Newsweek columnist George Will recently called the Roe vs. Wade decision a “bad” and “anti-constitutional” decision which has “resulted in dismaying practices.” The popular journalist, in a February 13 editorial, said that support for Roe was “collapsing perhaps in the Court and certainly among thoughtful people … beneath the weight of its incoherence and accumulating weight of scientific and medical facts.”

Will explained that the 1973 abortion decision was shaky due to a “doubly absurd proposition: no one knows when human life begins but the Court knows when ‘meaningful’ life begins.” He went on to say, “The indisputable fact is that a fetus is alive and biologically human. Pregnancy is a continuum: what begins at conception will, if there is no natural misfortune or deliberate attack, become a child,” he said.

He pointed out the contradictions in the decision making of the Supreme Court justices: on one hand, courts have ruled that a woman has the right to her own body; yet in other cases, courts have ruled to take custody of fetuses by “controlling, even jailing, pregnant women whose behavior (e.g. drug abuse) might jeopardize the health of their fetuses.”

He explained that “science and society are radically and increasingly out of sync” in its treatment of human life. “Prenatal medicine’s diagnostic and therapeutic techniques make possible intrauterine treatment of many forms of fetal distress and genetic problems. Medicine, the most humane science, can heal fetuses that the law says lack an attribute of humanity – rights.”