{"id":32280,"date":"2024-09-16T17:20:41","date_gmt":"2024-09-16T17:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/?p=32280"},"modified":"2024-09-16T17:20:42","modified_gmt":"2024-09-16T17:20:42","slug":"abortion-is-a-civil-rights-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/abortion-is-a-civil-rights-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"Abortion is a Civil Rights Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By: John M. Grondelski, originally published September 16, 2024, American Thinker<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abortion is a civil rights issue, though not in the way pro-abortionists want to spin it. We should not forget that, after Roe v. Wade <\/em>was decided in 1973, there were liberal Democrats who opposed the ruling as a civil rights violation. Senators William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Harold Hughes of Iowa spring to mind, as do congressmen like Jim Oberstar of Minnesota.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fundamental duty of any society is to protect the lives of its members. There is no more basic function of a society than to keep its members alive. That means protecting them from foreign assault by providing for national defense. That means protecting them from domestic violence by making and enforcing criminal accountability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the bottom-line purpose of any society. English philosophers as different as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke agreed on this point. When Thomas Jefferson opines about \u201cunalienable rights\u201d of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, he was not just putting in some \u201cnice words\u201d before he got to his point: declare American independence. Go back and reread his argument (which, while changing \u201cproperty\u201d to \u201cpursuit of happiness\u201d basically comes straight out of Locke).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. There are \u201cinalienable\u201d rights.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Those rights do not come from any government or even democratic majority. They come from God and nobody — not even a democratic majority — can take them away.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. When governments \u201cbecome destructive\u201d of those rights, they forfeit their subjects\u2019 allegiance.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. When that destruction becomes grievous enough, people even have the right to overthrow such rights-destructive governments.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    That\u2019s where Jefferson\u2019s independence argument comes in: King George III and the British Parliament had so systematically violated the rights of people in these colonies that any claims of allegiance were dissolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Now, the list of rights Jefferson enumerates as divinely conferred and inalienable are limited and ordered. They start with \u201clife.\u201d Not with \u201cliberty.\u201d Not with \u201chappiness.\u201d Life is prerequisite to the other two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So, if a government exists to protect \u201ccertain unalienable rights\u201d which include \u201clife,\u201d that government has got to conclude who is alive. Think that through: if governments exist to protect the unalienable right to life, governments have to determine who is alive. It is very clear from Jefferson (and Hobbes and Locke) that question cannot be one of private judgment: everybody decides it for himself. No society can fulfill its basic responsibilities if everybody has his own opinion of what constitutes life. Nor did Jefferson or Hobbes or Locke consider that question a purely religious or doctrinal question, even far less one that was epistemologically insoluble. They\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>would have considered the notion that everybody makes up his own mind on that question utter nonsense, an example not of deep thinking but not thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Yet all these arguments are amassed today against addressing the question of when life begins. \u201cIt\u2019s a religious question.\u201d Well, no it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s a scientific question. Different religions may take different viewpoints, but the scientific question of when a separate human life comes into existence is pretty clear and definitively settled (unless you happen not to believe in DNA just as you doubt the relevance of X- or Y-chromosomes). \u201cIt\u2019s up to everybody\u2019s decision.\u201d Extrapolate that answer beyond the unborn and you would create a society in which no life is protected: every murderer\u2019s defense would be \u201cit\u2019s my choice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    If an argument cannot be applied beyond the narrow circumstances for which one has tailored it, it\u2019s not an argument. It\u2019s an excuse, a special pleading to carve an exception tailored to one\u2019s own liking. Why does the argument \u201cit\u2019s a choice\u201d apply nowhere else where a question of ethical or moral responsibility is thought to be at issue? Would anybody take seriously the argument that taking somebody else\u2019s property is a \u201cchoice?\u201d Taking somebody else\u2019s life? Committing perjury just a different kind of \u201ctruth?\u201d Again, if an argument fits only a narrow case and fails everywhere else, you ought to ask yourself: who benefits by this specially tailored excuse?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    A society which is agnostic or ambivalent about whom is encompassed by its legal protection is a society at fundamental conflict with itself. It is a society failing in its fundamental civil rights guarantee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Abortionists want to present \u201cfreedom of choice\u201d as the civil rights argument. They do so by systematically refusing to engage the question of when life begins. They pretend it\u2019s not an issue. But if it were not a question, nobody would be arguing about abortion. It is precisely because that is the question <\/em>that its evasion constitutes intellectual dishonesty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Defenders of \u201cchoice\u201d would argue it is a question of liberty. But, as we saw with Jefferson (and his philosophical predecessors), there is a hierarchy of rights for which societies are responsible and, in that enumeration, \u201clife\u201d precedes \u201cliberty.\u201d To bypass \u201clife\u201d as if it is a non-question is not to expand \u201cliberty\u201d but to deform it, to degrade a society by pretending it can ignore the prior question. That is not expanding civil rights but contracting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In the immediate wake of Roe, <\/em>the decision was frequently compared to Dred Scott v. Sandford, <\/em>the 1857 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that decided blacks were not human beings but property, the enjoyment of whose possession was a \u201cliberty\u201d right of Southern slavers who could not be denied their \u201cpursuit of happiness\u201d even if they went North with their \u201cproperty.\u201d Dred Scott <\/em>was reversed not by the Supreme Court but by history through a bloody Civil War: within ten years, that judicial abomination was dead. Roe <\/em>survived 49 years before the Supreme Court corrected its own civil rights violation. Today\u2019s James Buchanans — Joe Biden and Kamala Harris among them — want to reimpose that \u201cright\u2019 on the whole country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It\u2019s time we went back to ask ourselves fundamental questions: why do societies exist if not to protect all their members?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. He is an author and contributor to the National Catholic Register.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By: John M. Grondelski, originally published September 16, 2024, American Thinker Abortion is a civil rights issue, though not in the way pro-abortionists want to spin it. We should not forget that, after Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, there were liberal Democrats who opposed the ruling as a civil rights violation. Senators William Proxmire of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32281,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAbortion is a Civil Rights Issue - Cincinnati Right to Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/abortion-is-a-civil-rights-issue\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Abortion is a Civil Rights Issue - Cincinnati Right to Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By: John M. Grondelski, originally published September 16, 2024, American Thinker Abortion is a civil rights issue, though not in the way pro-abortionists want to spin it. We should not forget that, after Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, there were liberal Democrats who opposed the ruling as a civil rights violation. 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