Jan 21, 2013
Forty years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. In terms of demographics, that means almost two generations of Americans have lived their entire life in a country with legalized abortion. It is an anniversary worth noting because it has come to define, devastate, and destroy millions of people – who, in this one college history teacher’s view, we could call the “Roe Generations” – across the United States.
The First Generation, 1973-1993
Lives changed just as much as vocabulary with the Roe decision. For the first generation that came of age between 1973 and 1993, legalized abortion and its consequences warped their understandings of marriage and family. And although most people didn’t want to debate it publicly, the shaky legal foundations constructed for abortion by the Supreme Court poisoned an already bitter political climate.
The source for understanding the basis for such shifts is the opinion authored by Justice Harry Blackmun. According to Blackmun, a majority of the justices considered abortion a woman’s right of privacy guaranteed primarily under the Fourteenth Amendment. The history of abortion up to 1973 that the Court presented furthermore claimed that the definition of person under the Fourteenth Amendment “does not include the unborn.” Equally shocking for a generation already scarred by the fallout of Watergate and Vietnam, Blackmun declared that the Court “need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.”