They got me, they got me—and dead to rights, I must acknowledge.

I am identified by the management as a Human Life Review friend and contributor of goodness-knows-how-many-years’ standing: grateful to be standing anywhere at this stage of life, in which the competence of people born in the early 1940s is shall we say under intense scrutiny.

For the benefit of anyone wondering, I am not examining here the career of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Rather, the editors invited me to look sideways and backwards at some of the cultural questions and problems attendant on this country’s long, often dispiriting engagement with Roe v. Wade and the regime it initiated. My policy is to do whatever the esteemed editors ask me to do, as they get ready to mark half a century of public witness.

I am not here today to spin golden oldies and passionately talk about the cause of Life, which may in several senses be the largest cause of them all. It touches not only on the enlargement of the human race but on the question: To whom are we responsible for the gift of life, and how do we demonstrate that responsibility?

I do not want to maunder all over the premises, making this obvious point and that one. Our readership understands well enough the stakes in the present and long-running, perhaps eternal, contest over the value of human life. I am minded to take up what seems the current question: Two years after the body politic’s ingestion of the Dobbs case, what happens now? For which question I have the same number of answers as everyone else: None. Zero.

Nor am I sure that engineerable answers exist, given the perdurability of the question, what’s Life in the first place? And who gets to say so?

I was put onto this conundrum by reading recently a letter in the Wall Street Journal by the estimable Hadley Arkes of the James Wilson Institute. Arkes, a natural law scholar of great distinction, was criticizing—politely—a Journal editorial expressing general satisfaction about the abortion debate on the second anniversary of the overthrow of Roe v. Wade via the Dobbs decision.

The Journal was not out to call strikes or balls in the human life debate. It was enough, the editors reasoned, to note Dobbs’s role in “letting democracy work,” allowing abortion policy to be “settled by the electorate” at the state level: the same point Donald Trump would make a few days later in the first presidential debate. The “reality of American opinion” was its divided nature over abortion, with 69 percent telling Gallup pollsters a year earlier, on the first anniversary of Dobbs, that abortion during the first three months of pregnancy ought to be generally legal. Just 55 percent said the same of abortions performed in the second three months. Dobbs, said the Journal, obliged politicians to “take their positions seriously”: from which obligation Roe, as national policy, had formerly shielded them.

Well, as the editorial concluded, “that’s democracy.” Yeah. Assuming—as did the editorial—that the people’s constitutional right to decide the abortion question within their jurisdictional boundaries is THE Question: all we need to talk about, all we need to know.

Down came the court, in Roe v. Wade, on the side of there-isn’t-any-such right. We’re through, the justices said in effect, with The People, through their elected representatives, calling the shots on abortion. Those backward old days when states got by with sorting out the question—done; over with. Such was Roe’s meaning.

It was a very bad decision, but there we were. The U.S. Supreme Court had defined abortion as supremely a governmental decision. Not a moral decision, touching on the intricacies of the human relationship to the Creator of Life, whom humanity identified as God.

The justices of the Roe court, decked as they were in judicial sovereignty—Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!—weren’t about to get into an argument with God over the status and rights of Adam and Eve’s descendants. That wasn’t what the high court was for. All that mattered was what the Constitution meant; what the Constitution meant, the justices, after study and discussion, now were sharing with us. Wasn’t that good enough?

What truly amazed in 1973 was the court’s effrontery in performing dilation and extraction on the American people’s minds, evacuating the right to argue the protection of unborn life as the moral matter it had always been in Christian civilization. But such was the effect. Abortion, courtesy of seven Supreme Court justices, was henceforth a governmental/administrative matter, on a level with the space program; enmeshed in polls, election campaigns, legislation, court decisions; leading us by long vexing detours to that condition the Wall Street Journal referred to in its editorial as “letting democracy work.”

The inferiority of the political approach for sorting out abortion policy seems to me a fair inference from Prof. Arkes’s gentlemanly objection to what the Wall Street Journal had to say about democracy’s work on the question. And what the paper had to say no doubt, given its role in political-economic journalism. The Journal’s editorial deftly dodged moral conundrums. Is abortion right? Is it wrong? Prof. Arkes wasn’t letting the writers—despite his stated admiration of their understandings in general—off that hook. He wanted to address, and did, the moral emptiness of the Dobbs decision—never mind its preferability to Roe.

“Fifty years ago,” he wrote, “the lawyers for Texas in Roe v. Wade drew on the most updated findings of embryology to point out that nascent life in the human womb has never been anything [italics mine] but a human being from its very first moments.” No—notwithstanding the very correct finding by Roe critics that a constitutional right to abortion had to be inferred—stitched and woven from whole cloth. That was lawyers talking. The immorality of killing a living (if very, very small and unseen) human being—that wasn’t the big deal for the justices: men schooled in the law, rather than the Law and the Prophets, mindful of constitutional procedures, attentive to the functionings of the civil and not the moral order. “Conservatives”—unsurprisingly in such a context—“returned the matter to the political arena without pronouncing on the rightness or wrongness of abortion and taking the first steps to plant a new teaching.”

