For her abortion at 20 weeks—five weeks longer than allowed under Texas law—Kate Cox left the state. Where she went I don’t know, nor have I really attempted to find out. Quite likely New Mexico, whose hospitals teem, as I have read, with Texas women desiring to refute the seeming obligation of motherhood.

That is not the point. The point is the tragic light that bathes her story in the post-Roe v. Wade era.

If “post” is the word. Which it may not be, now or for a long time.

The cerulean, morally fresh world that many had hoped would follow the demise of Roe has not—if I may put it so—taken shape in the manner expected.

Life and death are larger, more terrible things than we think. There is no easy way, sometimes, of telling them apart. Which is why some of us tremble as we consider the matter of Kate Cox and the child she considered herself unable to deliver. Or just unwilling. It came to the same thing.

I doubt at this point that Kate Cox, Texas housewife, requires widespread introduction. She is young—31—and happily married, we infer, with two young children. The third child she and her husband conceived was found in November 2023 to be afflicted with full Trisomy 18—a chromosomal abnormity. Doctors told her the child would likely die soon after birth.

Kate Cox and her husband sought the abortion from which Texas law theoretically disqualified her. She was five weeks past the 15-week-deadline barring abortion save in very rare cases, mainly touching threats to the mother’s life. “I do not want my baby arriving in this world,” said Mrs. Cox, “only to watch her suffer.” The Coxes quoted Kate’s doctors’ view that carrying the pregnancy to term, whatever the fate of the baby, would undermine the mother’s health and “future fertility.” In which claim there was nothing novel from the standpoint of all who, over the long years of abortion conflict, grew used to the clamor for exceptions.

A state judge decided in Kate Cox’s case the exception called for was legitimate—never mind the law or the intentions of those who passed it. Kate Cox was entitled to her abortion.

But that was not all. Under the prodding of State Attorney General Ken Paxton, the state Supreme Court (100 percent Republican, as newspaper accounts helpfully reminded readers) could not be lured along this trail. Mrs. Cox’s doctors had not asserted that her life was at stake. The doctors presented, rather, “a good faith belief” that an exception to a law written for 30 million Texans should be entertained in the case of one of those Texans.

The court called on the Texas Medical Board to dig into the finer medical points and elucidate. Which invitation the board has scrupulously sidestepped on the grounds that providing “more clarity” to the matter “is beyond the scope of what we as an executive agency can do.”

No doubt. Which leaves the matter, here on this earth, here in the great state of Texas, to precisely whom? To you? To me? I should run as if pursued by the Furies—and at my age I do well to totter—were I told resolution of the moral equation rested in my palm and 10 fingers. There is something deadly wrong here. Something fierce and hard is loose among us and promises us no rest.

On the great question of unborn human life—never mind the overdue burial of Roe v. Wade—the various understandings of our society fail to interlock. Never mind so much what judges and lawmakers and governor say and do. Our moral norms are out of kilter. They fail to mesh in any generally constructive fashion.

Here we are: on one side of the playing field the exponents of abortion more or less on demand; on the other side, the defenders of life in all its human forms and shapes and prospects; the crowd as a whole fleshed out by the many, the very many, who adhere to both sides, to one degree or another. Kate Cox, loving mother of two, as well as abortion supplicant, may be among this latter number. Nothing should surprise us at this stage: which will continue, it seems to me, until experience, and moral renovation at many levels, move the matter away from the political realm, where it now festers. Politics, politics! You can’t do with ’em, and you can’t do without ’em, least of all in a land—did I mention the United States?—dedicated to democratic republicanism or republican democracy. Rescuing the nation from Roe v. Wade meant putting lawmakers in charge of addressing the justice question with respect to abortion.

Putting lawmakers in charge meant, necessarily, commissioning them to stage debates and hearings, draw up legislation, make speeches and cut deals and, of course, praise and denounce and boast and everything else allied with the political calling and its driving force—the quest for power. “O put not your trust in princes,” counseled the Psalmist, “or in any child of man; for there is no help in them.”

And there we are, like it or not.

Abortion, a matter so close to the whole question of human flourishing, is a moral question. Or was until it became a political question, in a world of polls and votes. Thus the tragedy at which we weep—children, representing the renewal of the human race, looked on often enough as numbers in a game of power, where votes count as much as prayers. If not more so.

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned the piece of judicial mischief an earlier Court gave us in the form of Roe v. Wade. Innumerable workers in the pro-life cause expected a turn-around in attitudes toward unborn life. This, while the fearful or unreconstructed in the pro-choice camp studied their watches. How long would a merely legal prohibition last? Not long. While legislators here and there—Texas included—enacted long-overdue protections for unborn life, voters in Ohio and elsewhere voted to turn back the clock, relaxing, instead of tightening restrictions on abortion.

The point to note here is the centrality of politics in the post-Roe maneuverings. One side was going to do it one way, the other another way. So there!

The challenge for pro-life holders of office has been the enduring nature— already referred to—of division in voter minds and voter hearts. You can’t win ’em all. But you can win majorities. Here and there. Maybe. For a while. So laws get duly passed, with scant reference to shall we say the central issue—the right or the wrong of seizing one of God’s creations from the womb and declaring one small life . . . extinct. Which sounds, I admit, like a political quibble. It is where we are—on both sides of the fence. The central question—what is life all about?—lies unaddressed for the most part.

We find we have made human life a political question—the meanest kind of question, once you descend from Aristotelian heights to the grubby world of votes for this, votes for that.

It is an “I want” question. A “give it to me” question. Democratic/Republican politics wasn’t designed for the situation we face. It was designed so that roads could get built and navies floated and taxes levied and wars fought to a just end. A tax law carries only some of the cosmic load we bear when life itself is the question before the house.

The end of Roe v. Wade has proved the start of a new milieu for questions of personal desire and who gets to resolve them. Such a stage-setting can only be called fitting for an age whose denizens talk less about Truth than about “my truth,” “her truth,” “the truths we never glimpsed until.”

The tragedy of Kate Cox is the tragedy in a large and tangible sense of us all: unable to grasp hands, to affirm not just individual or idiosyncratic truths but common ones, instantly recognizable when they come in view; familiar on account of tales and teachings; written on the heart, as St. Paul and numerous others have made bold to claim.

There oughta be a law, yeah, yeah. We’ve all said so. But what kind of law and taking what factors into account as fallen humans address the cases, hard and easy, they face in the post-Roe era, with half the country incensed against the other half? Laws often lead to yelling and screeching and the drawing of lines in the sand: the excoriation of the other side, muttered wishes for their mental disablement if not already accomplished.

There might yet come upon us a time for listening to each other. Wouldn’t that be a sight to behold in an era when nobody likes anybody anymore?

I confess myself ready, willing, and able.

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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.