Abolitionist Lawyer to File Amicus Brief in SCOTUS Abortion Case

In 2018, Mississippi enacted House Bill 1510 – also known as the “Gestational Age Act” – purportedly prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks gestation. The same day the act went into state law, the last remaining licensed abortion facility in the state challenged it in district court. Now, the case – Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – is slated to be heard by the Supreme Court during the 2021-2022 term. 

There have been 39 abortion-related cases since Roe v. Wade, but for the first time, the Supreme Court will be hearing directly from the Abolitionist Movement. Attorney Bradley Pierce of the Foundation to Abolish Abortion will be filing an abolitionist amicus brief in the Dobbs case, based on three key assertions.

First, for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, preborn children are legal persons; consequently, they must be provided equal protection under the law. When the amendment was ratified in 1868, the states acknowledged both that human life begins at conception, and that there was no difference between human beings and persons. This in itself demonstrates that Roe is unconstitutional and should be overturned, not complied with. HB 1510 itself not only submits to Roe, but it does nothing to protect persons younger than 15 weeks gestation from being murdered, and thereby denies those people the equal protection of the law. Even those older than 15 weeks, which the bill claims to protect, must rely on the abortionist – their assassin – to report their murder. And even then, the worst penalty their assassin would face is a suspended or revoked medical license and/or a five hundred dollar fine. To say this is a far cry from equal protection is an understatement. Despite the problems with the bill, Pierce will be making the argument that the court is Constitutionally obligated to go farther than the State of Mississippi is asking them to.

Second, according to the Tenth Amendment, states have the constitutional authority to use police power to control their own homicide enforcement. Unjust murder of innocent children is and should be treated as a criminal offense. The Supreme Court is not God, and the states do not have to wait for its blessing to enforce and protect unborn citizens’ unalienable, God-given right to life. SCOTUS does not have the authority to violate that right, and, when it attempts to, states should uphold the Constitution rather than siding with an unjust Court. 

Third and finally, Pierce will be arguing rightly that Roe is an illegitimate ruling that undermines the authority of SCOTUS. As former Stanford dean John Hart Ely said, Roe “is not a constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Furthermore, the ruling is against God’s law, and states have the power to defy its ruling. By continuing to uphold it, the Supreme Court demonstrates the extreme degree to which it has disregarded its Constitutional obligations, and thereby forfeited its authority on this topic. States will – and are – taking matters into their own hands. As Abolish Abortion Texas has explained, “Though prudence dictates that states should not declare actions of the federal judiciary void for light or indefinite causes, we must not concede that the federal judiciary is infallible nor its powers unlimited. Do we not have a line which, if crossed, we would stand and say no? And if not for this, then what?” It should be obvious to any sane and decent person that authorizing mass murder crosses that line.

Just last week, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination in the United States, adopted a resolution proclaiming that “governing authorities at every level have a duty before God to uphold justice asserting their God-ordained and constitutional authority to establish equal protection under the law for all, born and preborn, by intervening, ignoring, or nullifying iniquitous decisions when other authorities, such as the Supreme Court, condone such injustices as the legal taking of innocent life.”

The pro-life strategy of obsequiously begging SCOTUS for permission to regulate abortion in oral arguments and amicus briefs has clearly failed. HB1510 is the 40th pro-life law to come before the Supreme Court in the 48 years since Roe, and not one sentence of the Roe decision has been rolled back despite there being a Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court for all but four months of that span.

As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Pierce, on behalf of the Abolitionist Movement, is not merely asking SCOTUS to overturn Roe. He is telling them they must overturn it in full. Otherwise, we will utilize the constitutional checks and balances available to us: impeachment of corrupt officials rather than indifference towards them, and defiance of a tyrannical court rather than deference. 

The time for that defiance is now. The Supreme Court needs to hear directly from abolitionists, and by financially supporting Pierce’s amicus brief and FAA’s efforts to end the legal murder of unborn children, you have the opportunity to help accomplish that. Visit the FAA’s website here to take part in that opportunity.