Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:1 (Spring 2022)
Article: Abortion And The Law In America: Roe V. Wade To The Present
Author: Cory Higdon

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 176

Abortion And The Law In America: Roe V. Wade To The Present

REVIEWED BY

Cory Higdon

Cory D. Higdon (PhD, SBTS) serves as Director of Theological Research at Southern Seminary and as an adjunct professor of history at Boyce College. He is a historian of American Christianity, and his research has been published in the Journal of Church and State, Puritan Reformed Journal, and has presented at the American Society of Church History and the Evangelical Theological Society. His writings can also be found at Public Discourse, Providence Magazine, and American Reformer.

Mary Ziegler. Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Laws are never neutral. Even the most mundane, benign regulations communicate values prized by a particular society. Speed-limit laws prioritize public safety on roadways over an individual’s desire to more swiftly arrive at his or her destination. Tax-based incentives for charitable giving denotes a society attempting to inculcate a generous citizenry. Every law arises out of a desire to encourage and/or discourage a certain behavior, signaling the kind of worldview that is operative within a community.

Perhaps no topic in the present American context proves this point more than the issue of abortion. Indeed, consider the state of the debate: is abortion connected to a fundamental right of a woman to control her own healthcare or does it constitute the murder of an innocent baby? No gray room exists on this issue and the stark divergences between these two points redounds in our public square. At the time this review was written, Oklahoma effectively banned all abortions while Colorado removed all restrictions to an abortion, even up to the point of birth.

Again, laws are never neutral, and the reason states are passing radically distinct laws regarding abortion stems from equally distinct worldviews undergirding those statutes.

Mary Ziegler’s Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present, explains the fault lines over the abortion debate, providing an astute, well-researched, and carefully presented history of the unfolding legal drama that emerged after the landmark case in 1973 legalizing abortion in all fifty states.

Christians interested in the complexities of the abortion debate will welcome Ziegler’s book because of the necessary context her scholarship provides to the story of the abortion crisis in America. She helpfully explains that after the watershed Roe

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 177

v. Wade decision, ...