Senate Democrats have made support for the Roe v. Wade abortion decision a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees.
Now, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has set a new standard, declaring he will vote only for nominees who "have explicitly acknowledged" the 1973 Roe case was "wrongly decided," reports the Federalist.
"I don’t want private assurances from candidates. I don’t want to hear about their personal views, one way or another," Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told the Washington Post.
"I'm not looking for forecasts about how they may vote in the future or predictions. I don’t want any of that. I want to see on the record, as part of their record, that they have acknowledged in some forum that Roe v. Wade, as a legal matter, is wrongly decided," he said.
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
Hawley said Roe is "central" to the current prevailing judicial philosophy.
"Roe is and was an unbridled act of judicial imperialism," he said. "It marks the point the modern Supreme Court said, ‘You know, we don’t have to follow the Constitution. We won’t even pretend to try.'"
The writer of the majority opinion in Roe, Justice Harry Blackmun, acknowledged that if the "personhood" of the fetus is established, the "case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment."
Since then, as the Thomas More Society argued in a recent case, developments in science "establish fetuses as human persons and render Roe and its progeny obsolete."
That argument is the basis for a disputed Georgia law recognizing the humanity of the unborn by banning abortion when a heartbeat is detected.
Steve Jacobs, program director of Illinois Right to Life, said the Roe decision is "out of touch with the realities of today."
"Contemporary science renders its assumptions obsolete. An overwhelming majority of Americans do not want unrestricted abortion on demand," he said. "Unregulated abortion puts women at risk, and we believe that a disregard for women’s lives and safety contradicts all the progress that women have made in modern society, essentially devaluing the female sex."
A brief filed with the Supreme Court pointed out that 96% of biologists now acknowledge that human life begins at fertilization, and a fetus, biologically, is a human being.
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