Abortion is a Spear Aimed at Liberty

Before the Civil War Abraham Lincoln said the nation could not survive half-slave and half-free. Nor can it survive with some classes of people exercising arbitrary life and death power over other classes of people.

When Roe v Wade was decided 33 years ago people could honorably argue that a fetus was just a "blob of tissue." They were wrong, but who could know with certainty? Advances in medical science have demolished that argument for most of the term of pregnancy. Pro-lifers always believed that when medical science proved what faith already knew, people would step back from the abyss. But it was not to be. Abortion advocates just shifted ground, moving away from the 'blob of tissue' argument to a 'right to choose' argument. At that moment, though few understood it, the debate transmogrified from how we treat the unborn into one over whether freedom has any future in America.

But first a brief discourse on the concept of rights. As the founders understood them, rights were something that inhered to each person under natural law. A right was something that preceded the existence of the state. In fact, the very legitimacy of a state was determined by whether or not it acknowledged and defended human rights. People had the obligation to revolt against any state which did not acknowledge and protect universal human rights. This is why the founders' concept of natural law is so critical: a right could neither be created nor granted by the state, for what the state could legitimately grant it could legitimately revoke. The only question involved in whether one could properly lay claim to a right was based on humanity. It is why the slavery issue was bound to reach a crisis point: if, in America, an arbitrary definition of who was human and who was not could predominate, the concept of rights was meaningless and the American experiment in liberty a sham.

The history of American slavery from the founding through the Civil War is a history of abolitionists positing the humanity of the enslaved and pro-slavery elements desparately trying to change the subject. Even the sloganeering of the time is eerily similar to that of the abortion issue. Pore over the transcripts of Senate debates and you will be stunned at how frequently Southern Senators taunted their Northern counterparts by saying some variation of, "If you're against slavery, don't own one."

Rich Miller's question last week of whether people who oppose abortion 'rights' were out of the mainstream was truly ironic. The founders recognized that public opinion could be a fickle thing. Many attempts at democracy had floundered because they had degenerated into a "tyranny of the majority" that was more brutally repressive than overt autocracies. The Bill of Rights was to be a bulwark against that - a guarantee that regardless of what the majority (the mainstream) thought at a given moment, certain rights were beyond their power of interference.

When, in the late 80s, we reached the moment of tilt away from the 'blob of tissue' argument to the 'woman's right to choose' argument we entered into a slow-moving crisis of freedom, itself, without realizing it. At that moment we acknowledged that we overtly had decided that one class of people would have life and death power over another class of innocent people. Having accepted that principle, we damaged the concept of rights and elevated the very old and brutal notion that that autonomy belongs to those with sufficient power to impose their will on others. Having revoked the rights of life and liberty from one innocent class of people, what philosophical barrier is there to revoking it from others? There is nothing but inertia holding us back, and inertia fades over time. Some of those in the powerful class of people who boldly proclaim their 'right' to exercise life and death power over certain innocents may one day find themselves in a different, targeted class as we 'compassionately' expand the ranks of those whose innocent lives may be terminated by the fiat of a third party. When I advocate for a return to our pro-life roots and a rennaissance of the authentic concept of human rights, I advocate for them as well as for unborn children.