Sam Alito

Set aside your opinions about abortion for a moment. Throw down the fluttering placards about "THE PRO-LIFE GENERATION" and "KEEP ABORTION LEGAL"; avert your eyes from the demonstrators praying outside Planned Parenthood. And ask yourself this: was Roe v. Wade good law? Was it sound that a "right to privacy" was conjured out of pseudo-constitutional dust and then used to overturn abortion laws in all fifty states? My guess is that even left-wing law professors have their doubts. Now, the Supreme Court has finally gone and rectified this hideous blunder. Pro-lifers rejoice: the day we've hoped for has finally arrived. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Center was handed down on a bright and sunny morning in Washington, DC.

It's been almost a month since Politico scooped its bombshell leak, an unprecedented revelation of a draft majority opinion in a still-pending Supreme Court case. That leaked draft opinion, penned by the stalwart Justice Samuel Alito in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, would finally overturn 1973’s infamous Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Alito’s draft opinion does not go far enough, at least as far as the proper pro-life end goal is concerned, but it is a praiseworthy development and an admirable start toward an abortion-free America.

Something felt off about Mother’s Day this year. For one weekend every May, we post social media tributes and bow to marketing campaigns thanking our moms, letting them know they’ve given us something that can never be repaid. But that same weekend, the national news cycle was caught up in the drama — and the fear — generated by the mysterious leak less than a week earlier of a draft majority opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade and return the issue of legal abortion to the states. By that Sunday, we’d seen maternity clinics and Catholic churches vandalized, protests in front of the homes of Supreme Court justices, and ominous warnings from the mainstream press explaining what women stand to lose if Roe falls.

Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked majority opinion in this Supreme Court term’s marquee abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ought to be applauded by pro-lifers. In many ways, the opinion represents an epochal triumph for the conservative legal movement that I, despite being a clear part of, have often been quick to criticize. If Alito’s five-justice coalition holds — and it remains an “if” until the moment the opinion is formally released — then the decades-long architects of the movement will deserve credit for finally fulfilling one of the movement’s raison d'êtres, the overturning of the odious Roe v. Wade decision.

Yesterday, in the US Senate, Democrats let their abortion extremism hang out. No more faking it about "safe, legal, and rare": the new standard is "I mean, do you feel like it?" After the leak of Justice Alito's draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, it was inevitable that Chuck Schumer would introduce some kind of abortion legislation. Even if his bill couldn't hurdle over a filibuster, the Democrats could as least use it as a planted flag in the culture war to come. Their base has spent the last week running into traffic yodeling about right-wing fascism. And given that a majority of Americans support some kind of legal abortion, surely there was room to maneuver here. Instead, Schumer decided to tap into his party's dark id.

Pro-abortion activists are proving themselves a greater threat to the country than a man smiling and carrying Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lectern through the Capitol building or a parent protesting at a local school board meeting. Yet the latter two have been treated far more harshly by the Biden administration because, well, they don't have the right politics. After a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to Politico last week, pro-abortion groups used intimidation and violence to try to retain the "right" to kill their unborn children. The prevailing theory is that the leak itself was done to mobilize opposition to the opinion and get the justices to change their minds.

From the UK Spectator this week comes a pair of essays by Douglas Murray and Melanie McDonagh praising the American abortion debate. That debate can be difficult to admire when you're standing at the bottom of a culture war looking up. But as both Murray and McDonagh note, at least here in the States it's expected that we'll disagree about abortion, whereas throughout much of Europe it's regarded as a settled matter. Why is abortion in America still such a live issue? One reason, I think, is that in most other first-world countries it's been the subject of democratic deliberation, with people finding middle ground through their legislatures or referenda.

Not too long ago, pro-choice activists wished for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Their argument was that no one was really pro-abortion but that the procedure was a morally complicated but regrettable necessity. In fact, they would have been insulted by the label “pro-abortion." The reaction to the leak of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade shows those days are long past. Take, for example, a tweet from a rabbi scolding those who claim that “nobody is PRO-abortion!” Comparing abortion to an appendectomy, she answers her imagined interlocutor: “Both are life saving medical procedures Why wouldn’t I be ‘pro’ a life-saving medical procedure?

Can the left-wing hysteria over the Supreme Court's leaked opinion on abortion get any more ridiculous? Corporate media have claimed that the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade marks only the beginning of a slew of conservative judicial decisions that will ban everything from sodomy to birth control. "Next they'll go after gay marriage and maybe Brown v. Board of Education," Joy Behar postulated on The View. “They want to send us back to the dark ages,” 85-year-old woman Eleanor Oliver, who procured an illegal abortion in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, told a Washington Post columnist. The justices who have reportedly endorsed the draft opinion have been called “barbarous and cruel.” The prospective ruling has been accused of racism.

“Everybody want to know what I would do if I didn’t win,” said Kanye West, the only 2020 presidential candidate to truly grapple with the horrors of abortion, as he accepted his award for Best Rap Album at the Grammys in 2005. He paused. The room was silent. Then Ye dropped the bomb: “I guess we’ll never know.” The crowd erupted in applause. That’s the energy I felt Monday night at the Supreme Court as the world learned a majority of justices was prepared to strike down Roe v. Wade. You’ll find no nuance here. The pro-choicers lost, and I’m going to inject 500ccs of their tears straight into my veins. Cope and seethe. At around 9:30 on Monday, I was already in my pajamas, settling in for a quiet night with my wife. Then she showed me her phone.