As we recognize the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers should consider supporting a constitutional amendment to abolish abortion forty years from now

Abortion and the Constitution in Another Forty Years: 

A Right to Life for 2053

by Michael Stokes Paulsen

It has been forty years since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. Last year, about this time, I reflected on "The Unbearable Wrongness of Roe." Now, after another year of a million-and-a-half lives lost to abortion, it is fitting to reflect on those past forty years and to think creatively, and perhaps prophetically, about the next forty. What different roads might have been taken before? And what might that say about paths to be taken now, for the future, if those of us who may be alive in another forty years are to hope to see the promised land of protection of human life?

In thinking about this, I have returned to a short article I wrote a few years back for the inaugural issue of the University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy, in which I proposed an idea whose time now surely has come: a purely prospective abolition of abortion by constitutional amendment, to take effect forty years into the future.

Here is the essence of my thought experiment, which was partly inspired by my scholarly interest in historical issues of slavery and the Constitution (which of course often run parallel to today's issues of abortion and the Constitution). In 1820, America settled on a "solution" to the heated issue of spreading slavery to the territories: the famous Missouri Compromise. Forty years later, the compromise had solved nothing, and the nation descended into the maelstrom of secession and civil war.

Had politicians in 1820 been able to see what the next forty years would bring, might they have produced a better, more forward-looking compromise? What if the Missouri Compromise, instead of admitting one free state and one slave state into the Union, and drawing a latitude line to constrain the expansion of slavery into (existing) new territories and new states, had drawn a timeline, instead? Might the conflict over slavery have been better addressed in 1820 by thinking about what the world should look like forty years later? What if Congress in 1820 had fashioned a compromise that tolerated slavery everywhere, for the time being, but also proposed a constitutional amendment prospectively abolishing slavery everywhere in the Union as of 1860?
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