Statesman Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father and the third U.S. president, once said that maintaining slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

The same could be said for abortion which, like slavery, has divided the country since the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that established a woman’s right to have an abortion without undue restrictive interference from the government. Before that landmark ruling, abortion was illegal in most states, but since Roe v. Wade, over 60 million children have died in abortion procedures.

Last week’s unprecedented leak of a draft by Justice Samuel Alito marks a turning point in the half-century battle over abortion rights. In his opinion, Alito wrote that the high court’s 1973 ruling is “egregiously wrong” and that the issue should be returned “to the people’s elected representatives.”

This would pave the way for individual states to decide whether to ban abortion and how to regulate it, which was the original position before Roe v. Wade took effect.

The contentious debate has engulfed the long political career of the current president. Joe Biden ended the last State of the Union address with his defense of abortion, which he said is under attack as never before. That stand puts him at odds with the teachings of his own Catholic church, which believes that “human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception.”

Maureen Ferguson, a senior fellow for the Catholic Association, wrote that violence against the innocent is wrong, everywhere at every time, whether inflicted by aggressive dictators or abortion doctors.

“The same human dignity that makes abortion so heartbreaking also endows us, as citizens in a democracy, the right to decide for ourselves how abortion will be regulated in our laws,” she states. “Overturning Roe will give us back our voices to speak up for the voiceless, and the space to build a culture of life for mothers and children in need.”

Biden’s long political career has been marked by his shifting position on abortion. When he entered the senate in 1973, Biden stated that the Supreme Court went too far on Roe v. Wade.

When Ronald Reagan, an anti-abortion president was in the White House, and Republicans controlled the Senate, social conservatives pushed for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. The amendment, which the National Abortion Rights Action League, called the “most devastating attack yet on abortion rights,” cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1982.

Supporting the measure then was Biden, the second-term senator from Delaware.

The bill never made it to the full Senate but when it came up again the following year, Biden voted against it.

Four decades later when he left the vice presidential mansion, Biden stated that the government doesn’t “have a right to tell other people that women they can’t control their body.”

In 2019, Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights organization, said Biden has been trying to carve out a space for himself in the middle, and he’s going to have to really get with the times and understand that standing with abortion rights is the middle, moderate position.

Last week, Biden stated that the right to abortion comes from being a “child of God” expressing the idea that a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy is a natural born right that ought to be protected, rather than granted, by the government.

For the president to call the unborn baby a “child” is a big deal since it advances cellular life to personhood. Pro-life supporters will surely use the Biden remark in upcoming campaign ads.

Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School a key medical figure in the right-to-life movement, once stated that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion “gave my profession an almost unlimited license to kill.”

“With the obstetrician and mother becoming the worst enemy of the child and the pediatrician becoming the assassin for the family, the state must be enabled to protect the life of the child, born and unborn,” said Dr. Jefferson, who passed away in 2010.

The 19th century author John Jay Chapman wrote that there was never a moment in this nation “when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent. The issue lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.”

Now the same could be said for abortion, which has consumed the national consciousness and sparked debates and protests for the last half century.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.