Supreme Killing

In one week during January 1973, President Richard M. Nixon was inaugurated to his second term, former President Lyndon B. Johnson died, the United States and North Vietnam entered into the Paris Peace Accords, and the Supreme Court legalized abortion. Only the last of these events continues to affect and haunt the moral and constitutional order every minute of every day.

The Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade is arguably its most controversial in the post-World War II era. Its effect has been as pernicious to human life as was its 19th century intellectual progenitor, Dred Scott vs. Sanford, in which the Supreme Court ruled that African-Americans are not persons.

Is the fetus in the womb a person? Since the fetus has human parents and all the needed human genome to develop postnatally, of course the fetus is a person.

A simple one-line statute could have been enacted when Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush were in the White House and Republicans and pro-life Democrats (the handful that have made it to Congress) controlled the Congress. They could have ended the slaughter by legislatively defining the fetus in the womb to be a person. They did not. Are the self-proclaimed pro-life folks in Congress sincere, or do they march under the pro-life banner just to win votes?

Their failure to attempt to define the fetus in the womb as a person seriously, and the Supreme Court’s unprecedented dance around the requirement of due process and the prohibition of slavery has resulted in 44 million abortions in 43 years. That’s an abortion every minute. Abortion is today the most frequent medical procedure performed in America; and the Democrats have become its champion.

They, and their few Republican allies, have become the champions of totalitarianism as well. The removal of legal personhood from human offspring in order to destroy the offspring is only the work of tyrants. How long can a society last that violates universal norms and kills its babies in the name of “sexual freedom”?

Whose personhood will the government define away next?

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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