Roe V Wade 1973 Quotes

Is it only a coincidence that the same arc of time defining this reinvigorated clerical corruption about sexuality has seen the rise of the fervently political Catholic Church crusade against abortion? It is as if the 1973 war Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court threw a lifeline to the morally discredited Catholic hierarchy.

My father was neither an ally nor a confidant, but it seemed backward to me that this hardworking man would be relegated to the sofa while my lazy mother got the king-size bed. I resented her for that, but she seemed immune to guilt and shame. I think she got away with so much because she was beautiful. She looked like Lee Miller if Lee Miller had been a bedroom drunk. I assume she blamed my father for ruining her life—she got pregnant and dropped out of college to marry him. She didn’t have to, of course. I was born in August 1973, seven months after Roe v. Wade. Her family was the country club brand of alcoholic Southern Baptists—Mississippi loggers on one side, Louisiana oilmen on the other—or else, I assumed, she would have aborted me. My father was twelve years older than my mother. She’d been just nineteen years old and already four months pregnant when they got married. I’d figured that out as soon as I could do the math.

Since the legally and morally despicable decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973, American women have aborted some 56 million children. The vast majority of these children have been aborted for reasons that have nothing to do with rape, incest or the health of the mother. We have destroyed an entire generation of children purely for self-worship. Children are difficult; therefore, they can be done away with. Children are burdensome; therefore, they don’t exist in the womb.

The political reaction against Roe v. Wade built slowly. The first justice to join the Court after the January 1973 decision was John Paul Stevens, named by President Gerald Ford in December 1975. Yet remarkably enough, the nominee was not asked a single question about abortion during his confirmation hearing. If the senators’ questions during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing provide a reliable window onto the country’s law-related concerns, then it is reasonable to conclude that abortion had not yet become a national political issue nearly three years after the Court’s decision.

This, then, is the legacy of January 1973. The "me generation" found its voice, religion became a political force, poverty and civil rights became someone else's problem, and the national will for concerted action for the common good of all its citizens was scattered into "a thousand points of light." At some point, perhaps those scattered lights will re-form and reunite to give birth to a rededicated nation, one that includes a place for everyone, opportunity for all, and help for those who need it. After all, it only takes a moment in time and some simultaneity. As Lyndon Johnson so aptly observed in his greatest speech - the "We Shall Overcome" speech - there are times in America when "history and fate meet at a single time in a single space to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom." Let us hop such a time is nearing.

The president and Colson were in the middle of their conversation about Henry Kissinger when assistant Steve Bull entered the Oval Office to report that Coach Allen of the Redskins had finally arrived. Bull also informed the president of the news, just filtering in, that baseball star Roberto Clemente was on a plane that had crashed after taking off from the San Juan International Airport late the night before. “Was he killed?” Nixon asked. “They don’t have confirmation yet,” Bull replied.1 Clemente, the popular outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had boarded a rickety four-engine DC-7 plane that was overloaded with relief supplies for the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. The earthquake was believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than seven thousand people. Most of the deaths had occurred in the capital city of Managua, which had taken the brunt of the 6.2 magnitude shock at midday on Saturday, December 23.2 The city was leveled. The lumbering plane that Clemente was on nose-dived into heavy seas shortly after takeoff from San Juan. Clemente was thirty-eight years old and had been a perennial All-Star, four-time winner of the National League batting championship, defensive genius, and MVP in 1966. He led the Pirates to two world championships, one in 1960 and the other a decade later in 1971. “Mr. Clemente was the leader of Puerto Rican efforts to aid the Nicaraguan victims and was aboard the plane because he suspected that relief supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers,” the New York Times reported after his death was presumed.3 Clemente was scheduled to meet Anastasio Somoza, the military dictator of Nicaragua, at the airport, one of the very grafters he was attempting to circumvent with his personal mission. Clemente’s body was never recovered. It was a bad omen for the start of 1973.

Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” in the 1970s; the Southern Baptist Convention called for the legalization of abortion in 1971, and evangelical leaders, including W. A. Criswell of First Baptist Church in Dallas, applauded the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.

