The Supreme Court undid one of its worst mistakes last week when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision declaring a constitutional right to abortion. The Constitution reserves to the states the authority to write and enforce laws regarding murder. Since the question of whether or not to legalize abortion revolves around whether abortion is murder, it is not a federal issue. Roe was thus an illegitimate usurpation of state authority.

The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision last week will not stop the federal government from using the tax dollars of those who believe abortion is murder to fund abortion and family planning both in the United States and abroad. Those opposed to abortion, and in favor of constitutional government, must continue their efforts to end all federal funding of abortion.

Some state governments, such as in Texas and Mississippi, have adopted laws against abortion that are “triggered” after Roe is overturned. Now, additional pro-life state legislators and activists are no doubt planning to push other states with pro-life majorities to pass legislation outlawing abortion.

States where the majority favor legal abortion are no doubt planning to pass pro-abortion legislation. Some of these states will pass laws providing enhanced financial support for lower-income women to receive abortions. Pro-abortion activists are also planning to provide help to women from states where abortion is outlawed to travel to a state where they can legally “terminate” their pregnancies.

Pro-lifers should not respond to pro-abortion state laws by trying to pass an unconstitutional law making abortion a federal crime. Instead, they should work to change attitudes and build a culture of life. One way to do this is by supporting crisis pregnancy centers. These centers help pregnant women in difficult situations see that there are alternatives to abortion. Sadly, the crisis pregnancy centers are among the “woke” mob’s targets for cancellation. If the left were truly “pro-choice” they would not try to shut down privately run pro-life pregnancy centers.

Many libertarians believe that outlawing abortions violates a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. However, the nonaggression principle, which is the philosophic foundation of libertarianism, prohibits committing acts of aggression. Murder is certainly an act of aggression. Therefore, even though all humans have a right to bodily anatomy, this does not justify abortion.

No one ever asked an expectant mother, “how’s the fetus?” Instead, people ask about the baby. This implicitly acknowledges the unborn child’s humanity and thus the child’s right to live. The denial of this right has warped our constitutional system. More importantly it has contributed to the devaluing of human life that is the root of much of America’s moral crisis. A society that devalues life will not respect liberty. Therefore, all who value liberty must protect the right to life. This does not just include ending abortion. It also includes rejecting the militaristic foreign policy that kills innocents in the name of “freedom and democracy.”

Just as pro-life conservatives should be antiwar, progressives should reject the violence government commits against its own citizens via taxation, income redistribution, and the fiat money system that robs average Americans to benefit politicians and elites. Rejecting the use of force, including government force, will lead to a society that values and protects our lives, liberty, and property.

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Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.

In February, five Supreme Court Justices voted in camera to overturn Roe v. Wade and send the issue of abortion back to the states, where it resided until 1973.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett had all signed on to the majority opinion overturning Roe that had been drafted by Justice Samuel Alito.

The right-to-life movement was only weeks away from a stunning victory in its half-century struggle to overturn Roe.

This suggests that the leak to Politico of the Alito draft was the work of a saboteur seeking to derail the course of the court by the media explosion he or she knew it would ignite.

Whoever leaked Alito’s draft, it was a violation of an oath, an unethical act and a betrayal that ought to see the perpetrator fired in disgrace and disbarred permanently from the practice of law.

But the crucial issue now is for the Alito Five, even if unwedded to the exact language of the Alito opinion, to stay the course until the ruling comes down in late June.

For, on the substance of the abortion issue, Alito’s opinion is dead on:

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe … enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

“We hold that Roe … must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.”

Indeed, at the time of Roe, January 1973, the U.S. had a long history of punishing “abortionists,” and the laws under which they were prosecuted were “spurred by a sincere belief that abortion kills a human being.”

The nation remains divided, and the issue is best decided in this democracy, Alito argues, not by unelected justices on the Supreme Court but by democratically elected representatives of the American people.

Pro-abortion Democrats say a woman’s “right to choose” must remain paramount and sacrosanct. But the “right to choose” what?

As President Joe Biden just described it bluntly this week, it is the right to choose to “abort a child.”

But at what point in a pregnancy does the pre-born child’s right to life supersede a woman’s right to abort that child. And who decides?

A New York Times front-page map this week shows that if Roe is overturned, states with liberalized abortion laws such as Illinois, California, Oregon, Washington, New York and most of New England would not be significantly affected.

It is the Republican states, the Trump states, the Mountain West and the South, where the overturning of Roe will free up Christians and social conservatives to write the regulations and restrictions that were abolished and outlawed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe.

These states are where the post-Roe abortion wars will be fought.

But is this not how a democratic republic is supposed to work?

Remarkable, is it not? Those who do not cease to talk about right-wing threats to “our democracy” are today the loudest and most insistent that abortion not be sent back to the states for the people and their democratically chosen representatives to decide.

