Aborting history - abortion activism

National Review, Oct 23, 1995 by Ramesh Ponnuru

Laurence Tribe, the prominent constitutional theorist, consulted the brief extensively for his book Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes. At the opening of a chapter on "Two Centuries of Abortion in America," he drew on the brief to make a philosophical point about the historicity of moral conflicts:

Current debate in America concerning abortion appears to pose an insoluble conflict between two fundamental values: the right of a fetus to live and the right of a woman to determine her own fate. . . . [But] these competing values are in significant part peculiar to late-twentieth-century America. Far from being inevitable outgrowths of the natural order of things, these competing values are socially constructed.

In the first footnote to this chapter, Tribe described the brief as "the point of departure for much of this chapter."

When the brief was first publicized in 1989, an article in The Nation, the left-wing weekly, exulted, "The signatures on this amicus brief, many those of eminent mainstream scholars, signal a coming of age for the historians who have entered the field since the 1960s." They certainly do.