... there are clear parallels between the Supreme Court's language describing black slaves in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford slavery case, and the court's language describing unborn babies in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

The Roe v. Wade decision had come down on a Monday in January of 1973, and I remember the afternoon newspapers sold out as word spread. I watched my daddy sit down in his chair and silently read, shake his head and then leave the paper on the coffee table. We never discussed it, but surely he knew that there were houses out in the country where women went to have the procedure, even before the ruling. I’d gone to one in Opelika, one where Miss Pope believed I could get safe care. And it had still been a risk. Surely Daddy understood that women needed a trustworthy place. Some women traveled to New York to have the procedure, but that was too far for most of us. Make no mistake about it, that ruling was a big deal.

The most popular origin story of Christian nationalism today, shared by many critics and supporters alike, explains that the movement was born one day in 1973, when the Supreme Court unilaterally shredded Christian morality and made abortion ‘on demand’ a constitutional right. At that instant, the story goes, the flock of believers arose in protest and through their support to the party of ‘Life’ now known as the Republican Party. The implication is that the movement, in its current form, finds its principal motivation in the desire to protect fetuses against the women who would refuse to carry them to term. This story is worse than myth. It is false as history and incorrect as analysis. Christian nationalism drew its inspiration from a set of concerns that long predated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade and had little to do with abortion. The movement settled on abortion as its litmus test sometime after that decision for reasons that had more to do with politics than embryos. It then set about changing the religion of many people in the country in order to serve its new political ambitions. From the beginning, the ‘abortion issue’ has never been just about abortion. It has also been about dividing and uniting to mobilize votes for the sake of amassing political power.

Mann had an abortion shortly after the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade invented a constitutional right to abortion.

Roe v. Wade, 1973 The Constitutionally implied right to privacy protects a woman’s choice in matters of abortion. Norma McCorvey sought an abortion in Texas, but was denied under state law. The Court struck down that law, on grounds that it unconstitutionally restricted the woman’s right to choose. The opinion set forth guidelines for state abortion regulations; states could restrict a woman’s right to choose only in the later stages of the pregnancy. Later modified but not overruled, the decision stands as one of the Court’s most controversial.

So the years 1973–78 were apocalyptic years not just for me, but for the millions upon millions of people around the world dominated by capitalism. For many Americans, especially those in the North and Northeast, the economic conditions in the early 1970s were in fact quite brutal. Between 1970 and 1977, one million jobs disappeared. The rapid and massive displacements of capital and jobs due to increasing globalization and deindustrialization caused immense human suffering for those on the lower levels of the economic ladder, compounded by chronic stagflation and deep cuts in social spending under the Nixon administration.11 Add to these economic crises the political and cultural turmoil of the early 1970s stirred by the Watergate revelations, the abandonment of the gold standard for currency, the energy crisis, the ignominious retreat from Vietnam, and Roe v. Wade.12 For many people, these economic, political, and cultural upheavals made for apocalyptic times indeed.13

Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973. Most of those Americans who were, say, about fifty years old, in 1973, will not likely be around, due to the sheer passage of time, when the blood of aborted Americans is accounted and avenged. On the other hand, for those of us who were fifty years old or younger when Roe v. Wade was handed down, and therefore Roe v Wade was allowed by us as Americans to continue as the law of the land, though we were of an age and level of influence that we could have done something about it, we may likely witness the destruction of the world’s leading abortion nation in the end times. That’s justice. It happened on our watch, during our time of influence, we let it happen, and today we continue to let it happen.

When asked if he believes it’s realistic to think that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing abortion could be overturned in his lifetime, Barron is cautiously optimistic. Probably not in our lifetime, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I’d make a comparison with slavery. At a certain point in American history, nobody would have imagined the possibility of slavery being overturned. Very smart people, very morally plugged-in people, were defenders of slavery in 1830, 1840, including Christians at a very high level. Politicians at the highest level didn’t think slavery could be overturned in 1820 or 1840, and yet now slavery is unthinkable. It’s the same with civil rights. In the 1930s and ’40s, a lot of very high-placed people, including religious people, wouldn’t have imagined the overturning of Jim Crow, but now it’s a fact. I find that, by the way, from a theoretical standpoint, fascinating, how that happens in a society. How at one point something is commonly accepted, and fifty years later it’s unthinkable. I don’t rule out that, at some point, the same could happen with abortion. I hope, in God’s providence, it will become unthinkable that we’re murdering children at the rate of millions per year. I don’t know if it will happen in our lifetimes, because you and I don’t have that much longer to go! But I also don’t rule it out.