Intuiting Matters of the Heart.

"In our lifetime has there been a more politically poisonous Supreme Court decision than Roe v. Wade? Set aside for a moment your thoughts on the substance of the ruling. (I happen to be a supporter of legalized abortion.) I'm talking about the continuing damage to the republic: disenfranchising, instantly and without recourse, an enormous part of the American population; preventing, as even [Supreme Court Justice] Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, proper political settlement of the issue by the people and their representatives; making us the only nation in the West to have legalized abortion by judicial fiat rather than by the popular will expressed democratically." -- Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, September 16, 2005

Outside of presidential election season, I'd be hard pressed to name a 30-day period to compare in sheer importance to what has transpired in the month since we last published. At the top of the list of critically important developments, of course, is Harriet Miers' decision to withdraw as a candidate for the Supreme Court and, as a result, President Bush's selection of federal appeals court Judge Samuel Alito, Jr., to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. (See story, page one.)

Whenever there are changes on the High Court, abortion is item number one up for discussion and debate. Ordinarily, there is a kind of Gresham's Law at work whenever the topic arises.

By that I mean, what ought to be a sensible discussion about creating "rights" out of whole cloth, federalism, and our moral and ethical obligations to the most defenseless among us is often driven out of the intellectual marketplace by hysteria, bad history, and Chicken Little-like warnings that the end of the world (i.e., the end of Roe v. Wade) is at handthe enduring pro-abortion bogeyman.

Although many news outlets still get it wrong, if you believe in the importance of accuracy, it's encouraging that at least some reporters are getting more of the particulars correct. For example, we know that, as of the last Supreme Court abortion decision in 2000, there were six pro-Roe votes on the Supreme Court, not five. More reporters are doing the math.

Obviously, we wish there were many more anti-Roe justices on the Court. But the simple truth is unborn children need three more justices on the Court who understand that Roe is indefensible. (Sometimes reporters are confused by Justice Anthony Kennedy's vote to uphold the ban on partial-birth abortion at issue in the 2000 case of Stenberg v. Carhart. However, in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, Kennedy played a pivotal role in reformulating the grounds on which to uphold the "core holdings" of Roe.)

Likewise, there is a greater appreciation among commentators who support Roe that the manner in which the abortion plague was visited on the landseven unelected justices picking through the Constitution for imaginary "penumbras" and "emanations" to justify their flights of fancyis a menace to civil harmony, our representative system of government, and is the source of unending controversy.