What will it take to overturn Roe v. Wade?
On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic judgment that personal privacy includes a woman’s right to abortion. Eleven years and some 15 million abortions later, six of the seven justices who agreed with the Roe v. Wade decision still serve on the High Court. But five of those six are at least 75 years old, including Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion.
Blackmun has said one of the prizes to be claimed by the winner of this fall’s presidential election is “the opportunity to fill [Supreme Court] vacancies.” He predicted there will be as many as four vacancies to fill in the next four years.
Many prolife leaders regard a sympathetic Supreme Court as an important, though not indispensable, pillar in the plan for overturning Roe v. Wade. Believing the time may soon be right, some of the nation’s most articulate legal spokesmen came to Chicago in March to discuss strategies. Speakers included constitutional lawyer William Bentley Ball and Northwestern University law professor Victor Rosenblum. Americans United for Life (AUL), the legal arm of the prolife movement, sponsored the meeting.
“When two of the six-member pro-Roe majority are replaced with justices who oppose or can be persuaded to oppose the Roe doctrine, the reversal process may begin,” Rosenblum said in a paper prepared for the conference. Prolife leaders want to make sure that if and when that ground is prepared, the legal seeds for reversal are planted with prudence.
AUL spokesman Steven Baer said the conference was “designed to begin discussion on the very best kind of case to push up to the Supreme Court.” In his address, attorney Ball raised questions he said should be asked to make that determination. These include whether to take a case to federal or state court, and whether to initiate legal proceedings or assume the posture of the underdog by being named as a defendant. Making these choices, Ball suggested, would depend in part on an evaluation of the leanings of the news media most likely to cover the case.
Rosenblum, who successfully argued the 1980 Supreme Court case prohibiting the use of Medicaid funds for abortions, presented a comprehensive proposal for reversing Roe v. Wade. The key element in his strategy is the principle of gradualism. He and others cited as a useful model the gradual approach used by N.A.A.C.P. lawyers to achieve the 1954 Supreme Court reversal of institutionalized racial segregation.
He called for “confronting the court with a series of specific, carefully considered issues calculated to open wounds in the Roe doctrine that will eventually sap the life from it.” He noted that the High Court has held that abortion is legal if a mother’s health is at stake, and that it has defined “health” to include medical, psychological, social, and economic factors. “A first step might be to enact legislation banning sex-selective abortion after viability,” he said.
Ball stressed the importance of building a court record replete with expert testimony regarding the humanity of prenatal life.
“The rightness or wrongness of this case of ours does not depend on who is on the Court,” he said. “We will have to attack [Roe v. Wade’s] pseudo-science, its dated notions, by unmasking the whole battery of hard evidence that can now be brought against the Roe decision.”
John T. Noonan, Jr., a professor at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law, noted that the Supreme Court has reversed itself more than 100 times. “What was done by raw judicial power in Roe must answer to reason, and it will ultimately do so,” he said.
In the meantime, prolife leaders fear that one hasty legal maneuver could set the reversal process back indefinitely.
A Pastors’ Group Calls For A Stop To Ucc-Discipies Merger Talks
An ad hoc coalition of pastors in the United Church of Christ (UCC) is calling for an end to church union talks between the UCC and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
The coalition was organized shortly after a joint UCC-Disciples steering committee issued a working paper on church union. The pastors’ coalition said the document’s proposals, if accepted, would commit the UCC to union “without the clear consent of our churches and various member bodies.”
The working paper on union calls for “an intentional sharing of life with a firm commitment to becoming one church.” It envisions that the top decision-making bodies of both denominations next year will decide to work toward organic union. The document also suggests certain aspects of church life—to include mission, membership procedures, theology, ordained ministry, and celebration of the Lord’s Supper—to be included in the process of becoming a new church.
The UCC and the Disciples began a six-year process to study union in 1979. Their national meetings next year must determine any future steps in the relationship.
“You have to search long and hard to find anyone in favor of it [the union proposal],” said Robert Alward, the Glenview, Illinois, UCC pastor who chairs the coalition. “The grass roots are largely not in favor. They have ignored it, and have been shocked to hear that a vote by the General Synod in 1985 could determine that we enter into negotiations toward formal union.”
In addition, he said, some officials of national UCC boards and commissions are cool to union efforts. “People who are opposed to this at a bureaucratic level are afraid to come out of the closet,” he said. “They send us money, but say ‘don’t use my name.’ ”
The coalition said discussions leading to union should be ended. Instead, it suggested the pursuit of “cooperative ecumenical partnerships” with both the Disciples of Christ and other denominations. It argued that the church’s focus on opposing “the sins of racism, militarism, poverty, dehumanization, and injustice” would be deflected by an “internal preoccupation with structure and self-definition” during union negotiations. The group suggested also that union could result in “a lowest common denominator theological compromise.”
In another development, a cautionary work on the proposed UCC-Disciples union was issued recently by the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice. The commission said blacks are underrepresented at policy-making levels of the Disciples of Christ. The group cautioned against compromising on critical issues in order to unite with the Disciples.
Paul Crow, ecumenical officer for the Disciples of Christ, said no organized opposition to the union proposal has surfaced in his denomination. The 1.2-million-member Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) was founded on the American frontier in the nineteenth century as a movement to unify Christians. The 1.7-million-member United Church of Christ is a product of church union. It was formed in 1957 when the Congregational Christian Churches united with the Evangelical and Reformed Church.
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