Catholic League president Bill Donohue praised the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade as a victory for democracy and a victory for life.
The Catholic Church has been on the frontlines of the pro-life movement since 1973, arguing that the protection of innocent human life is not a confessional question but a matter of basic justice that should be defended by the rule of law.
“It is a credit to the Catholic Church that it led the discussion on the morality of abortion for all these years,” Dr. Donohue declares in his June 24 essay. “This ruling makes us proud to be Catholic.”
“For a half century, abortion has been legal across the United States,” Donohue notes. “Those days are over: the Supreme Court has overruled the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.”
Donohue writes that debates regarding the issue of abortion are not over, but the matter has been returned to the states who will now “decide how to address it.”
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences,” Donohue writes, citing the majority opinion of the Court, which is why it is time “to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Donohue underscores the decision of the Court to go beyond overturning Roe to annul the 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, a decision that went beyond Roe “by making abortion a near absolute right, through term.”
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito asserted that the Constitution “makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” an observation shared for decades by many “honest abortion-rights legal scholars,” Donohue writes.