On America’s 250th Birthday, Acknowledge Unborn Babies Have a Right to Life

In celebrating her 250^th birthday, America is celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, a document that lays out with clarity the principles and self-evident truths on which our Republic is based.

Our Founders declared God as the source of our unalienable rights, starting with the right to life itself, and further declared that governments are instituted to secure those rights.

George Washington wrote to Tench TilghmanI, “I shall persevere … so as to make that peace and independence, which we have fought for and obtained, a blessing to the millions yet unborn” (April 24, 1783).

And those unborn, according to the Founders, included those in the womb.

James Wilson, signer of the Declaration and the Constitution, and a Supreme Court Justice, wrote, “With consistency, beautiful and undeviating, human life, from its commencement to its close, is protected by the common law … Life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. By the law, life is protected.” (Lectures on Law (1789 to 1791), Part 2, Chapter XII Of The Natural Rights Of Individuals 69).

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This right to life has been under unprecedented attack in the last five decades by an organized and well-funded movement in favor of abortion. By declaring an act that takes life to be a fundamental right that the government must uphold, the duty of government to secure the right to life has been turned on its head.

From 1973 to 2022, American jurisprudence on abortion was dominated by Roe vs. Wade and the notion that somehow it was unconstitutional to protect children in the womb prior to viability.

It is no exaggeration to say that Roe v. Wade established a different form of government in America.

Whereas the Declaration says that the right to life comes from God and must be secured by government, Roe said that this right comes from government and can be taken away by government.

Roe discarded the uniqueness of America and reverted to the discriminatory principles on which many other regimes were built: pre-revolutionary France on inherited estate and privilege, Spanish imperial rule on blood purity and caste hierarchy, Russia on serfdom, Nazi Germany on racial citizenship, and apartheid South Africa on statutory racial subordination.

Early Zhou China was openly stratified. Britannica describes the Zhou feudal system as a ranked society in which rulers and ministers formed a superior class, the “shi” an intermediate class, and commoners and enslaved people an inferior class.

Legal abortion brings this back, and destroys the foundations of our Republic. Our founders were willing to sacrifice their prosperity for their posterity, pledging their “lives…fortunes and… sacred honor” for a generation yet unborn. Yet today, tragically, some are doing the opposite, sacrificing their posterity for prosperity.

One of the most striking, bold and sobering paragraphs ever written on this topic is the 20th paragraph of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life).

He maintains that a process whereby the right to life, which is the condition for all other rights, no longer applies to the youngest human beings makes all rights negotiable.  “The appearance of the strictest respect for legality is maintained …. Really, what we have here is only the tragic caricature of legality; the democratic ideal, which is only truly such when it acknowledges and safeguards the dignity of every human person, is betrayed in its very foundations: How is it still possible to speak of the dignity of every human person when the killing of the weakest and most innocent is permitted?”

Along with this, he has some of the strongest words ever written about what happens when the state legalizes abortion:

“In this way democracy, contradicting its own principles, effectively moves towards a form of totalitarianism. The State is no longer the ‘common home’ where all can live together on the basis of principles of fundamental equality, but is transformed into a tyrant State, which arrogates to itself the right to dispose of the life of the weakest and most defenseless members … When this happens, … the disintegration of the State itself has already begun. To claim the right to abortion… means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom.”

John Paul’s contemporary, Ronald Reagan, said it in his own words: “We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the unborn — without diminishing the value of all human life” – “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation” (The Human Life Review, 1983).

And President Trump urged, “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life. And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: all children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God” (State of the Union Address, February 5, 2019.)

Now, of course, Roe has been overturned by the Dobbs decision, returning abortion policy to the people and their elected representatives. The timing is perfect, as those people and representatives have the opportunity to again study, appreciate, and apply that 250-year-old birth certificate that reminds us exactly what the right to life is: unalienable.

Only then can our freedom be real.

LifeNews.com Note:  Frank Pavone is the national director for Priests for Life. Bill Federer is an author and President of American Minute.