By Mary Frances Myler, The Federalist, Jan. 21, 2024
Mary Frances Myler is a writer from Northern Michigan now living in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.
Fifty-one years later, Roe’s damage continues.
Just before his retirement in 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, had a change of heart. He had previously voted in support of capital punishment but later changed his views on the death penalty. “From this day forward,” he said, “I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.” But he had already tinkered with death quite a bit — and not just with the death penalty. His change of heart was too little, too late.
Dubious Origins
Fifty-one years ago, on January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court published the Roe v. Wade decision, which discovered a “right to abortion” in the Constitution. The origins of this right were shadowy from the start. Blackmun’s opinion relied on the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, which discovered a right to privacy in “penumbras, formed by emanations” from the Bill of Rights. But shadows sufficed for the justices, who found a right to birth control, then a right to abortion seven years later. …
