In the past several weeks, a bevy of states have passed extensive new restrictions on abortion. Alabama has effectively banned abortion from point of conception. Georgia has banned abortion from the time a heartbeat is detected, as have Ohio, Kentucky and Mississippi. Missouri has banned abortion after eight weeks. Other states are on the move as well.

This has prompted paroxysms of rage from the media and the political left — the same folks who celebrated when New York passed a law effectively allowing abortion up until point of birth and who defended Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s perverse statements about late-term abortion. According to these thinkers, conservatives have encroached on a supposed “right to abortion” inherent in the Constitution.

This, of course, is a lie. There is no “right to abortion” in the Constitution. The founders would have been appalled by such a statement. The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) is a legal monstrosity by every available metric: As legal scholar John Hart Ely wrote, Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”