Getting Beyond Roe.

• Author: Fry-Revere, Sigrid
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

As a libertarian and a mother of four, I take issue with Radley Balko's characterization of the abortion controversy in "Getting Beyond Roe" (August/September) as a debate about "setting community standards" and his claim that issues such as abortion "are best dealt with in those diverse laboratories of democracy, the states." Abortion should no more be a question for local politics than slavery.

Community standards are the greatest threat to individual liberty there is. They have led to witch trials, kangaroo courts, censorship, and egregious takings through eminent domain. And now Balko would like to let them decide the reproductive fate of women. Our country is not a democracy, not even a federalist democracy, but a constitutional republic--a country in which the Constitution protects individuals against majoritarian trespass. As far as individual rights are concerned, the Constitution is useless if it can't protect one portion of the population from being forced into involuntary servitude by another, no matter at what level of government the enslavement takes place.

Perhaps Roe was decided wrongly, not because it nationalized a right to abortion but because it relied on the wrong precedents. The 13th Amendment is more germane to the abortion debate than the Griswold v. Connecticut line of cases and their amorphous right to privacy.

In Roe...