Justice Thomas’s Moment Arrives, as Supreme Court Reviews Abortion Rights

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas poses for the official group photograph at the U.S. Supreme Court in the District of Columbia on Nov. 30, 2018. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

It’s time to retire Charles Baudelaire’s famous aphorism that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince you he doesn’t exist.”

A century and more after the destruction of European Christian civilization during World War I, the world has had ample opportunity to admire his handiwork, from the killing fields of Flanders to the killing fields of Cambodia. If God seeks souls, Satan requires corpses to slake his animus against humanity, and he’s certainly harvested plenty of them, right in plain sight.

He’s still harvesting them, of course, only this time the butcher’s toll is less visible. But with arguments before the Supreme Court this week regarding the progressives’ favorite diabolical sacrament, abortion, we may finally come to realize that the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the women of the post-Christian West to murder their own unborn children.

The decision will be announced at some point in the current term, most likely in June, when the court goes in the summer recess.

The case is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which will decide the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortion after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. Lower courts have thus far blocked the law on the grounds that it violates the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, the worst Court ruling since Dred Scott in 1857.

This case would not necessarily lead to the abolition of Roe but would be an important first step in rolling the issue back to the states and recognizing that the Constitution does not in fact have anything to say about abortion.

Even if Roe were overturned tomorrow, abortion would still be legal for a time in all 50 states. But at least then the issue would be restored to the legislative, not the judicial, process, and the residents of the several states would once again be free to choose, so to speak.

According to one pro-abortion group, the Guttmacher Institute, it’s likely that 26 states would reimpose either severe restrictions or outright bans. This possibility has the Left’s hair on fire.

That the democratic process is not free to do so is due to the fact that the Warren Burger court overstepped its authority in Roe by a vote of 7–2, finding an implied “right of privacy” in the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment—a Reconstruction-era law regarding citizenship for the newly freed slaves that had nothing to do with “reproductive rights.”

The evil that this court did has continued to live on and flourish in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which liberal Justice William O. Douglas further explored sexual privacy rights (the only kind of liberty the Left actually cares about) in a case involving contraception, conjuring them up out of the thin air of “penumbras, formed by emanations” from imaginary “guarantees” in the Bill of Rights.

What makes Dobbs so threatening is that this could be the first time the Court has banned abortion before fetal viability outside the womb, which means that the Baal worshippers among the secular atheists who have made Roe a hill to die on rightly see it as the slippery slope that, having made abortion a national right, could eventually lead to the end of legalized abortion on the national level.

Even worse from their point of view is that this is the case that Justice Clarence Thomas, now the Court’s senior justice, has been waiting for since he was appointed in 1991. Thomas, the liberals’ bête noire, has long been an outspoken opponent of Roe: “Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled,” he wrote in a dissent in a different case just last year. “The Constitution does not constrain the States’ ability to regulate or even prohibit abortion.”

Further, Thomas is no fan of stare decisis, the absurd notion that once the Court has decided something, however incorrectly, that precedent should heavily influence later cases. Were that true, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld state-imposed segregation, would still be on the books.  Instead, it was overturned by the court in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education.

“In my view, if the Court encounters a decision that is demonstrably erroneous — i.e., one that is not a permissible interpretation of the text—the Court should correct the error, regardless of whether other factors support overruling the precedent,” wrote Thomas in Gamble v. United States¸ a double-jeopardy case.

With the Court now at least nominally split 6–3 in favor of conservatives, the chances that the Mississippi law will be upheld look good. Another abortion case, this one involving Texas’s SB 8, which blocks abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, has already been argued and awaits decision, although the issue there has to do with its novel enforcement mechanism.

Whatever happens in this round of legal challenges, the larger practical and moral issues remain. Previous societies that have made a fetish out of sacrificing their children—the Carthaginians and the Canaanites come to mind—have wound up on the ash heap of history.

In their Punic Wars with republican Rome, the Carthaginians were forced to outsource their military to mercenaries and allies, owing to their chronic shortage of manpower. At the Carthaginians’ conclusion, Rome was master of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Canaanites’ devotion to Moloch didn’t help them when Yahweh offered their land to the Hebrews fleeing slavery in Egypt.

Across the West, birth rates have collapsed, forcing a reliance on often-hostile immigration to maintain secular welfare states—which in any case won’t long outlast the cultures that invented them.

Morally, you don’t have to be either a believing Christian or an observant Jew to understand that proscriptions against the slaughter of innocents go back thousands of years. No previous society has adopted selective abortion as an absolute moral good, as American and European “progressives” have, and only a culture bent on murder-suicide would even consider it.

Meanwhile, how hollow does the “feminist” mantra “My body, my choice” now ring as governments everywhere demand that their populations willingly submit to not only having their bodily autonomy violated, but their very cellular essence altered. And not just once, but repeatedly as bureaucrats run amok over “booster shots” and “variants”?

But the left, which depends on narrowly decided court decisions to get what it can’t achieve through the democratic process, will fight this to the end, no matter how many unborn children must be scissored, stabbed, and suctioned to death. Baby murder is their raison d'être, their badge of honor. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.

This is Justice Thomas’s moment. And ours.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.