Why overturning Roe vs. Wade was 100 percent right

On Sunday, June 26, 2022, I stood before both of my congregations in their services, and stated that the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court, almost 49 and a half years after the decision was handed down, was 100% good. Then, during prayer, I gave thanks to God that Roe v. Wade was no longer the law of the land. In the month since, I’ve thought about that statement. I stand by it with no wavering at all. I totally believe what I said! Here’s why.
1. Historically, abortion was not allowed. In colonial America, the common law passed down from Sir William Blackstone held that the abortion of a “quickened” fetus was a “very heinous misdemeanor,” with the penalty as much as life in prison. Quickening was when a pregnant woman first feels her child move, generally in the fourth month. Since there were no pregnancy tests in those days, evidence that a baby’s movement had been felt might have been the only way to establish with any certainty in a court of law that a pregnancy had existed.
In the 1800s, states began to pass laws forbidding abortion at any stage, whether the baby could be detected or not. Science was telling us that life begins when a sperm enters an ovum, and the law was catching up. In 1859, the newly formed American Medical Association began to lobby for laws AGAINST abortion. An AMA committee report stated:
“The frightful extent of [abortion in the US] is found in the grave defects of our laws, both common and statute, as regards the independent and actual existence of the child before birth, as a living being. These errors, which are sufficient in most instances to prevent conviction, are based, and only based, upon mistaken and exploded medical dogmas.” By 1910, every state except Kentucky had passed an anti-abortion law, and Kentucky’s courts had declared abortion at any stage of gestation to be illegal. By 1967, not much had changed. In 49 states, abortion was a felony; in New Jersey, it was a high misdemeanor. 29 states also banned abortion advertising, and many outlawed the manufacture or distribution of abortifacients. In 1967, though, state abortion laws began to change after years of organized campaigns by pro-abortion forces (information from ewtn.com).
2. Abortion is rarely a medical necessity. “Dr. Susan Rutherford, a Navy veteran and board certified OB-GYN specializing in maternal-fetal medicine, has seen only one patient in her entire 35+-year career that required an abortion to save her life. ‘She was 16 weeks with severe pre-eclampsia, her liver function was rapidly deteriorating, and she was developing DIC (disseminated intravascular coagulation), which would result in uncontrollable hemorrhaging (bleeding) throughout her body,’ says Rutherford. Thankfully, a tragic circumstance like this is rare.
“‘(F)or most of my career... (I) have been the recipient of complicated obstetrical patients,’ she says. ‘At one point, I was the primary referral person for doctors who, together, delivered about 4,000 patients per year (two hospitals). So if there were situations requiring abortion to save a life, I should have seen some’ (adflegal.org).
3. Very few pregnancies are due to rape or incest. USA Today, hardly a conservative rag, states, “Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute.”

4. If a fetus is a human being, it has rights as well. Columnist Amy Hall put it this way: “The science of embryology says that when your baby was conceived, the moment the egg and sperm came together, a new human being was created with his or her own unique DNA. That DNA will direct their development throughout their entire life through every stage of human development from embryo, to fetus, to newborn, to toddler, to teenager, to adult.
“There’s no question that your baby is human. Human parents create human children, so why do some people say that human beings who are still in the womb aren’t persons? Here’s what they’re really saying: They’re not denying that your baby is a human being. They’re denying that he or she has the same rights and value as every other born human being. They’re separating human beings into two groups and saying these human beings are valuable and these aren’t.
“Now, we’ve seen people divide human beings this way before in history, and it has always led to serious human rights violations. Think about slavery. People argued that some human beings were not persons because of the color of their skin, and that gave them the right to enslave them. Or think about the Holocaust. The Nazis argued that since Jewish people were not persons like they were, they had the right to kill them. In other words, people deny that human beings are persons when they want to unjustly discriminate against them” (str.org).
5. The original Roe v. Wade decision was unconstitutional. Don’t take my word for this! “Among the legal scholars who have roundly criticized the Court’s ruling in Roe as not being grounded in the U.S. Constitution are the following:
- Six justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, unfortunately not simultaneously seated - White, Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and O’Connor;
- Virtually every recognized constitutional scholar who has published a book or article on Roe - including many, like Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, who support Roe’s outcome on other grounds (although he’s switched grounds over the years). Yale Law School professor John Hart Ely spoke for many when he stated: Roe v. Wade ‘is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be;’
Kevin Barron is the pastor of Perryville and Crossroads United Methodist churches. He can be reached by phone at 573-547-5200 or via email at kdbarron@gmail.com.