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It looks like Roe v. Wade is finally about to be overruled. What does it mean that the news has been leaked? What does the draft decision say? Joe Heschmeyer joins us to discuss what appears to be very happy news.
Cy Kellett:
Apparently, Roe v. Wade will be overturned. Joe Heschmeyer is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Thank you so much for being with us.
Cy Kellett:
We’re going to respond to a recent news story in this episode, because it’s a big one. We’ve been waiting for a long time to find out whether or not the Roe v. Wade decision would stand. Apparently, it will not. A really shocking and unprecedented way of finding that out. It was leaked, and that gave us some uncertainty about whether even we should be talking about this. But I asked our guest, Joe Heschmeyer, about that, and about what’s in the decision, and here’s what he had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer, apologist extraordinaire, thanks for being here with us on this special day.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’m pleased to be here.
Cy Kellett:
I’m really glad to get to talk with you about this. You’re a Catholic theologian and apologist, and also a lawyer. We’re here to talk a little bit about the claim that Roe v. Wade is to be discarded entirely. I’m really glad to get to talk with you about it, but I want to start with this question. Should we be talking about it? I don’t mean we’re going to jinx it or something, but clearly an evil thing was done to get this news out. Are we complicit in that evil in even talking about this?
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s a good question. I think the answer to that is no. We’re not encouraging people to leak by discussing it. It’s out there as public knowledge. This is always the thing that comes up with leaked information. I knew a young woman who worked for an intelligence agency in D.C., and when Wikileaks came out, she couldn’t access any of that information on her secure computer, even though the rest of the world could, because it was, “Oh, well, this leaked. You can’t. You can’t.” It’s sort of like that, where it’s like, “Well, everyone knows it at this point.” It would be different if no one knew about this leak and we were announcing it to the world. There’d be a much deeper concern, a much deeper question. I don’t think we’re contributing in any meaningful way to its spreading.
Cy Kellett:
The Roe v. Wade decision, since it was first produced, has relied on intense emotional appeals and deception. I’m not going to say the pro-life side has always been angels and saints. There have been many sins committed by those who claim to be doing that in the name of life. But you can’t say there’s a constitutional right to killing a baby in the womb with a straight face. There’s no way to say that without there being deception involved. The father of lies, therefore, I’m sure, delights in all this public discourse and lying that’s been going on. It seems to me that this release is just more of the same. This-
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is shockingly bad form. For those who aren’t familiar, these draft opinions are kept extremely confidential because it’s the Supreme Court working out what they’re going to say, what they’re going to do. You don’t want that process opened up to the public. You don’t want to see how the sausage is made, all the back and forth that goes on, because it really does hurt the image of the Court as a judicial body, the same way even if you had a court case.
Joe Heschmeyer:
There’s a reason we don’t wiretap the jury room. For a long time, this was viewed as almost sacrosanct. There was controversy when the movie 12 Angry Men came out because it showed jury deliberations. That process was supposed to be kept away from the public view, simply so all of those deliberations could happen with freedom, and people didn’t have to worry about how their words would be picked apart. To leak something like this in a first draft really is a violation of trust. It really is a violation of a long-held, longstanding Supreme Court tradition. I think it’s going to be very counterproductive for the person who leaked it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. It’s a bad thing meant to sow… I don’t know what the motive of it is for the person who did it, but I just think it’s so ugly. It’s part and parcel with a way of thinking that says this abortion thing is so important that even the normal standards of decency and honesty, they all have to be subjugated to just the pure will to keep this abortion regime going.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Well, exactly. It’s not just a violation of decorum, not just a violation of honor. It really breaks down trust within the Court at a really fundamental level.
