Indefensible Roe – The Scientific Track

Standing by Roe in 2021 requires so much blind faith it would be considered a cult in any other context.

Do not believe your lying eyes.

This (pictured above) is not a baby. No sir.

If it were a person, then the Supreme Court itself admitted in Roe they would not have made the decision they made to allow her to be crushed and sucked out of her mother’s womb.

It is actually a good thing they didn’t have such confusing pictures back then. In 1973, when Roe was decided, they thought a baby at 15 weeks, as is at issue in the Mississippi law being challenged in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, looked like this:

Much easier to declare that this is some sort of tissue, part of a woman’s body, instead of a baby deserving of love and care. That is why the pro-abortion side in Dobbs wants the justices to keep women back in 1973. Nothing has changed, they argued on the day of oral arguments.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the most ardent advocate for the abortion side in the courtroom that day, took exception to Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart’s reference to advancements in science. She took great exception to Mr. Stewart’s mention of the increasing scientific progress in the “knowledge and concern about such things as fetal pain.”

Justice Sotomayor compared a fetus to a braindead person.

“[T]he literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain dead responding to stimuli. There’s about 40 percent of dead people who, if you touch their feet, the foot will recoil. There are spontaneous acts by dead brain people. So I don’t think that a response to -- by a fetus necessarily proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness.”

A Charlotte Lozier Institute fact sheet collects the growing scientific data on fetal pain, including a comprehensive review of scientific data by “two highly credentialed medical professionals, one pro-choice,” concluding that “unborn babies may experience pain as early as 12 weeks.” They point to embryological development, which shows the presence of pain in sensory mechanism and neurophysiology and highlighted that “The basic anatomical organization of the human nervous system is established by 6 weeks.”

Science, “schmience,” says Sotomayor. She knows better than to get confused by all that biology stuff. Women need abortions. I mean, sure, surgeons administer pain medication to unborn patients, with one European fetal surgery team stating, “The administration of anesthesia directly to the fetus is critical in open fetal surgery procedures,” but that doesn’t prove anything. “Not much has changed since Roe and Casey,” was the argument in the Court, as Justice Elena Kagan came to the aid of her liberal colleague Justice Sotomayor.

So don’t believe your lying eyes, and don’t believe all that science mumbo jumbo. Roe! No need to consider four decades of scientific advancements.

Ignore fetal development, also. One quick search for development at 15 weeks sent me to BabyCenter’s page for that week, which lets us know the baby “can move all her joints and limbs.” We can know the baby’s sex. The baby has eyelids, eyebrows, nails, hair, and well-defined fingers and toes.” Ignore all of it. Doctor Sotomayor knows she won’t feel pain if you pull her out limb by limb.

“If you could see inside your womb, you’d catch your baby sucking a thumb, yawning, stretching, and making faces!” it tells us.

But Roe!

Other scientific advancements we must ignore in the name of Roe!™ include our understanding of the lasting harmful effects of abortion in women’s lives. In Concerned Women for America’s (CWA) brief before the Court, we argue the Court has undervalued the states’ interest in women’s health by failing to give proper weight to the physical, psychological, and emotional harms post-abortion.

Even though the Court has recognized that “Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision,” that it is “a decision [ ] fraught with emotional consequences,” that pregnancy may “force upon the woman a distressful life and future,” that “Psychological harm may be imminent,” and even the “grief more anguished and sorrow more profound” that can follow an abortion decision, the Court’s own jurisprudence prevents the states from taking any of that into account at this stage of pregnancy because all that the courts must determine is viability.

According to the Court, if you have suffered personally after an abortion, your pain does not matter before viability. Therefore, the state cannot fight for you. It cannot take your experience and the experience of millions like you into account when prescribing its abortion policy. It is one of the most outrageous realizations to come out of this case.

As CWA pointed out to the Court:

There are serious concerns about women’s health after an abortion, especially after one at the late stages of pregnancy. One study found “Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion.”[ ] It found post-abortive women were 34% more likely to develop an anxiety disorder, 37% more likely to experience depression, 110% more likely to abuse alcohol, and 155% more likely to commit suicide.[ ] A long thirteen-year longitudinal study also found women sometimes struggle for years after an abortion.

But don’t believe it. Don’t believe your lying eyes. Don’t believe in scientific advancements. And don’t believe in your experience, either. That’s the pro-abortion requirement today.

Roe is simply indefensible, scientifically speaking.  To stand by it in 2021 requires so much blind faith it would be considered a cult in any other context.