That is the title of a recent Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick. See http://www.slate.com/id/2291596/ The piece has to be read to be be believed. Lithwick complains that Roe is no longer a binding precedent, because opponents and supporters of abortion rights don’t treat the case as the law of the land. The result she says is to make the right to abortion a practical unreality. She claims, for example, that for all practical purposes women can’t get an abortion in Ohio, North Dakota, or Florida. But, in reality, there are still over a million abortions a year in this country. I live in Florida and there is an active abortion clinic just a couple of miles from my home. Lithwick is surely aware of all of this, despite the recent legislative measures that place very modest restrictions on abortion.
The piece is not a serious legal analysis. It seems mainly designed to rally the supporters of abortion rights. But the lack of seriousness is, I think, a good sign for the pro-life movement. Lithwick doesn’t seem willing to be able to describe the facts with any semblance of truth. Her piece reveals an air of desperation–that the abortion rights movement is losing ground and that she can sense that the pro-life position is, as Charlie Rice stated a few years back, The Winning Side.
Richard M.
Richard Myers
Richard S. Myers, the Vice-President of UFL, is Professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law, where he teaches Antitrust, Civil Procedure, Conflict of Laws, Constitutional Law, and Religious Freedom. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College and earned his law degree at Notre Dame, where he won the law school's highest academic prize. He began his legal career by clerking for Judge John F. Kilkenny of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Myers also worked for Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C. He taught at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law before joining the Ave Maria faculty. He is a co-editor of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives (Catholic University of American Press, 2004) and a co-editor of Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy (Scarecrow Press, 2007). He has also published extensively on constitutional law in law reviews and also testified before Congressional and state legislative hearings on life issues.
Married to Mollie Murphy, who is also on the faculty at Ave Maria School of Law, they are the proud parents of six children - Michael, Patrick, Clare, Kathleen, Matthew, and Andrew. http://www.avemarialaw.edu/index.cfm?event=faculty.bio&pid=11705E7D4E0111010366