Joe Heschmeyer:
This is something I think people don’t get, that even though the American public has lost a lot of faith in the Court, that the members of the Court actually have a much better rapport and much better working relationship than one might assume. There are regularly 9-0 or 8-1 decisions. It isn’t like everything is 5-4 or 6-3. And you’ll often find these strange pairings when there are split decisions.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You have to have this ability to work with people who you don’t see eye to eye on, on everything, and work in this very thoughtful and really… It’s not like, “Let’s vote for this piece of legislation,” like you might do in the Senate. In this case, it’s a 96-page draft opinion. You have to be able to kick that around and say, “Well, change this part, mess with that part.” If you can’t trust on all parties being able to preserve confidence in that situation, that kind of betrayal really hurts that process of writing good judicial decisions.
Cy Kellett:
My own sense is that whoever did this should just come forward and admit it, because the person is going to be disbarred, but they are also going to be found out. You get a great book contract. You probably get a million-dollar book contract. Just come-
Joe Heschmeyer:
There’s already a pretty strong lead, I think, as to who it was. The journalist who broke the story had previously written on a story where he quoted a Yale student. That Yale student now works for Justice Sotomayor. Now, that may be a coincidence, and that young woman may be having her career unnecessarily ruined, but it’s a pretty remarkable coincidence that he knew her when she was an undergrad, apparently, and was quoting her then, and then he should come into possession of such a document.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Well-
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s a very short list of who gets these documents before they go public.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, and I’m sure that there… Even to do dishonorable things now generates a very good audience, and you can make a good living at it. You’re not going to make a living as a lawyer now, so may be time to get into the writing field.
Cy Kellett:
This is extremely unusual then. As a matter of fact, I heard a very liberal commenter last night say absolutely unprecedented, unprecedented, nothing like this-
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’ve never heard of this happening. It is shocking. It’s remarkable. A friend of mine used to clerk for Clarence Thomas, and he couldn’t talk even privately about cases that he had worked on. My understanding is that there’s one case per term that you can get permission to discuss some of the details of your involvement with, but all of that is kind of within a black box.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Even in terms of saying, “Well, this is Justice Alito’s. It’s clearly his writing. It’s clearly his wording on things,” chances are his clerks had a large hand in actually drafting it, in the same way that when a papal document comes out, the pope isn’t just sitting down at Microsoft Word every night and typing it all out personally. But you don’t want to reveal all the ins and outs, all of the hands that go into that, the collaborative way those things work, because it really does hurt the authority the document ends up possessing.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Maybe that was the point. Maybe the point was to try to undermine the authority of this out the gate. But in doing so, it only works by attacking the legitimacy of Supreme Court decisions as a whole. It’s hard to imagine, as a lawyer, a much deeper affront to the dignity of the law. Before we even get into the pro-life, pro-choice, wherever you are on the spectrum, this should be greatly troubling to anyone who cares about the legitimacy of the Court.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Fair enough.
Cy Kellett:
All right. I want to get into the decision itself as we now understand it. We don’t have a final draft. We have a first draft. That has already been affirmed by the chief justice that this is actually a first draft.
Cy Kellett:
Before we get into all that, though, I would just like to say that the emotion of this is enormous, and I personally feel the emotion of it. Emotion can be good and can be dangerous. But I personally, I grew up in a pro-life family. My father was a doctor. My mother made us all march in the pro-life parades in the 1970s, downtown San Diego, which I think is what turned the tide, actually, when I got out there and marched as a fourth grader.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You personally. Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. So it’s a lifetime that people have devoted to this, and many of the best pro-life voices have died during the course of this. They didn’t make it to see this day. I want to just begin by saying, thank God for this day, and thank God that He has so many good friends who love Him and love His children, and fought and fought and fought to get to this day.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think this is one thing that really is a marked difference between the pro-life and pro-choice side of this debate, which is that the energy to really be there in the street and really inconvenience yourself for this issue. Now, that may change. I think that’s something we need to be aware of and cautious of. Right now, almost all of that energy is on the pro-life side. There’s plenty of money, there’s plenty of influence and clout on the pro-choice side. But in terms of just bodies in the street, of people really showing up…
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s so predictable that you get the stock photo of a group of protestors out in front of the Supreme Court building, and it’s always about 50-50, or it’ll be mostly pro-choice people; but anyone who’s ever been to the March for Life or anyone who knows anything about the way this activism actually works knows that’s a total fiction. That’s just that false bothsidesism that you always hear about. It’s making it look like both sides are equally motivated in the street, and that’s just not true. The pro-life movement turns out tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people every year. In response, you might get counter-protesters that you could measure in the dozens. It’s only by doing the super-close-up shot that you can make it look like those are equivalent-size numbers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Now, I suspect that’s the one thing the pro-choice movement is maybe excited by with this draft being leaked, is that it mobilizes their base to really come out, to really donate, to really take this more seriously than they’ve taken it so far. It seemed to so many people on both sides of the issue that Roe v. Wade would just never go away. I’ve heard, even recently, conservative Catholics saying, “Oh, it’s here to stay. It’s totally folly to try to overturn it.” That’s not true.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think because of that, there’s going to be a real step up in pro-abortion and pro-choice activism. There needs to also be a step up, not down, not a complacency, not a “well, we’re finally there” in terms of pro-life activism. This is the time to really act on this momentum in a positive way in state legislatures and local laws that can really make a difference in terms of abortion.
