By Dave Andrusko

This week, the week of the 45th anniversary of the wretched Roe v. Wade decision, CBS News ran what it calls “60 Minutes Rewind.” It was a program that aired May 14, 1972 with the pretentious and annoying Mike Wallace telling us what’s what about abortion in America eight months before the High Court’s 7-2 decision.

The program first aired, as it happened, on Mother’s Day. The hook was that the New York legislature had voted to repeal its highly ”liberal” abortion law which passed by a single vote two years before. Pro-abortion Gov. Nelson Rockefeller then vetoed the measure and the legislature would not have the votes to override his veto.

There’s no shortage of smarmy pro-abortion propaganda, put downs of pro-lifers, and cocked eyebrows that President Nixon had not embraced the pro-abortion recommendations of the Commission on Population and the American Future. On the other hand one New York officeholder was allowed to make the case that “I don’t know how to measure the beginning of life except at the point of conception” and another woman to point out that no one had shown that the unborn “was not human.”

Forty-five years and 60 million abortions later, you listen in a kind of dazed amazement to Wallace conclude with contrasting Supreme Court outcomes. In all his pontificating glory, Wallace tells us the Supreme Court is being asked “whether laws restricting abortion in Texas and Georgia are a violation of the right to privacy and a denial of individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

“If the Supreme Court decides the Texas and Georgia laws on abortion are unconstitutional that would open the way to legalized abortion throughout the country.

“But if the Supreme Court decides that a woman’s constitutional rights are not breached by anti-abortion laws, well, then, it seems likely the opposing forces will continue to do battle for many Mother’s Days to come.”

Well, yes, indeed, Roe v. Wade and its equally evil twin, Doe v. Bolton, did open the way to legalized abortion throughout the country. What he could not have known was that it would legalize abortion through the entire nine months throughout the entire country.

Note that Wallace did not predict that pro-lifers would rise to battle if the High Court overturned abortion laws, most of which were quite protective. Like the New York Times, in its response to Roe, no doubt he believed pro-lifers would fold their tents and quietly go home.

But Wallace could see that pro-abortionists would fight another day, if they lost. He predicted as much.

Pro-lifers had the beginnings of a great grassroots movement even in 1973. It has only grown larger and more effective ever since.