A new book is making waves on talk radio and interview shows. In “The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts and the Disregard for Human Life,” National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru argues in part that the pro-abortion courts in our country have made abortion on demand a fundamental human right.

Because the Supreme Court will be taking up a number of abortion cases in the near future, it is imperative that we all understand exactly what the courts have and have not done in the abortion debate.

Ponnuru’s title and willingness in interviews to equate pro-choice with pro-abortion are unconscionable, but the issue he raises concerning fundamental rights is critical to our understanding of ourselves as citizens.

As a professor and lecturer, I find that there is no Supreme Court case more misunderstood than the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Almost no one I know has read the case, and fewer still understand the test that the court was working with.

One job of the Supreme Court is to determine which of our rights are so fundamental that the majority should not be allowed to use legislation to take those rights away from the minority. The right of privacy is not stated in the Constitution, but over the course of the last 100 years justices have found that the introductory paragraph of the Constitution and the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and 14th amendments assume that some form of privacy exists for citizens.

Going as far back as cases relating to the right of parents to educate their children in ways they deem best, conservative and liberal judges alike have recognized this right of privacy and often have called it a “fundamental right.” No rights are absolute, but fundamental rights are afforded extra protection.

When a fundamental right exists, the government is not allowed to limit it or take it away without a “compelling reason.” Sometimes a case involves competing fundamental rights, and then judges must decide how to balance them.

In 1973, when Roe v. Wade was handed down, the right to privacy had been defined in earlier cases as relating to the way parents bring up their children, to whom we choose to marry, to our decisions to procreate and to our decisions to use contraception.

In Roe, the justices had to decide if the right to privacy also applied to a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy.

There was also another right at stake: the right of the unborn child to life. The justices recognized this and struggled to determine which right was paramount. The justices all had different opinions, and the result was a case that divided pregnancy and the decision-making about pregnancy into thirds.

During the first trimester, the justices fell on the side of privacy, saying that women and their doctors could make the decision during this period.

During the last trimester, the justices decided on the side of the unborn child, saying that the state could make the decision about pregnancy as long as the life and health of the mother were not put at risk.

The middle trimester was left somewhat up in the air. Later cases developed an “undue burden” test to examine legislation that restricts abortion during the last two trimesters of pregnancy.

We can disagree with Supreme Court justices for their balancing of interests in Roe. We can say that protecting the health of a woman in the last trimester should not trump the life of the unborn. We can argue about the nature of undue burden with respect to termination of a pregnancy. But to call the courts part of a culture of death demonstrates a lack of understanding about the role that justices play.

The abortion cases coming before the Supreme Court over the next year deal with questions relating to undue burden and to ambiguity in the wording of statutes regulating abortion.

When the federal partial-birth abortion statute is examined by the court, the question will never be: “Do we think partial-birth abortions are OK?” Rather, the questions are: “Does legislation have to include an exemption for a mother’s health in order to avoid undue burden?” And “does the plain wording of this statute really regulate abortions in the third trimester rather than trying to get around Roe and regulate in the first trimester?”

We must read the cases and think about the questions. We must never rely on controversial titles of books to do the thinking for us.