Cy Kellett:
It seems to me that it’s incumbent upon the chief justice to get the decision out now and not wait until June. Do you share that view?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I am hesitant about it. As a pro-life person, knowing that every day that we pass by, more children are being unnecessarily killed, makes it seem like every day we wait is an abomination. On the other hand, I want a well-written, very carefully nuanced legal argument that isn’t just going to come under 50 years of legal attack. Now, it may be that you can’t avoid the 50 years of legal attack, but I want an ironclad pro-life ruling here.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think we have a very good ruling here, but I want to make sure that it… Iron sharpens iron, and so the more the justices kick things around and make sure everything looks good and are comfortable with the decision… There’s a reason that first drafts aren’t just published immediately. We don’t know, for one, if all five justices or all six justices, depending on how this goes, are pleased with this first draft. It’s just that; it’s the first draft.
Joe Heschmeyer:
In the same way that if we were collaborating on a book project, and you said, “Here’s what I think would be a really good chapter,” you don’t just publish it then. I then look at it and say, “I would keep this. I’d change that.” That whole process, this leak really threatens to short-circuit that in a way that does damage to the decision itself.
Cy Kellett:
Let me pose a different question to you, though, Joe. I think the fact that we know what the decision is in all likelihood, and now there’s a gap between when it’s published, which means it’s not law right now, it’s not law until it’s published, puts the lives of the justices in danger. There are mad people who will take advantage of this interim, or try to, to promote their agenda by… You just take one or two of these justices out, and we’re back to square one. We’ve got to start all over again.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. That’s certainly a risk. That’s certainly a danger. I think something that catastrophic would ultimately backfire. I don’t think the American people would support replacing an assassinated pro-life justice with a justice who is going to totally undermine that pro-life… In other words, in such a case, I think you would have to see a pro-lifer who promised to uphold this decision taking their place and joining them on the vote, because this is an important point, that the voting isn’t done until the final. At this point, there are 0-0 votes on this whole question.
Joe Heschmeyer:
There have been cases, not at the Supreme Court level but at lower courts, where decisions actually have gone the other way because a judge died in a one-vote swing case after a draft was already written. There was actually a very funny line explaining why this is, that judges have lifetime appointments, but lifetime appointments don’t extend after death. If something should happen, illness as well, that’s certainly the thing where… Clarence Thomas was in the hospital not long ago, and I think many pro-lifers were just waiting with bated breath to make sure he was okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think there’s a need to expedite it. I would just say that expedition shouldn’t come at the cost of quality. I would just say, make sure all the Ts are crossed, all the Is are dotted, but do that as quickly as possible, and then get the final document out as soon as possible. I think it could be done sooner than this summer, which is when it was probably going to come out. Although, we’re getting pretty close to the summer as it is, but I don’t know that we want to expedite it just to today or tomorrow.
