During his Tuesday hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Jeff Sessions, a pro-life Republican from Alabama, reaffirmed his view on Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion in all 50 states and which is responsible for over 58 million preborn lives being lost to abortion.
Sen. Diane Feinstein, a pro-abortion Democrat from California, asked Sessions if he still believes, as he once stated, that Roe is “one of the colossally erroneous Supreme Court decisions of all time,” and Sessions reaffirmed that this is still his view. He then added that the decision “violated the Constitution and really attempted to set policy and not follow law.”
Sessions continued to say that it is the law of the land and he would respect it as such. However, if Trump nominates pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, as he has promised and says he is “committed” to do, Roe may not be the law of the land for much longer.
Sessions’ view on the 1973 Roe decision is not unique. It was mostly based off of a penumbra, or a feeling about what seven male justices thought the Constitution implied about “privacy” — even though neither that word nor “abortion” are in our founding document. The so-called right to privacy, which supposedly includes the right to an abortion, came from a (mis)interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which would be more better suited to grant equal protection and protect the life, liberty, and due process of preborn Americans rather than take these fundamental rights away.
Another concern with the 7-2 decision of Roe is indeed that it “really attempted to set policy.” Many, including the late Antonin Scalia, believe that Roe should not have been a decision left to the judiciary branch, but to the people and their legislators. Clarke Forsythe of Americans United for Life also highlighted the legal problems associated with the decision in his book, Abuse of Discretion.
Sen. Sessions has a 100 percent pro-life rating from the National Right to Life Committee. As Live Action News’ Calvin Freiburger mentioned when Sessions’ nomination was first announced:
…Throughout his lengthy legislative career, Sessions has maintained a 100% pro-life voting record. Moreover, he led the effort to filibuster Obama’s very first pro-abortion judicial nominee, David Hamilton, has earned praise for his conviction that the rule of law should trump (no pun intended) any administration’s political preferences (a breath of fresh air, considering Planned Parenthood’s heavy financial support for Obama and other pro-abortion politicians who’ve returned the favor by covering for its crimes), was not intimidated by howls that defunding Planned Parenthood would shut down the government (he called them “ludicrous” and maintained that Obama lacked “the moral authority, the political clout, to tell the American people that the Congress shut down the government”), and is already on record demanding that Planned Parenthood be prosecuted—and now he’ll be in a position to make sure that it finally happens.
