Today marks the 36th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States.

Author and speaker Frederica Mathewes-Green has a column that appears in the National Review online today, reprinted on her own site. Excerpt:

My Boomer generation will never see abortion as anything other than the wise and benevolent gift we bestowed on all future generations. We still control the media, the universities, and so forth, and it will take time for all of us to topple off the end of the conveyer belt.

But the time is coming when a younger generation will be in charge, and they may well see abortion differently. They could see it, not as "a woman's choice" but as a form of state-sanctioned violence inflicted on their generation. It was their brothers and sisters who died; anyone under the age of 36 could have been aborted (and somewhere around a fourth or a fifth of all pregnancies, in fact, are aborted). A younger generation might feel a strange kinship with the brothers and sisters, classmates and coworkers, who are missing.

And I'm afraid that, if they do see things that way, they aren't going to go easy on my generation. Our acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. The next generation can fairly say, "It's not like they didn't know." They'll say, "After all, they had sonograms." And they may judge us to be monsters.

Maybe that won't happen. Maybe future generations won't think twice about abortion. But even we who have grown sick of talking about it still harbor some doubts. In particular, people who think of themselves as defenders of the weak and the oppressed must have many a quiet moment when they wonder, "How, in this one issue, did I wind up on the side that's defending death?"

As an interesting aside, the plantiff in the Roe v Wade decision was "Jane Roe", a pseudonymous woman who claimed that the pregnancy was on the account of rape and insisted on an abortion. Roe later revealed her identity as Norma McCorvey. The court case took longer than 9 months, she gave birth to her child-- who was put up for adoption. McCorvey later said that she was not raped and that her entire trial was put up to her by two lawyers one of whom advocates challenging the Roe decision the same way they argued for it, saying that challengers "would go at it every way they could -- and they'd especially pick up on the dissent on Roe v. Wade, in which Rehnquist wrote there is no right to privacy in the Constitution, that the court made it up."

McCorvey is now pro-life.

Hat tip: CrunchyCon.