Cy Kellett:
Fair enough. As far as that legal reasoning goes, you read the opinion. I’ve read the first 10 pages of it, and I felt I got the basics of the reasoning in those 10 pages. What did you think of the legal reasoning?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think the legal reasoning is fantastic. I say that not just because I’m pro-life, but because even many pro-choicers realize Roe v. Wade was a very badly decided opinion. John Hart Ely was a legal commentator from the 20th century who is actually quoted in the decision. They quote just a little excerpt from him, but I want to quote a little more.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Now, Ely was pro-choice, and he said, “Roe v. Wade seems like a durable decision. It is, nevertheless, a very bad decision. Not because it will perceptively weaken the Court. It won’t. And not because it conflicts with either my idea of progress or what the evidence suggests is society’s. It doesn’t. It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Now, I want to unpack that, because all of the areas where he was optimistic, that it’s durable, that it won’t weaken the Court, that it will match up with society’s sense of progress, none of that actually came true. But all of the critiques he nevertheless had, which was that this reads like a piece of legislation, it doesn’t read like a Supreme Court decision… The job of the Supreme Court in cases like Roe is to say, “What does the Constitution say about a right to abortion?” The answer is very clear. It says nothing. It does not provide a right to abortion in the Constitution.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The Court in Roe basically said, “Well, it should,” which is not the role of a court. It’s the role of a legislative body. It’s the role, maybe, of a president. It is not the role of the interpretive branch, which is the judicial branch. This is one of the biggest things that it points out.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The opinion actually opens by pointing out that there’s, largely speaking, three groups of Americans right now, large groups. There are those who believe life begins at conception; abortion should be illegal at all stages. There are those who think that any regulation is a violation of a woman’s dignity and liberty, and that it should be restricted at no stage. Then there are a lot of Americans who fall somewhere in between and think that there’s some line that we ought to draw as to when abortion should be legal and when it shouldn’t be.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Roe v. Wade just takes one position, apparently arbitrarily, using the trimester framework, and says, “Here’s where we’re going to draw the line.” All you have there is a group of seven people imposing their own line-drawing over everyone else, which is not the role of the Court at all. It is shockingly undemocratic, because there’s very little judicial recourse, or legal recourse of any kind, short of a constitutional amendment that would change this, and so it was a disaster.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Then flash forward to the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision in the ’90s, and what you have there is the Court came very close to just overturning it. You probably had five justices who were pro-life and four who were pro-choice. But one of those justices, Anthony Kennedy, chickened out at the last minute, was worried that it would hurt the Court’s reputation to overturn Roe. What they did is actually just dramatically worse. Two of the justices argued we should keep Roe, four of the justices argued we should overturn Roe, and three of the justices argued we should keep something and basically call it the essential Roe holding, but it scrapped the actual line-drawing from Roe. It scrapped the trimester framework and just drew the line at another equally arbitrary place in terms of due versus undue burdens.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That kind of thing, where the Court is acting like a legislative body instead of like a Court, where it’s not really saying, “What does the Constitution say on the matter?” and it’s more just saying, “How do we save face as a Court?” and it just does this by making one decision and then changing its mind and doing another but similar decision, that thing is terrible for the country as a whole, terrible for the legitimacy of the Court. That’s true even if you’re pro-choice.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Even if you think abortion should be legal at any stage in pregnancy, hopefully you can realize that having one Court say it one way in Roe, another Court say it another way in Casey, and neither Court having a good legal foundation to do so, that’s not how you get there. That should be a federal law, if you’re going to have it at all. Obviously, I think it shouldn’t be either a federal law or a judicial decision.
Cy Kellett:
Anything else stick out to you? What struck me was the one line where it says… Well, two lines, one early and one towards the middle of what I read, the early one saying, “Roe was egregiously wrong the day it was decided,” and then later saying, “We find that Roe v. Wade must be overruled.” That second sentence, I have to say, is the sentence I’ve been waiting a lifetime to hear. I just was-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Amen.
