Ruminations on Roe v. Wade

I beg your indulgence as I branch the New Covenant idea to venture into political territory today and for the next few installments.  It’s important or I wouldn’t do it.

The decision on Roe v Wade was issued on January 22, 1973.  For any woman born in 1960 or after, it’s been part—even though controversial—of the very fabric of our reproductive lives. 

I am as pro-life as a woman comes and that’s why I’d like to speak to my friends in the pro-life movement and to those in the pro-Roe movement.

If the landmark decision gets overturned as the leaked draft indicates is a possibility, it’s going to change the entire landscape overnight.  I suspect it’s going to be political pandemonium for a while, and I’d like to urge patience and caution upon all who have strong feelings about this.

For those who have never known life before Roe, there will be feelings of deprivation and betrayal of what had been their lifelong ground rules.  Suddenly, there is renewed scary talk of back alleys and coat hangers, things of abortion folklore that will never happen again in a global world, if it ever did on any significant scale.  But protestors and pundits inflaming matters—through social media and a few minutes of going viral—will not help anyone.  May cooler heads prevail.

Constitutionalists, like myself, see turning the decisions local, back to the States, as being more in line with what the Founders designed.  The Tenth Amendment states that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  States Rights – US Constitution – LAWS.com .”

But any decision to return power to the States
is not the same as turning back the clock
and pretending this Roe thing was just an unimportant parenthesis,
kind of like how some people view blipping over genealogies in Scripture. 
It changed our world, and we can acknowledge that.

A New Covenant World speaks grace and truth. It offers the Gospel as healing. It speaks peace into chaos. Please bear with me as I explore why we cannot simply turn back time. In the coming installments, I will point to some of the complex issues forthcoming in the “abortion wars” as legal scholars call our future.