In its Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution prohibits Americans from legally protecting human beings in utero. Killing those human beings, the Court said, must be allowed for any reason. You don’t have to be pro-life in order to want this decision overturned. That’s because Roe was a flagrant judicial mistake that usurped authority belonging to the American people rather than to the Court. John Hart Ely, the eminent legal scholar and Yale law professor, famously concluded that Roe “is a very bad decision,” but “not because it conflicts with … my idea of progress.” Instead, he explained, “It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Here are three of Roe’s most egregious errors.