Cy Kellett:
… over the moon to hear that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Let me explain a little bit of the background to it being wrong from the day it was decided. In other words, what the justices are saying, or at least what Justice Alito was saying, is that it isn’t that Roe was a good decision and then we subsequently learned some facts that call it into question. It’s true, embryology has gotten better. It’s true, viability and all of that is earlier than it was when Roe v. Wade was decided. But there are some cases that are just so badly decided that it’s wrong the day it’s decided.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The reason this matters is usually the Court will uphold what prior Supreme Court justices have ruled, unless you can show either this was totally wrong at the time or something has really dramatically changed since then and now we know better. The justices are very clearly saying this is the first one.
Joe Heschmeyer:
There are other examples. They give the example of Plessy v. Ferguson, that allowed separate but equal discrimination. Racial discrimination, it wasn’t like it was okay and fine in 1897, and then later we found out in 1954 it was wrong. It’s like, no, we had all of the tools we needed to know it was wrong on day one.
Joe Heschmeyer:
One of the reasons this matters is even the justices who will almost definitely dissent from this, even the justices who are going to say we shouldn’t overturn Roe, have stopped short, at least in oral arguments, of taking any kind of position like Roe was rightly decided or is a good decision. They’ve instead just said, “Well, even if it was a bad decision, we should uphold it.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Alito is really pressing, “We didn’t just find out it was a bad decision.” The reason you quote John Hart Ely is he’s writing in 1973. We knew it was a bad decision from day one. That makes it really hard to use stare decisis, this principle of respecting precedent, to uphold the decision that was just a flagrant violation of what the Court was supposed to be doing. That’s, I think, one really important, I guess, dimension to that.
Cy Kellett:
What will happen then if in the coming days or weeks, when this decision comes down, Roe is overruled? In a practical sense, what’s going to happen?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, so in a practical sense, it’ll go back to the states. Now, the federal government could step in, and there have already been demands. I saw Senator Elizabeth Warren demanding that Congress codify Roe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think two thoughts on that. One, that would really hurt state pro-life efforts; but two, that’s only a short-term obstacle. That’ll just motivate pro-lifers in the midterm elections. That’ll motivate people to just overturn any of these efforts. Actually, even Warren’s supporters pointed that out, that, “Well, even if we do this, they’ll just go and undo it next time around.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, that’s how legislation works.” If you pass really bad, really controversial legislation, you can’t just demand that the other party or the other side of the issue doesn’t try to undo the bad thing you did.
Cy Kellett:
Well, they’re always telling us when the decisions go their way, “This is settled law. We should all accept it and move on.” Well, why don’t we just all accept this and move on?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. It turns out that was just a cudgel. It was never a real serious argument, that it only is settled law if you like the way it settled. For example, when the Supreme Court upheld laws against sodomy, they didn’t just stop. They didn’t say, “Oh, okay. Well, I guess same-sex relationships are wrong. We can’t fight that anymore because the Court settled it.” Or Plessy v. Ferguson, when it said racial discrimination was fine, we didn’t just say, “All right. Well, I guess there’s no civil rights movement.” It’s never been a good argument to just say settled law in the case of a law that’s really badly decided. That’s the case.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Alito points out that no justice on the Supreme Court has ever said that every Supreme Court precedent should be upheld, that we should never overrule constitutional interpretation. The difference is in the standard.
