by Mark Helprin – Summer 2024 – Claremont Review of Books

My cmnt: I first became aware of the abortion issue when we attended a Baptist church in 1982. Up till then I knew next to nothing about abortion, the 1973 Supreme Court decision making up a new Constitutional right to unrestricted (more or less) abortion cut out of whole cloth, nor why the Left so desperately wanted this heinous act to be legitimized by law.

My cmnt: Soon I would know more about this (generally) surgical procedure than I ever wanted to know. For over 40 years I have faithfully stood with my fellow proLifers the first Sunday of each October in the National Life Chain, silently holding our signs and praying for an end to the scourge of murdering the pre-born in America.

My cmnt: Then miraculously Donald Trump is elected President and Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg – after years of falling asleep at the bench and in failing health – refuses to step down from the Court so that Hillary can choose her Left-leaning, democrat replacement. But Hillary never becomes president and Trump names and stands firmly behind three, originalist justices who in June of 2022 help overturn Roe v Wade. The Supreme Court by a 5-4 majority in Dobbs confirms that there never was a Constitutional right to abortion nor is there now. So the matter is thrown back to the States where it always was.

My cmnt: The murderous dems then sneak constitutional amendments, purposefully worded to fool the voters into thinking they were protecting women’s health, into Red state constitutions. Pro-lifers become wise to this ruse and have vigorously fought back.

My cmnt: The writer below asserts that abortion is equivalent to slavery and needs to be completely outlawed by Republicans. The author ignores the outcome of abolitionist purists in the 1850s led to a devastating Civil War that the North could have easily lost in which case slavery would probably still be here to this day.

My cmnt: A better way, now that the necessary step of reversing Roe has finally occurred, will be to let the matter settle out in each state through the people’s choice and then attack each state, one by one, to limit abortion rather than completely outlaw it which would lead to civil war or at the least driving it underground.

My cmnt: Bill Clinton’s dictate that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” with the last word indicating abortion isn’t something to be celebrated. And in 1996, the DNC adopted a platform that characterized abortion as a “difficult issue” and because of that, “we respect the individual conscience of each American.” It called for making abortion “less necessary” and “more rare.” But as with the slavers it wasn’t enough simply to be tolerated until it died out of its own accord, democrats love and celebrate abortion as a sacrament. It has religious meaning to them and they want it thought of as a good thing.

“It being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.” Thus did the evasive Stephen Douglas, in the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, dodge the moral question of slavery by leaping into the briar patch of legality.

“I’m leaving everything up to the states. The states are going to be different. Some will say yes. Some will say no. Texas is different than Ohio…. I don’t have to do anything about vetoes, because we now have it back in the states.” Thus, as Abraham Lincoln spun in the grave, did the ideological blank slate Donald Trump, in an interview following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, evade the moral question of abortion by resurrecting the specious doctrine of popular sovereignty.

Although the question of slavery and that of abortion are, or should be, wholly dependent upon the further question of who is a human being and who is not, abortion is unlike the absolute binary of slavery, in that, for example, it may force a choice between the life of the mother and the life of the child. In the era of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, however, tradition, practice, and various religious and philosophical interpretations caused many to view the slavery question as not binary at all.

Similarly, today’s secularism, rejection of tradition, and various philosophical and political doctrines—such as relativism, utilitarianism, and ego-über-alles feminism (as in “believe all women”)—have transformed the abortion debate into a contest of ways and means rather than a decision about life or death.

Then as now, the public was divided, with divisions within divisions. The antebellum split correlated far more with differences in geography and regional economics than does the divergence between red and blue states now. And then as now, the flanks were separated by a broad middle that each flank hoped to persuade: then, abolitionists versus the slave power; now, advocates of a federal or constitutional abortion ban versus those who would establish a federal or constitutional abortion right.

Apprehending such questions from the vast hinterlands of politics and ideology tends to muddy them. In the 1850s, camouflaged within the multiple folds of the design of the union, precedent law, tradition, worldwide practice, ethics, and religion, whether to support slavery or freedom appeared to most of the population as if through a kaleidoscope of extraneous influences. In line with this, even were it not his wish, Douglas constructed for the slave states a legal and philosophical bulwark against abolition, by assuring them of an absolutist right to organize the powers of government, as the Declaration of Independence had put it, “in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.”

In his Peoria Address and in his famous debates with Douglas, Lincoln deftly cut through the extraneous and immaterial influences and severed the illogical link between the right of the people to govern themselves and the freedom to transgress the pact in which that right was stated: “The doctrine of self government…depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man…. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”

***

This recurrence to first principles clarified for an America in crisis that just as God has established postulates to govern subsequent and derivative questions, so must majority rule be limited to the dictates and spirit of the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. And it demolished the idea that the will of the majority can give license to tyranny, whether over a whole people or a single person. In speech after speech, letter after letter, and debate after debate, Lincoln and those of like mind laid to rest the sophistical endowment of popular sovereignty with unjust powers beyond its remit.

That is, until—as there is no right to abortion in the Constitution—the Supreme Court (in Democrats’ eyes, scandalously) found that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution, perforce off-loading to Congress and the legislatures of the states the question of the humanity, or lack thereof, of the human being at various stages of development. Not the Court but, ironically and for electoral purposes, the Republicans—as the Democrats fear no controversy in demanding a federal or constitutional laissez-passer for abortion—prefer to sidestep. Accordingly, they have chosen to allow under the revived doctrine of popular sovereignty the existence and legality of two contradictory answers to a fundamental question that demands only one.

Rejecting expediency, in platform after platform, speech after speech, and debate after debate, the Republicans until now have at considerable cost stated their opposition to unrestricted abortion, just as before the Civil War they were clear in opposition to slavery. Lincoln exposed popular sovereignty for what it was, and in the 20th century after it had risen from the dead as an illegitimate interpretation of states’ rights in service of Jim Crow, the GOP helped to smite it again. But, in 2024, it is back. You might ask, has Donald Trump ever read the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Or heard of them? His resurrection of Stephen Douglas, albeit unwittingly, is an internal contradiction at seismic scale, and does not bode well for the GOP.

Beyond partisan advantage or any particular question or controversy, but rather in service of the greater and long-term interests of the nation, the untenable logic of popular sovereignty à la Stephen Douglas must not stand, for in granting structure and rationale for division it can only lay the foundation for a house further divided. Whether in relation to the question of slavery, the question of abortion, or the ways in which it judges what is right and what is wrong, how a nation deals with fundamental principles will determine its character and decide its fate. It may evade, prevaricate, shirk, or delay. But not, and never, forever.

Mark Helprin is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and the author, most recently, of Paris in the Present Tense (Abrams Books).