Reverse Midas touch, part two

I've said before that abortion corrupts everything it touches. It's not an original thought, but it's worth revisiting in light of the fact that tomorrow marks the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review Online was an early champion of this same thesis, and his 1998 essay, "Dead Reckoning" remains the yardstick against which I measure similar efforts. Ponnuru minced no words in explaining how abortion corrupts family life, law, medicine, and liberalism itself. I agree (and after reading "Dead Reckoning," you probably will, too. It's that good.)

But big picture thinking can strain the brain, and so I think it's also helpful to compile a more modest list of abortion's corrosive effects. Here's what I came up with just by reading news stories over the last month or so:

• Abortion mocks the judicial nomination process (James Taranto found a 1991 article saying that Clarence Thomas drew Senatorial fire even before he was accused of sexual harrassment because, among other things, he refused to disclose his position on abortion to Senate inquisitors).
• Abortion twists consumer product safety reporting into pretzels.
• Abortion has a disproportionately harmful effect on the women it was supposed to empower.
• Abortion subverts Democratic Party efforts to reclaim majority status.
• Abortion taints the motivation for accepting nominations to presumably unrelated federal posts like Director of Homeland Security.
• Abortion corrupts science, and more particularly research into cures for breast cancer.
• Abortion encourages split personalities in politicians.
• Abortion set the modern precedent for judicial activism of the kind that has done so much to weaken the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches of government.

Students of constitutional law might want to see the original legal arguments used by the Supreme Court justices themselves. From a web site of summaries called "Roe v. Wade in a nutshell" we find Justice Rehnquist making the common-sense point that:

A transaction resulting in an operation such as this is not "private" in the ordinary usage of that word. Nor is the "privacy" that the Court finds here even a distant relative of the freedom from searches and seizures protected by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which the Court has referred to as embodying a right to privacy.

Dissenting from the misbegotten majority opinion, Rehnquist added that:

To reach its result the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment.

Justice Byron White joined Rehnquist in dissent, saying:

I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. . . . As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.

The Court apparently values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life that she carries. Whether or not I might agree with that marshaling of values, I can in no event join the Court's judgment because I find no constitutional warrant for imposing such an order of priorities on the people and legislatures of the States. In a sensitive area such as this, involving as it does issues over which reasonable men may easily and heatedly differ, I cannot accept the Court's exercise of its clear power of choice by interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life and by investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it.

Is it any wonder that abortion law is such a great motivator for single-issue voting?

UPDATE: January 22: the Brothers Judd pan Laurence H. Tribe's attempt to help opposing sides in the abortion controversy find common ground.

UPDATE 2: Welcome, friends of Amy Welborn and her Open Book!

UPDATE 3: Doug Bandow and George Neumayr weigh in.