Last month was the thirtieth anniversary of

Roe v. Wade, surely

one of the most divisive Supreme Court decisions of our time. We

do not propose to enter into the debate over abortion, but we

would like to share with our readers a few sentences from

“The Mother of All Rights,” Meghan Cox Gurdon’s reflection

on Roe v. Wade in the January 21 issue of The Wall Street

Journal. Ms. Gurdon begins by recalling the scene in

“Schindler’s List” where the actual survivors that Oskar

Schindler saved, along with their children and grandchildren,

line up to place stones on Schindler’s grave.

“What makes the scene so powerful,” Ms. Gurdon writes, “is not just

the surprising number of progeny already produced by the

Holocaust escapees, but the staggering number of men, women and

children who aren’t there, who never had a chance of life because

the Nazis gassed those who would have been their parents and

grandparents.” She continues:

When Roe comes up, it has Schindler-like reverberations in my own

family. The fact is, my husband and I, our four children, his

three siblings, and their combined eight children all owe our

lives to the fact that the famous Supreme Court decision did not

come until 1973 (and its British equivalent until 1967). For all

17 of us are descended from two unwanted pregnancies—two

pregnancies that produced two hasty marriages, some happiness,

rather more sadness, and, eventually, two divorces. And I have to

say, boy am I glad that those pregnancies—dismaying and

unexpected as they were, entailing the compromises that they did

for those involved—weren’t tidied up in a clinic so that the

young mothers in question could “get on with their lives.” You,

gentle reader, would have been deprived of nothing more than my

editorial voice. I, and 16 kinsfolk, would have been robbed of

everything.

Which does, we hope, give one pause.