across the country to continue to advocate for the precious life of every unborn child. And not only the child. We must redouble our efforts in the state houses in Tennessee and across the country to provide support to young mothers who find themselves in the midst of a crisis pregnancy. Roe v. Wade, thanks be to God, is a relic of the past, but crisis pregnancies go on—and so must the support—financial, emotional, and medical–we provide to mothers go on. Kathy is a founding board member of a faith-based group, Mulier Case (muliercare.org) that provides such support to those in crisis pregnancies. Their focus is to provide financial, emotional, and medical help to young women in crisis pregnancies.
So as we celebrate this long overdue victory in the Supreme Court, we continue to put our shoulder to the wheel of fighting to protect the life of every unborn child—and to provide the help necessary to allow every young woman faced with a crisis pregnancy to respond with a “yes,” I will choose life.