The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has blasted the UK-based Lancet medical journal for wading into American politics by attacking Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
As Breitbart News reported Saturday, the Lancet assailed the leaked opinion with a series of tendentious arguments, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, further marring its already badly tarnished reputation as a once-venerable medical journal.
“What is so shocking, inhuman, and irrational about this draft opinion is that the Court is basing its decision on an 18th century document ignorant of 21st century realities for women,” trumpeted the May 14 essay by the Lancet’s editorial board titled “Why Roe v. Wade must be defended.”
As the Wall Street Journal notes, the Lancet’s politicization of medicine will only serve to further undermine the public’s confidence in scientific institutions, which “suffered greatly during Covid-19 as lockdowns and mask mandates outlived the underlying evidence.”
“The Lancet, a medical journal, decides it has expertise in American law,” the WSJ editors quip in the subtitle to their op-ed.
“Allow us to offer some peer editorial review,” they suggest, while underscoring the egregious misstatements in the Lancet piece, such as the claim that overturning Roe would make abortion illegal.
“The Court’s draft decision doesn’t end abortion in America. It returns the question to the states, where the public and elected representatives would debate and vote,” the WSJ editors state.
“The Lancet editors lament that Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion is based on ‘an 18th century document’ — you know, the U.S. Constitution,” they continue, as if the Supreme Court’s job were something other than safeguarding and applying the Constitution.
“The Justices are beholden to the law and are no more qualified to settle the political consequences than, well, medical doctors are to wade into rights guaranteed by the Constitution,” the editors observe.
“The Lancet is trying to lend the imprimatur of science to an American legal and political debate,” they conclude. “But the journal will damage the pro-abortion cause if the public starts to dismiss medical expertise as merely another vehicle for the progressive agenda.”
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