Letter to the Editor

Today, Jan. 22, we recognize that nearly four decades ago, a terrible injustice was imposed on our nation with the infamous Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion on demand in the United States. Since then, we have seen the “legal” murder of nearly 55 million of our citizens.

Some say that Roe v. Wade should be accepted as “settled law” and that attempts to restrict or overturn it should end. This argument has appeal because there should be clarity and certainty in our laws. But it falls short because there is a principle more important than certainty in our legal system and that is justice. While there are many problems with the legal reasoning in the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, the most fundamental is that the court’s decision rests upon a falsehood, which is expressed in Justice Harry Blackmun’s statement, “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.”

Whatever Blackmun may have believed in 1973, it is simply untrue in 2012 to say that abortion does not take the life of an unborn human being. Because of this reality, abortion will never be settled law in the United States and must someday be overturned. In his famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “One may well ask, ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’”

He continued, “A just law is a manmade code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal or natural law.” Another great example of this would be the attempt to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples.

Please consider as you wade through the coming avalanche of scorched-earth politics that our nation will ultimately be judged by the respect and protection we offer to every human person, even to the least among us. We need to seriously educate ourselves, pray, discern and, above all, act! If we remain committed, legalized abortion, not unlike slavery, will one day be brushed into the dustbin of history.

Scott Bute

Alden