Who Ended Roe? Catholics – The American Spectator

On Jun 25, 2023

America celebrated yesterday the fall of the most disastrous Supreme Court decision in the nation’s history: Roe v. Wade. After nearly 50 years of increasingly unregulated abortion gutted the United States and wiped out almost 64 million unborn Americans, a mostly Catholic Supreme Court reversed the deadly decision and removed federal protections for the systematic slaughter of the unborn.

In fact, Catholics have played a leading role in fighting abortion from the very beginning.

Over 100 years before the Supreme Court erroneously found a right to abortion in the Constitution, the Catholic Church in the U.S. was the barbaric practice’s most vocal opponent. In 1870, the Michigan State Medical Society wrote:

In America the Roman Catholic Church have taken the lead of all others in this reform. Its ministers preach from the altar the true doctrine, that the “destruction of the embryo at any period from the first instant of conception is a crime equal in guilt to that of murder;” “that to admit its practice [the practice of abortion] is to open the way for the most unbridled licentiousness, and to take away the responsibility of maternity is to destroy one of the strongest bulwarks of female virtue.”

Catholic From the Beginning

Early pro-life efforts to combat state abortion legislation were almost entirely Catholic-led, and the only groups orchestrating organized pro-life efforts were both Catholic: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Family Life Bureau. The U.S. Catholic bishops founded the National Right to Life Committee shortly before the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down. After the ruling, the bishops launched an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to invalidate Roe and bar Congress and individual states from legalizing abortion. Connie Paige, author of The Right to Lifers, once quipped that “[t]he Roman Catholic Church created the right-to-life movement. Without the Church, the movement would not exist as such today.” (READ MORE: Faithful Catholic Institutions Defy Trend of Secularization)

Since Roe, Catholics bishops in the U.S. have been more vocal in opposing abortion than they have been on any other single topic, although their voices have waned in recent years. Instead, it has been — perhaps unsurprisingly — the Catholic laity who have taken up the pro-life banner.

Lay Catholics vehemently opposed the abortion regime, and after Roe many Catholic-led state legislatures implemented measures to ban abortion — the predominantly Irish Catholic Massachusetts state Legislature, for example, immediately implemented a 20-week ban on abortion and Rhode Island fought against federal courts to ban abortion facilities within the state.

According to historian Daniel K. Williams, author of Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-life Movement before Roe v. Wade, Catholics accounted for the bulk — almost the entirety — of pro-life activism until the 1980s, when Evangelical Protestants joined them as the Republican Party, partly under the influence of Catholics like William F. Buckley Jr., shifted further right and took up a position against the results of the sexual revolution: homosexuality, contraception, and abortion chief among them.

Some of the preeminent pro-life figures even of this era were devout Catholics. Nellie Gray, the founder of the annual March for Life, was a Catholic and until her death in 2012 ensured that the March for Life adhered to Catholic moral theology — for example, she ensured that it did not propose contraception as an alternative to abortion. The great Phyllis Schlafly, one of the most ardent opponents of abortion, was Catholic. The late Vicki Thorn, founder of the Rachel Project, which offers support and healing for women post-abortion, was Catholic. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the longtime president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, is a convert to Catholicism.

Catholic Jurists

And, of course, there are the men and women who, just last year, voted to overturn Roe. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have made no bones about their Catholic faith. Thomas, in fact, has stated that he attends daily Mass: “I go to Mass before I go to work and the reason for that is not just habit. It gives you, a sinner, it starts you in a way of doing this job — secular job — the right way for the right reasons.” Thomas even went a step further than his fellow justices and not only overturned Roe but called for reconsidering everything pertaining to substantive due process, including contraception and homosexuality. (READ MORE: Catholic Bishops Vote to Address Transgender Health Care)

Alito wrote the opinion overturning Roe, which caused no small amount of controversy when leaked last year. That leak led to an increase in anti-Catholic hostility in the U.S., with CatholicVote reporting that over 160 Catholic churches have been attacked, vandalized, defaced, etc. since the Dobbs leak. Alito and Thomas were joined by Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch, all Trump appointees.

Barrett’s Catholic faith was a subject of some brouhaha several years before the Roe reversal. When nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017, Barrett was berated for her Catholic faith, with pro-abortion Sen. Dianne Feinstein infamously quipping, “The dogma lives loudly within you,” referring to concerns Barrett’s Catholicism may lead her to side with Catholic morals over established legal precedent. When nominated to the Supreme Court in 2020, Barrett was repeatedly grilled on whether she would overturn Roe.

Kavanaugh’s Catholicism received less attention than Barrett’s, but he too was grilled on Roe during his confirmation hearings. Amusingly, a group of witches announced that they would try to “hex” Kavanaugh shortly after his confirmation. Catholic exorcists prayed for his protection.

Gorsuch is an interesting case: raised Catholic, he now attends an Episcopalian church with his family, but he still reportedly designates himself a Catholic on his Episcopalian church’s membership records. Regardless, Gorsuch grew up a Catholic and was less than 6 years old when the Roe decision was passed down. It’s inevitable that Catholic thought on abortion influenced his own.

From the moment the Supreme Court made what Phyllis Schlafly called “the worst decision in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court,” it has been Catholics who have most ardently fought for life. Roe was brought down by Catholics, and it is up to Catholics to continue waging war on the abortion industry until the thought of ending an unborn child’s life in America is unthinkable.

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