Xí Muội's essay - Moving forward

By one life, live it


Jessica Hoang
Ms. Duran
English11 Honors
22 March 2016 

Moving forward

            For hundreds of years, the government has been adding, changing, and removing laws numerous times. However, the process of changing the law is not quick nor is it easy. Most of the time, change requires endless efforts of raising awareness to gain support, proposing bills, petitioning, and many more. Martin Luther King Junior was a transcendentalist who promotes the idea of large scale protest resistance to unjust laws in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In his writing, he touched on the subject regarding the importance of one’s moral responsibility by standing up for the rights that they are entitled to when those rights are violated. The awareness that the Civil Rights Movement desperately needed at the moment was brought by Dr. King’s responding letter. Despite the fact that society is moving in the right direction with the issue of racial inequalities, it is moving backwards with the issue of abortion rights. The law legalizing in 1973 sparked the start of many organizations forming with the purpose of giving everyone a place to testify the beauty of life and the dignity of everyone. The march for life is one of those organizations. The march embodies Dr. King’s idea by bringing together people, who genuinely want change, to protest against the unjust law of violating a person’s right to live. 

            The case of Roe v. Wade in 1973 was the case that ruled a state law that banned abortions unconstitutional, except in a situation where the mother’s life is endangered by the child. Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington were two recent graduates from the University of Texas Law School, who brought a lawsuit on behalf of Jane Doe, a pregnant woman who resides in Dallas, claiming that the Texas law that criminalizes most abortions violated Jane Roe’s rights. The lawsuit was against Dallas Country District Attorney, Henry Wade. In a recent article published by the Public Broadcasting Service, Alex McBride, a third year law student, writes that Roe claimed that her life was not endangered but she could not afford to move out of state and had the right of aborting her pregnancy in a safe and secure medical environment. The Texas court ruled the law unconstitutional. Disagreeing with the court, Wade appealed to the US Supreme Court, which reviewed the case from 1971 to 1972. The Roe v. Wade companion case, Doe v. Bolton also prompted the start of the controversial debate regarding abortion rights.  The author of the article Doe v. Bolton talks about how in this case, the Supreme Court elaborated on the health exceptions that was established in Roe. The Court ruled that the doctor’s medical judgement of the mother’s health may be exercised in the light of all factors including physical, emotional, familial, the women’s age and psychological.

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