While Democrats see their base energized today, we are six months away from the election. And if the Alito draft becomes law, pro-choice Democrats will have to sustain their outrage and fight political battles in virtually all the red states.

Pro-life Republicans and conservatives should stand with the Alito Five and what they have done and what, hopefully, they are about to do.

For this is what a vast slice of the party and the conservative movement has fought for, worked for, marched for and prayed for, for half a century.

If Roe is overturned, it is never coming back. It is gone for good. No Supreme Court will ever reinstate it. It will be on the ash heap of history, as President Ronald Reagan used to say.

If Biden, Nancy Pelosi’s House and Chuck Schumer’s Senate majority want to make abortion the issue of 2022 by passing a federal law codifying Roe v. Wade, if they want to die on that hill, it’s their call.

Democrats claim 60% of the nation wants Roe preserved and only 1 in 5 Americans wants Roe overturned.

Why, then, do they not pass that law codifying Roe at the national level and rely upon Roe’s supporters to produce pro-choice laws in the states where they do not today exist?

If the Alito draft opinion survives and Roe is overturned, pro-lifers will have many people to thank.

Foremost among these are President Donald Trump, who elevated to the Supreme Court three of the five justices who voted with Alito, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, who saw to it that these three alone would make it.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

A new era of abortion acceptance has begun, and, typical of the abortion industry, it has to do with money. In several places across the United States, cities have begun to offer bereavement time off for abortions—meaning that men and women are now being compensated and given days off for killing their child.

This new policy has popped up in cities like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Portland, Oregon. In both Pittsburgh and Portland, city workers can get up to three days of fully paid bereavement leave off following a loss of pregnancy—and abortion is included as an eligible “loss” of pregnancy (similarly, the City of Boston pays workers for up to 12 weeks of abortion time off under the guise of “parental leave”). Portland’s ordinance even goes so far as to specifically outline that abortions do not need to be “deemed medically necessary” in order to qualify for this leave.

These pro-abortion cities are calling this “bereavement leave,” but that smells a little fishy.

In the coming weeks, I will be taking bereavement leave for a couple days following the death of my grandmother. The time off will be spent travelling for her funeral and comforting loved ones in their grief. We will celebrate her beautiful life and mourn the lack of her presence in our lives now. The purpose of my bereavement leave will be to commemorate her. CARTOONS | Steve Kelley View Cartoon

But what is the purpose of bereavement leave following an abortion? Who are they commemorating? After all, the meaning of bereavement is the “state of being sad because a family member or friend has recently died.”

According to some pro-abortion supporters, no one dies during an abortion. Many pro-abortion supporters refuse to accept that preborn children are alive. They refuse to call victims of abortion violence ‘babies,’ referring instead to preborn children as ‘clumps of cells’ or ‘pregnancy tissue.’ Abortion advocates who do acknowledge that a child dies in abortion often portray this as a positive or empowering fact.

To give men and women bereavement leave following an abortion is a logical inconsistency.

Here are three reasons why:

1. Pro-abortion supporters do not get to talk out of both sides of their mouth. There is either a child who has been killed during an abortion, or there’s not. (Spoiler alert, there is a child!) If there’s a child being killed during an abortion, abortion is wrong and should be illegal because children shouldn’t be killed. That means there is no place for paid abortion leave.

2. If pro-abortion supporters insist that the preborn are just clumps of cells and not really children, then there should be nothing to mourn about an abortion. We don’t do bereavement leave for colonoscopies, do we? If an abortion is an innocuous medical procedure, there is no place for paid abortion bereavement leave.

3. If pro-abortion supporters want to argue for paid abortion leave on the basis that women need recovery time after an abortion, that doesn’t fall under bereavement. It also defeats their lie that abortions are safe and easy, a myth widely propagated by the abortion industry. Once again, this policy is inappropriate.

Additionally, what message does it send to parents who are suffering the loss of a child through miscarriage, stillbirth, infant loss, or the loss of an older child, when city officials place elective abortion in the same category and grant the same benefits to a parent who has intentionally snuffed out the life of his or her child? It is a mockery of the suffering of parents who loved their children.

To make matters even worse, these cities are compounding the injustice by making taxpayers violate their consciences by paying for this abortion leave with their hard-earned money.

SFLA is on the ground working to change these policies. In Portland, Oregon, SFLA has launched its Campaign for Abortion Free Cities, and every day we get closer to our goal of eradicating abortion therein—and everywhere else, too.

Pro-life advocates should work proactively in their cities and states to stop similar policies from going into effect. Paid abortion leave will not become a norm in our country if SFLA and the Pro-Life Generation have anything to say about it — and we certainly do.

Caroline Wharton