Princeton legal scholar says Biden pledge to codify Roe is ‘disgraceful’

CNA Staff, Sep 4, 2020 / 09:30 am (CNA).- A pledge by Joe Biden to codify Roe v Wade into federal law is “disgraceful,” a Catholic law professor has said, and argued that the 1973 Supreme Court decision that imposed an abortion “regime” on the country must be reversed.  

Robert P. George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, made the comments during an interview Thursday on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly. 

Asked about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden—a baptized Catholic— pledging support for efforts to codify the maximum application of Roe v. Wade into federal law if he is elected president, George said it would “expose an entire class of human beings to death.”

“It’s disgraceful,” George said. 

“How can anybody who, as a Catholic, is committed to the proposition that every single member of the human family—irrespective certainly of race and sex and ethnicity, but also and equally irrespective of age, size, stage of development or condition of dependency—is the bearer of a profound and inherent and equal dignity, a creature made in the very image and likeness of God, how can someone who professes, as a Catholic to believe that, expose an entire class of human beings to death?”

George also discussed the Trump administration’s recent petition to the Supreme Court to reinstate a rule from the United States Food and Drug Administration requiring patients who take abortion pills to do so in the presence of a physician. A federal judge in Maryland lifted the rule in July, ruling it burdensome amid the coronavirus pandemic.

George said it is hard to predict how the Court will respond because “the record of the current Court is mixed on these sorts of issues.”

George said that the case should be considered in the larger context of the future of Roe v. Wade and the legality of abortion nationwide. 

“Of course, this doesn’t really get us to the $64,000 question, the real question that eventually needs to get before the Court, and that is whether to reverse the decision in Roe v Wade that constitutionalized the question of abortion in the first place and imposed on the entire nation of course the regime of legal abortion, so this is a skirmish in that larger struggle,” George said.

George said that legal protection for unborn children ultimately depended on the Court reversing its decision in Roe.