Pro-Aborts Are Right:  Abortion Is Settled Law

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2018/01/20/pro-aborts-are-right-abortion-is-settled-law/

Next week recalls one of the darkest days in these united states at it marks the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which decriminalized abortion in our federal republic and resulted in the legal destruction of 60 million innocent pre-born babies.

I have no respect for politicians and political operatives who claim “they are personally pro-life, but that abortion [through Roe v. Wade] is settled law.” Such politicians are trying to have it both ways:  appear to be pro-life in order to gain the support of moral-values conservatives and simultaneously appease self-proclaimed “fiscally conservative social moderates.” An example of this took place last year when the Newton Republican City Committee hosted Republican Attorney General candidate Daniel Shores.  Shores’s answer to Ward 5 chairman Susan Carson Huffman’s question where he stood on the life issue was that he was a personally pro-life Reagan conservative but that Roe v. Wade was “settled law” by the Supreme Court.

When such politicians claim that abortion is settled law, they are partially correct, but not in the way they conceive. To talk that way suggests they don’t know who or what has the authority to settle it.

The courts have no authority to declare this issue “settled law.” G-d already settled this issue thousands of years ago in Genesis 9:6 when G-d decreed to Noah that “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of G-d made He man.” G-d affirmed this again in Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17 “Thou shalt not commit murder” as the sixth of the Ten Commandments. Rabbi Nosson Scherman wrote in the ArtScroll Chumash’s Midrash (commentary on specific Torah passages) that the modern world’s accelerating loss of faith has accompanied an increasing cheapness of human life. The legalization of abortion has certainly contributed to it.

Interestingly enough, the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish dynasty at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn was a former abortion clinic before the authorities shut down its operations and before the Lubavitchers bought the building in 1940.  It makes me proud to see that my fellow Jews took control of a building where the desecration of G-d’s name took place on a regular basis and turn it into a House of G-d that sanctifies G-d’s name. Clearly, the Lubavitchers followed Deuteronomy 30:19 (“I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed”) with their transformation of 770 Eastern Parkway.  

According to the Oxford Dictionary, abortion is the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy. In my humble opinion, abortion is a euphemism for child sacrifice and is no different from any other deliberate and premeditated murder.  When I heard three years ago about how the remains of aborted babies were incinerated as part of a waste-to-energy program, I thought to myself “Moloch’s technocrats are alive and well here in the 21st century.” The Torah states unequivocally and repeatedly to not give of one’s seed to Moloch (a Canaanite idol associated with child sacrifice).

Conservative media personality Steve Deace wrote about how we need to attack the premise of baby murder, as this debate is centered on when the child is a “person” entitled to legal protection. Deace declared his support for the “personhood” strategy against abortion because the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution states “No person … shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Abortion-on-demand deprived 60 million pre-born babies of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. Focus on the Family noted that medical technology advances have helped reinforce that a pregnant woman carries a pre-born human life in her belly, not a blob of cells.  Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s remarks during his confirmation hearing that “A fetus is not a person” and that he accepts Roe v. Wade as the law of the land was enough for me to justify not supporting his nomination to the court and made me question why so many conservatives expended political capital on his behalf.

The most personal source reinforcing that G-d had settled the life issue, not the courts, is Jeremiah 1:4-5; “And the word of the L-RD came unto me, saying:  Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.” Every time I see little Bassye Wagner playing with the other children at the Agudas Achim synagogue in Nonantum, I am reminded of that quote, as I first met her and her family when she was in her mother’s tummy four months before she was actually born.

 

Joshua Norman is an adoptee and attended religious services at eight different Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish Outreach Centers.  See his other New Boston Post columns here.