"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

So wrote the founders of our country: the authors of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. They stated that one of our most undeniable rights, as a citizen in this country, is the right to life. But when does life begin? It is the question that has fueled the debate over abortion since the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Although the controversy regarding the issue has traditionally fallen to a more religious and moral debate, it still has powerful political implications and can easily stir great amounts of emotion in the political arena. Women had been obtaining abortions illegally for countless years before Roe, and the public was calling for change. The political fervor

"Abortion," The American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd ed., 1997.

I believe that it may be possible for the pro-life and situational groups to pull together to reverse Roe v. Wade decision. History has shown that it can be done. In the 1994 election, the Christian Coalition united together and turned the Congress Republican. Before that, the labor unions, unsatisfied with the Republican Party, worked hard to regain majority in Congress. The challenge that the group needs to overcome is their inability to compromise. Both sides need to give a little bit of slack to unite and become powerful.

The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Antiabortion groups were outraged by the decision. These same groups often equated the legalization of abortion to the Nazi holocaust and the case was compared to that of Dred Scott v. Samford, the infamous 1857 case that declared that blacks had no rights. In both instances, the court ruled that a group of "people" (slaves in Dred and human embryos in Roe) to be "nonpersons." It was also argued that both rulings were made to invalidate certain instances: in Dred, the Missouri Compromise was voided and in Roe, it "invalidated the efforts of state legislatures to reform their abortion laws without surrendering state jurisdiction over abortion."

Cook, Elizabeth Adell. Between Two Absolutes: Public Opinion and the Politics of

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Approximate Word count = 1995
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)