Joe Heschmeyer:
For instance, Clarence Thomas has argued that we should give basically no stare decisis to constitutional law matters, and the reason is this. If you have a bad Supreme Court decision about what a statute means, Congress can step in and just say, “No, that’s not what we mean by that,” and they can pass a law tomorrow that very quickly remedies that. If they don’t, at a certain point, that’s on them, and so we’ll just continue to assume that’s what that law means because they didn’t tell us otherwise when we said it earlier.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But when you get the Constitution wrong or you get the Bill of Rights wrong, there aren’t a lot of remedies. True, you could try to pass a constitutional amendment that really specifically revokes the interpretation, but even then it would be virtually impossible to come up with an amendment that could, A, pass or, B, be specific enough that it wouldn’t just open a whole new can of worms.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The best remedy is for the Supreme Court to self-correct when it gets things wrong in constitutional law. Now, some justices will have a higher threshold and say, “Well, we should still respect precedent wherever we can, even on bad constitutional law.” But that’s where the debate is. Nobody says precedent always wins.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Given that, the question is, well, if precedent doesn’t always win, should precedent win in this case? Should Roe win just because we’ve upheld Roe even when everybody knew it was a bad decision? Alito gives five different major categories for why Roe and Casey both need to be overturned.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Number one, the nature of the error. This is something that’s really grievous. He again cites to Plessy v. Ferguson.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Two, the quality of the reasoning. The judicial reasoning in Roe really is kind of a joke. The judicial reasoning in Casey is also really bad. The predictions Casey makes about how this will settle the abortion debate just obviously didn’t come true.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Third, the workability of the rules imposed on the country. The Casey standard is about due versus undue burdens, but no one is really clear about what that means or where that line is.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Fourth, the disruptive effect on other areas of the law, this so-called abortion distortion in legal precedent.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Then, five, the absence of concrete reliance. In other words, no one, pro-life or pro-choice, really totally thinks that this issue is settled law. There’s a pro-life movement in the way that there aren’t for other areas of the law. That’s, by itself, a good sign.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Let me give a contrast there. There are other questions. For instance, there are constitutional questions about whether the 15th Amendment was properly passed because of the post-Civil War politics and states being forced to sign on. But it’s so much a part of the U.S. taken-for-granted legal landscape, there’s no movement to really overturn it, and there never really has been, that it’s just an arcane legal question.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, abortion is not an arcane legal question. There’s been a continuous live public outcry over the awfulness of the Roe decision, and a political movement to change it, and a judicial movement to change it, literally since the day it was passed until now.
Cy Kellett:
There have been a lot of disappointments in the last 50 years, some shocking disappointments in the last 50 years, so I suppose we should brace ourselves, be cautious, but this does look very good.
Joe Heschmeyer:
In fact, I would say, while I agree with all of that, I feel better now than I did just after the original oral arguments. The oral arguments certainly looked good for a 5-4 or a 6-3 decision. The big question was, where is Justice Roberts going to fall? That question was, in some ways, not relevant because he wasn’t the swing vote. Since then, with Justice Breyer stepping down and not being a voting member, it really is just looking like it’s not going to be a particularly close decision.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, given all of that, it was still like, well, we remember the disappointment of the Casey decision, in which Kennedy switched sides. We know there have been issues on other areas where Justice Roberts, or even Justice Alito himself, haven’t always been very predictable or very reliable. But now I don’t think the justices could back down if they wanted to. Both pro-life and pro-choice commentators are saying this.
Joe Heschmeyer:
At this point, if the justices were to switch sides, it would look like this incredible act of betrayal paid off, and the legitimacy of the Court wouldn’t survive that. If double dealing from the side that’s losing now looks like it might get you to back down… Basically, what they’ve done is probably entrenched the majority opinion and made it less likely that anyone would water the decision down. They’ve probably made it more likely now, although I give it maybe a 25% chance that Justice Roberts joins the majority opinion.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Justice Roberts is very concerned with the legitimacy of the Court. He takes his job as the chief justice extremely seriously. That means he didn’t want to be revolutionary in overturning Roe, but it also means he doesn’t want Roe overturned by one vote, or doesn’t want it to be a super-close margin. Especially in a case like this, where the other side really is engaging in this kind of behavior, I could easily see him joining the majority, both out of personal conviction or leaning, and out of a sense of upholding the dignity of the Court in so doing.
