A Massachusetts member of Congress sponsored a bill in December declaring that abortion rights are human rights. The bill would require the U.S. State Department to include “reproductive rights” in its annual human rights report, after the State Department deleted all subsections pertaining to abortion rights in 2017.
This approach isn’t just wrong. It’s disgusting.
U.S. Representative Katherine Clark (D-Melrose) and her fellow sponsors (Nita Lowey (D-New York), Eliot Engel (D-New York), Lois Frankel (D-Florida), and Barbara Lee (D-California) are misguided because the right to life, not abortion, is the real natural human right, as codified in the Declaration of Independence.
The right to life is the oldest right that humans possess. This right G-d gave to mankind 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.
It should be obvious that the right to life is not a privilege that government bestows on its citizenry. Ken Bartle of Natural Law Matters wrote that unless “we each have the unalienable right to our life, to the exclusion of all who would violate that right, then the (supposed) power of society to crush our right to life remains.” A woman’s “right to choose” to abort her unborn baby conflicts with that child’s right to life. For those who say “My body, my choice,” I say, “Make your choices before your baby is conceived, not afterwards.”
Our country doesn’t currently recognize the right to life for unborn babies, even though we should. What’s the best way to get there?
I stand with Steve Deace of Blaze TV and Personhood Iowa in support of the personhood strategy in order to end judicially imposed baby murder and to reaffirm the natural right to life. Personhood USA and its affiliates seek to abolish human abortion by establishing a federal law that a “person” (born or preborn) is a person at the moment of biological beginning under the 5th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which say “no person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”
Abortion-on-demand since 1973 has deprived 60 million pre-born babies of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. Jerome Corsi wrote in his book Bad Samaritansabout the verbal arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court during the Roe v. Wade case. Corsi referred to when Justice Potter Stewart asked Norma McCorvey’s legal counsel Sarah Weddington “If it were established that an unborn fetus is a person within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, you would have an almost impossible case here, would you not?” Weddington sheepishly responded that she would have a very difficult case, to which Justice Stewart agreed.
The best recent approach is the Life at Conception Act recently sponsored by Kentucky U.S. Senator Rand Paul and eight other senators. This bill seeks to implement equal protection under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States for the right to life of each born and preborn human person. The bill is similar to the Sanctity of Life Acts that his father, former U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), sponsored during his congressional tenure. Ron Paul’s background as an obstetrician influenced his pro-life position, and it is refreshing to see his son share his values and continue his fight for the right to life for the born and unborn. (Senator Paul’s bill reinforces why I proudly voted for him in my local Newton Republican City Committee’s 2016 presidential straw poll, and why I voted for him in the 2016 presidential primary even after he announced the suspension of his presidential campaign.)
Personhood is the one argument that counters the hypothetical “right to privacy argument” pro-abortion forces used to fashion and preserve the “legal” basis of the Roe v. Wade decision. Since Planned Parenthood once said in its own pamphlets, “An abortion requires an operation. It kills the life of a baby after it begins,” I am bewildered as to why the National Right to Life Committee has actually opposed all federal and statewide personhood efforts. It appears that they and their affiliates are pursuing an incrementalist strategy by regulating it in the hopes of chipping away at abortion while simultaneously gaining approval from the 52% of Americans who think abortion should be legal in some, but not all, cases. This have inspired me to try to take the personhood message to everyone I know in the Massachusetts pro-life community.
The best argument affirming the right to life as a natural right came from Mary Meehan’s September 1980 article in The Progressive. Meehan is known for speaking out against abortion from the perspective of a left-wing Irish-American Catholic. Meehan wrote that the right to life underlies and sustains every other right we have. It is, as Thomas Jefferson and his friends said, self-evident. Logically, as well as in our Declaration of Independence, it comes before the right to liberty and the right to property. The right to exist, to be free from assault by others, is the basis of equality. Without it, the other rights are meaningless, and life becomes a sort of warfare in which force decides everything. There is no equality, because one person’s convenience takes precedence over another’s life, provided only that the first person has more power. History is replete with numerous examples of the death and destruction that results when governments deny personhood to a group of people. We need to protect this right for everyone; otherwise, this right is not guaranteed for anyone.
Joshua Norman is an Auburndale resident and an adoptee.
