THIS WEEK there will be a march in Washington calling for the repeal of the Supreme Court’s verdict in Roe v Wade, the case that created the constitutional right for a woman to have an abortion. The original judgment was delivered in 1973; so this is the 32nd anniversary of the court’s decision.

Miss Roe herself, the young appellant selected by the abortion lobby to bring the case, now deeply regrets becoming involved, and has joined the demand for repeal. She thinks her youth was exploited and that abortion is wrong.

The re-election of President Bush may well give the conservative justices a clear majority in the Supreme Court. The President may be able to nominate as many as four justices in this term. At least for his first two years, he will have a Republican majority in the Senate — though not necessarily a majority that favours the “right to life” over the “right to choose”.

Roe v Wade will be one of the big political issues of President Bush’s second term.

The historic consequences of the case take one’s breath away, if only because the scale of the abortions is proportionate to the population of the United States. No doubt the figures for Europe would be as large, and those for China much larger. In the 33 years since Roe v Wade, the annual US abortion rate has been approximately 1.5 million. The 50 millionth US abortion could occur this year. The number of lives lost to abortion in the United States is equivalent to the casualties in both world wars, to eight Holocausts, 200 tsunamis or a couple of global epidemics. Yet the US has only a twentieth of the world’s population.

A German Roman Catholic bishop has recently been forced to apologise for comparing the babies lost by abortion with the Holocaust. He believes that the foetus is a living human being. It is no disrespect to the Holocaust victims for him to compare what he regards as two different examples of the state-approved termination of innocent lives; it does not make the crime of the Holocaust, which we are also remembering this week, any less terrible.

Numbers, of course, do not determine the moral issue. Is the foetus a live human being, entitled to the normal protection for human life, or does it become a human being, with human rights, only when it is born?

There are three views about this. Some people think that an unborn foetus can be destroyed without any moral problem. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that the earliest cluster of cells which is potentially a human being deserves the full protection that should be given to human life.

A third group thinks that abortion may be legitimate at some early stage, but should not be performed after the foetus has passed its early stage of development, and certainly not after it has reached the stage at which premature babies can survive.

In most European countries this third view seems to have majority support, even in strongly Roman Catholic countries. Abortion laws were passed, mostly in the late 1960s or early 1970s which laid down limits to the period when abortions could be performed, and sometimes attempted to define justifying reasons — such as rape or incest, or the health of the mother or the baby.

One American survey, which was conducted in the late 1980s by a pro-abortion group, suggests that rape or incest is involved in about 1 per cent of abortions, and the health of the mother or the child in about 20 per cent. Approximately 80 per cent of all American abortions were primarily motivated by convenience; by the mother’s feeling that “having a baby could change her life”. In Britain, the reasons for abortion are supposed by law to be limited to substantial grounds of health or psychological damage, but this has not proved enforceable. In practice, United Kingdom law allows abortion on demand.

This debate has been much easier to conduct through the democratic process than the constitutional. Many American lawyers, including pro-abortion lawyers, think that the issue is one for the states, and for their legislatures, and not for the Supreme Court. Certainly, the judgment in Roe v Wade cannot be supported from the text of the Constitution.

Robert Bork, the conservative jurist who was kept off the Supreme Court by Senator Edward Kennedy on just this issue, has written: “I objected to Roe v Wade the moment it was decided, not because of any doubts about abortion, but because the decision was a radical deformation of the Constitution. The Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, leaving it, like most subjects, to the judgment and moral sense of the American people and their elected representatives.”

The superiority of the democratic process has been shown by the relative freedom from violence in the British debate on abortion compared with the angry and unresolved debate in the United States. We can, after all, vote against members of Parliament with whose views we disagree — Americans take 30 years and half a dozen presidents to change the Supreme Court. Constitutional law also tends to be too absolute — women were given an unqualified right to an abortion in all circumstances, with no protection for the welfare of the foetus. Sound legislation does not create such unqualified rights which overrule the conflict of legitimate interests.

A future Supreme Court in the United States can and should return the Roe v Wade decision to the states and the people, which is were they belong under the US Constitution. The people, through their representatives, have the sole right to take such decisions, whichever way they take them. Such laws are not a matter for the Supreme Court, in the US or here. In the meantime, we can grieve for the 50 million missing Americans, and their descendants, who would now number 10 million or so.

The result of Roe v Wade was that abortion in the United States became an epidemic. It has taken 50 million potential lives already. It has left many mothers with the trauma of regret. Many other Americans find the scale of the abortion business intolerable. It has deeply divided American society. Every abortion is a tragedy.

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