Cy Kellett:
Myself, I would support a pro-life amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but one also has to be realistic and prudent. Maybe in another 50 years we’ll get there. I don’t think we’re tired of the battle. I don’t know. But it does seem that with this decision, what really matters now, if you’re a pro-life person, is state politics.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And changing hearts and minds. The hearts and minds haven’t been as relevant because the only hearts and minds that seemed to matter for so long were the few rogue justices who really held the whole issue in their hand. Now it’s going back to the American people in a real way, and we need to really perfect the art of persuasion. We really need to perfect the involvement in local politics and good legislative writing, to make not just pro-life legislation, but good and durable, smart pro-life legislation that we can really stand behind with a clear conscience.
Cy Kellett:
Through the whole 50 years that we’ve lived under this regime, the United States media has refused to report on the children. They’re not interested in the child, but they have been very good at finding every emotional case, and some of these are incredibly difficult circumstances and cases. I imagine that that will continue, and I think we should be alert for it and not be suckers, frankly. It’s shocking that there are two people involved in every abortion, and the United States media has utterly refused to report on one of those people. That’s going to continue, and the manipulation will continue.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. There are genuinely tragic stories involving women who have gotten pregnant in horrible situations and genuinely tragic stories of women who have suffered from abortions, or suffered from having a child in really difficult circumstances. The response there is compassion. The response there is not, “Let’s legalize murder.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
The analogy I’d give is this. For a lot of women who are, especially, single moms, having a lot of kids may be a tremendous hardship, financially, emotionally, just in terms of time. Right now, we’ve got two sick kids under three, and it’s draining for both of us. I was out of town last week. It was extremely difficult for my wife. And there are women who, that’s their ordinary life because they are doing it alone. They deserve compassion, but you don’t say we should legalize the right to kill your kids because it’ll make your life a lot easier. I’m sure it would make their life a lot easier. That doesn’t make it acceptable.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I don’t just mean because the 10 Commandments say so. I mean because basic human morality says you don’t just kill children because they’re inconvenient to adults. That is no different for born children or unborn children. That’s the pro-life argument in a nutshell.
Joe Heschmeyer:
By all means, I think that the appropriate response here is both rejoicing at the apparent decision and being truly compassionate for the women who find themselves in difficult situations, not just crowing and shoving it in the face of the people who are losing today, but really having compassion and generosity, and really treating them with the respect and compassion you would desire if the situation had gone the other way. I think that’s the best solution, but not a respect and compassion that means that you betray principle and start endorsing legalized murder, because that’s not true compassion. That’s not true respect.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer, I really appreciate that you took the time on short notice to come and talk with us about this. One of these days not too long from now, the actual decision in the Dobbs case will come out, and we’ll have you back again. Okay?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Sounds good.
Cy Kellett:
Thank you, Joe.
Cy Kellett:
This whole Roe v. Wade thing has been messy right from the beginning, and apparently it’s going to end in a messy way. That’s unfortunate. It’s sad to think about that. But the fact is, it does appear that it’s ending, and that’s the thing to be joyful about.
Cy Kellett:
Many, many good people have worked many, many years, decades of lives devoted to overturning Roe v. Wade, so that we could start the pro-life work, not so that it would be done, so that we could begin to do the pro-life work. I hope that we’ll always remember that that pro-life work has to be pro-family work, has to be pro-woman work, has to be pro-mother work. If it’s not, it’s not really just. It’s something else.
Cy Kellett:
But thank God that we can start it now, and thank Joe Heschmeyer very much for doing this episode with us. Hopefully we’ll be celebrating soon that the real decision is out, we can read it, and we can be confident that it is the law of the land.
Cy Kellett:
Hey, if you want to comment on this episode or any episode, maybe you want to suggest a future episode, just send us an email. Focus@catholic.com is our email address, focus@catholic.com.
Cy Kellett:
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Cy Kellett:
If you’d like to maybe get a notice whenever a new episode is available, just subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. Maybe give us that five-star review, say a few nice words. That will help to grow the podcast. It is growing, and we’re grateful for your help in doing that.
Cy Kellett:
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Cy Kellett:
We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.