Last month was the thirtieth anniversary of
Roe v. Wade, surely
one of the most divisive Supreme Court decisions of our time. We
do not propose to enter into the debate over abortion, but we
would like to share with our readers a few sentences from
“The Mother of All Rights,” Meghan Cox Gurdon’s reflection
on Roe v. Wade in the January 21 issue of The Wall Street
Journal. Ms. Gurdon begins by recalling the scene in
“Schindler’s List” where the actual survivors that Oskar
Schindler saved, along with their children and grandchildren,
line up to place stones on Schindler’s grave.
“What makes the scene so powerful,” Ms. Gurdon writes, “is not just
the surprising number of progeny already produced by the
Holocaust escapees, but the staggering number of men, women and
children who aren’t there, who never had a chance of life because
the Nazis gassed those who would have been their parents and
grandparents.” She continues:
When Roe comes up, it has Schindler-like reverberations in my own
family. The fact is, my husband and I, our four children, his
three siblings, and their combined eight children all owe our
lives to the fact that the famous Supreme Court decision did not
come until 1973 (and its British equivalent until 1967). For all
17 of us are descended from two unwanted pregnancies—two
pregnancies that produced two hasty marriages, some happiness,
rather more sadness, and, eventually, two divorces. And I have to
say, boy am I glad that those pregnancies—dismaying and
unexpected as they were, entailing the compromises that they did
for those involved—weren’t tidied up in a clinic so that the
young mothers in question could “get on with their lives.” You,
gentle reader, would have been deprived of nothing more than my
editorial voice. I, and 16 kinsfolk, would have been robbed of
everything.
Which does, we hope, give one pause.