Abstract
[...]kill we have: Since Roe fashioned a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, there have been approximately sixty-two million abortions in America, a death toll that dwarfs the Nazi Holocaust and exceeds the total loss of American lives in all of our wars combined-by a factor of about forty. On the way to its recognition of a constitutional right to kill, there were three key rulings: first, that the unborn child had no legal rights or moral status whatsoever; second, that the Constitution affirmatively bestowed upon pregnant women and abortionists a presumptive legal entitlement to abort the unborn; and third, that this presumed right prevailed over essentially any other competing consideration and thus produced a nearly plenary right to abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, up to and including the point of birth. If there is some legal ambiguity surrounding the question of legal personhood, Roe's second holding is unequivocally and unambiguously wrong: that the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of "due process of law" before the state deprives someone of life, liberty, or property-the same language claimed by Dred Scott to support a federal constitutional right to slave ownership-embraces a right to "privacy" that includes a right to abortion. [...]Roe held that this right to abortion prevailed over essentially any and all countervailing considerations.