A columnist at the Daily Signal has cited what may have been a “slip of tongue” by abortion campaigners at the U.S. Supreme Court during arguments held recently.
There, while Joe Biden’s Solicitor General, Elizabeth Prelogar, was arguing for abortion businesses and against Mississippi’s state-endorsed abortion limits, she was grilled about the issue in abortion.
Daily Signal commentator Terence Jeffrey explained the exchange.
“Justice Clarence Thomas confronted her with a fundamental question,” he reported, and Prelogar talked about “a right that is so fundamental to so many Americans…” being the “right” to abortion.
“Thomas asked her, ‘Would you … specifically state what the right is? Is it specifically abortion? Is it liberty? Is it autonomy? Is it privacy?'” he continued,
“The right is grounded in the liberty component of the 14th Amendment, Justice Thomas,” she said, “but I think it promotes interest in autonomy, bodily integrity, liberty, and equality. And I do think that it is specifically the right to abortion here, the right of a woman to be able to control, without the state forcing her to continue a pregnancy, whether to carry that baby to term.”
Jeffrey noted, “So, the target of an abortion, according to the argument President Joe Biden’s solicitor general made in the Supreme Court, is ‘that baby.’ Is ‘that baby’ a human being? Is ‘that baby’ a person? Does ‘that baby’ have a right to life? Of course.”
Jeffrey pointed out that lawyer Sarah Weddington, who argued the original Roe v. Wade case in which the Supreme Court created out of an understanding of the Constitution the right to abortion, “legalistically” was careful in avoiding a reference to “unborn child” or “baby.”
She pointedly claimed at that time that the “fetus” was devoid of constitutional rights, much like Democrats in Colorado now are proposing to embed in their pro-abortion state law.
In fact, a document published at the National Institutes of Health explains that back in the day when Roe was being argued, “the state of Texas argued that ‘the fetus is a ‘person’ within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
“To which Justice Harry Blackmun responded, ‘If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment,'” the scientific paper reported.
The paper then argues that the “unborn children are indeed ‘persons’ within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments. As there is no constitutional text explicitly holding unborn children to be, or not to be, ‘persons,’ this argument will be based on the ‘historical understanding and practice, the structure of the Constitution, and the jurisprudence of [the Supreme] Court.'”
The paper explains, “the Constitution does not confer upon the federal government a specifically enumerated power to grant or deny ‘personhood’ under the Fourteenth Amendment. Rather, the power to recognize or deny unborn children as the holders of rights and duties has been historically exercised by the states. The Roe opinion and other Supreme Court cases implicitly recognize this function of state sovereignty. The states did exercise this power and held unborn children to be persons under the property, tort, and criminal law of the several states at the time Roe was decided.”
In fact, the paper argues, because of those, “the text of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment compels federal protection of unborn persons.”
Blackmun, it explains, simply engaged in “judicial error.”
The dispute was because at the time in 1973, not enough was known about the development of the unborn to describe them as persons, abortion proponents insist. But that changed quickly.
In fact, it was abortionist Bernard Nathanson who quickly abandoned his abortion business, which had performed some 75,000 procedures, because of the information available through ultrasound tests when they became available.
Then too, there are multiple images of hands or arms of the unborn emerging from the womb during in-womb surgeries.
Even the biased Snopes “fact-checker” admitted the images were real, but pointed out those undergoing surgery were anesthetized, so it would be inaccurate to say a child “reached” out.
But the point is that operations now routinely are performed on the unborn, correcting anomalies, much as they are on those already born.
And for those with a level of Christian faith, the Family Research Council listed multiple Bible references to the personhood of the unborn.
In Psalm 139:13-16, the Bible states, for example, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”
In Luke 1:39-45, it explains, “On those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would beg a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.'”
The FRC explained, “The Bible might lack an explicit statement that abortion is morally indefensible, but the principles displayed in these and many other verses point to a God who has intentionally created us all with a plan. He knows and loves each person before they are even born.”
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