A Voice of Liberty

The most sacred role of government is defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the reason the American government was instituted, and it is the most straightforward argument for the defense of the unborn.

In 1776, the American Founders unequivocally declared that God, not government, gives every person the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government, they believed, is “instituted among men” for the explicit purpose of defending and securing these rights. They rejected the heavy handed rule of King George III and created a new government, better suited to that purpose: defending the inalienable rights of the defenseless.

Today however, the defenseless are murdered with the consent of that same government, and their defenders are maligned as enemies of freedom.

An American Holocaust

In the Holocaust, nearly 6 million Jews were systematically eliminated by the Nazis—one of the greatest tragedies of human history. Only when it ended did America understand the full extent of the horror, and our nation’s decisive reaction was that such a slaughter of innocents must never happen again. Surely it could never happen in America, the land of liberty… but it has.

Here we are, not even 75 years since the end of the Nazi Holocaust—in the midst of our own holocaust that seems endless. The word holocaust means destruction or slaughter on a mass scale. If 6 million exterminations of innocent human lives is an unthinkable horror, then what is more than 50 million?

Not Just “Fetal Matter”

Thanks to modern science, we know far too much about fetal development to let the lies—that it’s just a clump of tissue feeding on the mother’s body, that it can’t feel the pain of its own death—stand unchallenged. The Human Life Institute is devoted to bringing vivid detail to Americans’ perception of fetal development. I encourage you to read this detailed description of a baby’s development in the womb.

• At the moment of conception, a brand new DNA code is created when 23 pairs of chromosomes, from the mother and father, unite to give the baby a unique genetic code, all its own.
• By the 24th day of pregnancy, the baby’s tiny heart is already beating independently of the mother’s.
• Even before that, at 20 days, the baby’s brain, spinal cord, and nervous system are formed.
• Her muscles start to form at 28 days, and the first cells of her neocortex—the complex source of her thinking and reasoning—are formed. Blood, unique to the mother’s, is flowing in the baby’s veins.
• By 8 weeks of pregnancy, all organs are fully formed and functioning (except the lungs), and the baby’s unique fingerprints appear.
• Also at 8 weeks, the neural circuitry that makes the human body sensitive to pain is formed—the baby can experience pain even this early in pregnancy.
• By 11 or 12 weeks, her personality has begun to form, expressed through her movements inside the womb.
• At 13 weeks, the sex of the baby can be determined, and she can hear. She recognizes her mother’s voice and can be lulled to sleep by soft music. She is still tiny, with lots of growing to do, but the miraculous development process is already well underway.

It’s mind-blowing how much development happens so early in a pregnancy. The mother won’t even start to “show” until 12 to 16 weeks along, and a “full term” pregnancy is 40 weeks.

When is a baby distinctly human, and not a mere mass of tissue? 22 to 24 weeks is generally agreed to be the earliest a baby can live outside the womb, but she is no less a human because she is dependent upon her mother for life. Even after birth, children remain heavily dependent upon their mothers and fathers—have you ever rescued a crying toddler who has lost his mommy in a grocery store? If the baby must be independent to be considered a human, then a baby moments—or days, or weeks—after delivery is no more worthy of protection than a baby still in utero. This seems to be the view that a scumbag politician like Ralph Northam holds to.

The question is not “when is the baby self-sufficient?” That would be absurd—arguably, children are not self sufficient until they can feed and clothe themselves, and they still rely on their parents in many ways even into their teens and twenties. The question is, “When is it human?” When is it uniquely and definitively different from anything else in the mother’s body? The answer, according to science, is when it has its own DNA—and that, as we have seen, occurs at conception. Parts of the mother’s and father’s DNA blend together and 46 entirely new chromosomes are created. At any point after that miraculous moment, abortion is the murder of a human life.

No Constitutional Right

There is no right to abortion in the Constitution. It was conjured up by the courts during the sexual revolution of the 1960s (which is another topic in itself) as a thin extension of the so-called Constitutional right to privacy. A “right to privacy” showed up in the courts for the first time in 1965, in a case regarding contraceptives. From there, the world of reproductive rights grew exponentially and the line between a woman’s body and her unborn baby’s was obscured. The result was legal abortion in the United States—but intellectual honesty forbids the conclusion that it is a Constitutional right.

“In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled on a case concerning a Connecticut law that criminalized the use of birth control. Ruling that the states had no right to ban contraception for married couples, the landmark case of Griswold v. Connecticut established—for the first time—a constitutional right to privacy regarding reproductive decisions that paved the way for the legalization of birth control for unmarried couples, and ultimately, Roe v. Wade and safe and legal abortion.”

That quote is directly from Planned Parenthood’s website, showing the natural progression towards abortion once the government started worrying about “reproductive rights” more than the right to life.

There is a true right to privacy vested in the 4th Amendment, which protects Americans in their “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” by an overbearing federal government. The first time any other right to privacy was affirmed by the Court was fully 176 years after the Constitution was ratified, and smack in the middle of the sexual revolution—a social movement that left this country forever changed in countless ways.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits states from depriving a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. To abortion rights activists, the 14th Amendment says a woman has a right to control her own body—and thus far they are correct. However, they go too far when they argue that an unborn child is merely part of the mother’s body, because that argument logically leads to the next: if a baby is perceived as an unwanted invader, a threat to the mother’s happiness or quality of life, she has the right—yes, the Constitutional right—to terminate the life of her child, as though it were a parasite. And therein lies the root of our modern Holocaust.

The role of government is protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and most of all, protecting those who cannot defend themselves. As long as our government, state or federal, fails to defend the most defenseless among us, we must not be silent. The “right” to privacy cannot be used as a death warrant for unborn children. As Americans we have buried millions of our own over the years in other countries for the sake of innocent lives. The Korean War memorial in D.C. honors those “…who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met.” It’s what Americans do, we defend the defenseless. We can’t be silent on abortion, we can’t just hope for less, we must fight for the day when no more innocent children are butchered at the altar of convenience.