”..For two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” — Sandra Day O’Connor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey

It is significant that the first woman to become a United States Supreme Court Justice, was also the first justice to officially argue that the mass execution and vivisection of children is justified and necessary so that women can work outside the home. Twenty-three years ago today Ronald Reagan became the first president to place a woman on the United States Supreme Court bench. Liberals made it clear that they celebrated the appointment of a woman to the Court. With the exception of a few die-hards like my father Howard Phillips, most conservatives and Evangelical leaders remained utterly silent, willfully ignoring the fact that Mrs. O’Connor had a flagrant pro-abortion judicial record. The most important thing, these politicos told themselves, was to be a Republican and show unity for the Republican Party leader. Evangelical leaders were not only silent about the issue of O’Connor’s support for executing babies, but about the broader question of whether it is biblically advisable for women to be rulers and judges over the land. Remarkably, just over one hundred years before the Reagan appointment, the United States Supreme Court itself issued a unanimous opinion which referenced Genesis and the Bible as the basis for supporting laws which would prohibit women from serving in the very capacity for which Mrs. O’Connor was being nominated:

That God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth. The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interest and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband. So firmly fixed was this sentiment in the founders of the common law that it became a maxim of that system of jurisprudence that a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband, who was regarded as her head and representative in the social state; and, notwithstanding some recent modifications of this civil status, many of the special rules of law flowing from and dependent upon this cardinal principle still exist in full force in most States. One of these is, that a married woman is incapable, without her husband’s consent, of making contracts which shall be binding on her or him. This very incapacity was one circumstance which the Supreme Court of Illinois deemed important in rendering a married woman incompetent fully to perform the duties and trusts that belong to the office of an attorney and counselor. — Bradwell vs. Illinois.

Such a perspective seems shocking today. Frankly, this statement by the United States Supreme Court is the kind of quote that will today get you labeled a “hegemonic patriarch” by men who had their wives support them through seminary, or will result in websites being launched calling you a legalist, by school administrators who rely on working mothers to stay afloat, but it was once the majority view of thinking Christians.

Let us return to the nomination of O’Connor: Why were Christians silent? Having won the legal battle of the 1970’s against the Equal Rights Amendment, Christians had privately conceded all the key principles of the feminists, and thus lost the cultural war in their own homes. Christian pastors embraced birth control, working wives and career oriented daughters. Often they would build their private fiefdoms around economically self-destructive Christian day schools fueled by the ultimate cheap labor force: young working moms. Church leaders not only embraced fashionable feminist concepts, they actively promoted such under the facade of “Christian liberty.”

Having conceded the premises of feminism, how could such men oppose the idea of our nation being ruled by left-wing Deborahs. They could not. They did not. And with this new Deborahs, they also got the most honest, but horrific argument for killing babies advanced to date by the Supreme Court. “We need abortion and birth control because we have to help women work outside the home,” or to quote O’Connor, “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”