Pro-lifers should also consider how to use public power to advance the debate. Would it be inappropriate, for example, to require sex education classes to teach the basic facts of embryonic development? The federal government and some states give public funds to abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood. Would it be improper for states such as Florida to fund crisis pregnancy centers to help mothers cope with their burden? Inventive minds can surely come up with many ways for government entities to legitimately support the antiabortion cause without overstepping legal bounds.
This advice will surely strike many abortion opponents as frustrating. How, they might ask, can I counsel patience when millions of babies are dying every year? That, however, raises the question: How can they protect those babies when a majority of their countrymen don’t want to? The answer some propound — the Supreme Court should find a right to life in the 14th Amendment and ban abortion nationwide — would be as destabilizing and antidemocratic as was Roe v. Wade. They should recall that it was the democratically enacted Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, not a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision, that irrevocably set Black Americans on the course to real freedom. Public opinion, not judicial fiat, is the only secure foundation for antiabortion laws.
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