WASHINGTON (BP) – South Dakota’s enactment of a ban on abortion has boosted hopes the new law might be the vehicle for a reversal of Roe v. Wade, but Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said recently he doubts the current Supreme Court would overturn the 1973 opinion and doesn’t know if it ever will.
By Tim Strode
Baptist Press
WASHINGTON (BP) – South Dakota’s enactment of a ban
on abortion has boosted hopes the new law might be the vehicle for a
reversal of Roe v. Wade, but Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said
recently he doubts the current Supreme Court would overturn the 1973
opinion and doesn’t know if it ever will.
Speaking to a gathering of Swiss professors and
students March 8, Scalia, whose opposition to Roe is well known, said
when asked if the highly criticized ruling would be reversed by the
high court, “I have no idea. I have no idea whether it will be.
“It is not likely to be overturned with the current
court, because there are still five justices on our court who voted in
favor of Roe vs. Wade,” Scalia told a group at the University of
Freiburg. “So, if I had to guess, I would say, ‘Not yet – maybe not
[ever] – but certainly not yet.”
Though Scalia said he did not have an official
opinion on abortion, he said a right to the procedure “is not contained
in the Constitution of the United States.”
Scalia’s remarks were reported by LifeNews.com,
which based its article on a French Audio-Visual Bureau news report.
Scalia’s remarks underscored concerns some pro-life
advocates have voiced about South Dakota’s frontal challenge to Roe.
In a March 8 online editorial, National Review, a conservative
magazine, said it had “mixed feelings.” The editors said they “share
the pro-life objectives that animate” the South Dakota law and a
Mississippi bill, “but we doubt that they actually advance those
objectives.”
If the measures are challenged and reach the high
court, “they will elicit another reaffirmation of that decision,” the
editorial said. “They could thus strengthen the felt force of the
argument that Roe is a super-duper-precedent.”
Some supporters of the South Dakota law have argued
not only that states should do what is right rather than look to the
Supreme Court for guidance on legislation, but also that the make-up of
the court might change before the case reaches the justices.
That scenario might pose another problem, National Review contended.
“If another vacancy arises while these laws are
working their way through the courts, their effect will be to make it
harder to confirm a justice who might be inclined to be the decisive
vote against Roe,” the editors wrote.
Instead, pro-lifers should continue to pursue an
“incremental strategy,” according to the editorial. If Roe is reversed,
pro-lifers should seek bans in each state on most abortions, then on
abortions in the cases of rape and incest, the editors said.