By Dave Andrusko
On Monday, National Right to Life unveiled its 11th annual “The State of Abortion in the United States”. We piggybacked on National Right to Life’s great summary with a few thoughts of our own. Those remarks included NRLC President Carol Tobias’s inspiring Introduction and “Fifty Years of Abortion in America: Abortion Statistics Before and After Dobb.”
On Tuesday, we tackled “Federal Policy & Abortion”; “The Hyde Amendment–Recent Attacks and Background”; and “State Laws & Abortion.” Which brings us to Part Three, the conclusion.
Today we examine “The Equal Rights Amendment: An In-Depth Special Report”; “Synopsis of U.S. Supreme Court Cases”; and “The Presidential Record on Life–Joseph R. Biden, Donald J. Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan.”
We say proudly and unapologetically that when it comes to comprehensiveness, the Special Report on the ERA takes a backseat to no one. It begins with this Executive Summary:
Pro-abortion groups, seeking a replacement for Roe v. Wade, are engaged in an intensive, long-term effort to flatten constitutional guardrails and ram the long-expired 1972 Equal Rights Amendment into the U.S. Constitution. Many elected Democratic officeholders have enlisted in this extra-constitutional campaign. However, for decades federal judges of every political stripe have rebuffed the politically contrived, legally untenable claims of the ERA revivalists. During 2024, the ERA-revival movement will continue to rely heavily on strongly sympathetic and often willfully gullible news media to promote the claim that the ERA is on the verge of becoming part of the Constitution, and that any lawmaker or judge who resists the scheme is an enemy of “equality.”
The ironies abound. After denying for 50 years that the ERA had anything to do with abortion, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, “pro-abortion activists now loudly proclaim as true a position that for decades they denied or deflected.”
Which is that
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the form proposed by Congress in 1972, if it ever became part of the U.S. Constitution, could be employed as a strong legal foundation for challenges to (and in their view, invalidation of) virtually all state and federal limits on abortion, and to require funding of elective abortion at all levels of government.
NRLC has provided a synopsis of all the Supreme Court decisions on abortion from Roe v. Wade all the way through to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. These pages summarize a journey of 49 and one-half years culminating with the return of the abortion debate largely to the state legislatures.
The Presidential Record on Life tells the tale of the contributions –some powerfully good, others blatantly anti-life–of 7 presidents from pro-life President Ronald Reagan to pro-abortion President Joe Biden.
As I said in Parts One and Two, do read “The State of Abortion in the United States” for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.