A recent, eloquent book by Prof. Arkes, Mere Natural Law: Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution (which I have reviewed for Human Life Review) makes these and numerous related points: showing how deep the matter is; involving not (as we are accustomed to thinking) men and women in black robes with grave looks on their faces; involving in various ways the lot of us. Here is the point to which I have come as (I hope) a good servant of Human Life Review. There has got to be, in Prof. Arkes’s words, “a new teaching.”

Or, what if we eliminate the “a”—making it “new teaching,” period; whole, unpartitioned into compartments of activity and understanding such as humanity as a whole—including the American branch—hasn’t thought about in a long time? A makeover of how we understand right and wrong? And how we act on that understanding?

That’s going pretty far. A makeover of human understanding? Wonder how we might regard human life questions were we to study them on a level higher, so to speak, than plain old human preference?

The political approach—however high our admiration of “democracy”— gets us just so far and no further. Consider: The Dobbs decision licenses friends of unborn life to press legislatively, constitutionally, for unborn life’s protection. But with no guarantees of success. You can overthrow any law, overturn any judicial decision (just as politico-legal activity of various sorts resulted in the overthrow of Roe). In early July, even as I write, the state— not the federal—supreme court nullified one law banning dilation and evacuation and another law tightening licensing requirements for abortion clinics. So much for pro-life gains such as Dobbs was thought likely to protect. Nevada voters around the same time gained the right to vote this November on a state constitutional amendment that would guarantee an explicit right to abortion. Voters in five other states were set, as of July, to vote yea or nay on similar measures. It’s democracy all right. Hurl a question into the political arena and you’ll see in due course what the political community—you and me—think about it. Which seems to me a very good reason not to overexpose moral questions to electoral judgment. You may get the answer you don’t want.

In that case, what is the answer? A king? Sure, provided I’m the king, and I get to tell everyone else what’s moral and what’s not. Not even Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. pretends to that authority. (As for his views on the right to life, um . . . !)

The adoption of “new teaching,” as mentioned above, with respect to the human role in life—duties, ambitions, fears, hopes, loyalties—will be a long, heavy slog if we ever get around to it, under the new leadership to which we might aspire. New teaching would beget new understandings: not least about purely political hopes and dreams and their ephemerality, their fragility. “O put not your trust in princes,” quoth the Psalmist. Which happens to be the best political advice I have ever read: exceeding Machiavelli’s.

Modern humanity’s uncertain grasp of moral questions and how they operate in our non-moral lives is in large part the legacy of our devotion to politics: congressional votes, court decisions, rallies, flags, buttons, the clash of Fox News and MSNBC.

We look at the question of human life in its unborn state and wonder, with such time and interest as may be available, how best to handle the matter. We, the human race, have always wondered, providing not only moral answers, but more or less pragmatic ones, easy and quick. Like, say, the guardians in Plato’s Republic concerning the newly born: “The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.”

Which is what we want, right?—the straightforward stuff; quick; easy; with a sense of civic outcomes; and above all, practical. What works, works. What gets votes is good.

The defense of unborn life in 21st-century America gets in the way of the practical and quick. You get to thinking, at a sub-practical level, about the origins and responsibilities of life. As does Prof. Arkes. “A human being from its very first moments.” This “thing” is no upset stomach. It lives. And, accordingly, becomes a moral question—a matter of right and wrong, good and evil.

Moral questions rarely find a warm welcome in today’s public affairs. They invite sharp disagreement and dispute. They set voters against one another, often amid shouting and accusations—unpleasantness you really don’t want to negotiate if you’re an office-seeker.

So: In abortion, moral question meets—collides with, really—practical question. Roe v. Wade hid the moral question from sight, philosophically at least. There wasn’t any such question for the justices to decide: just the constitutional question as to whether our system of government and its charter allowed women to decide for themselves the outcome of their pregnancies. The rightness or wrongness of abortion didn’t come into it—except in the minds of abortion’s opponents, whose affirmations of life’s beauty kept alive the controversy long after practical-minded judges thought they had resolved the matter.

What practical-minded judges failed to notice was that you don’t resolve moral questions with the apparatuses of power. At a minimum you talk them through. The answer to a moral question must be recognizably moral: never exactly the goal of all the politicking and lawsuits occasioned by Roe and such lawsuits and laws as Dobbs will in its own time produce.

The practical answer likeliest to please Roe’s exponents and fans would have been the end of all opposition to a mother’s right to “control” her own body; the wearing down and collapse of the moral impulse; stillness; exhaustion.

It never happened. It couldn’t; and, by some moral miracle or other, won’t.

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Original Bio:

William Murchison, a former syndicated columnist, is a senior editor of the Human Life Review. He will soon finish his book on moral restoration in our time.