Succinct

 George Weigel offers this perennial truth:

From a Catholic moral perspective, Roe v. Wade was the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1857 – and for the same reason. As Dred Scott declared black people outside the community of legal protection, Roe declared indisputably human beings, the unborn, beyond the boundaries of the law’s protection. Both Dred Scott and Roe thus violated the bedrock Catholic social justice principle of the inalienable dignity of every human life; both decisions rested on the claim – biologically false and morally unsustainable – that the lives in question were not really human. It is impossible to be a coherent Catholic and to affirm the degradation of human dignity that underwrites Roe v. Wade.