Restoring the Declaration's Promise

By Ken Concannon
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 4/15/04)

The U.S. Senate recently passed, by a vote of 61 to 38, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. By the time this article is published it may have already been signed into law by President Bush. The bill legally recognizes two victims when a pregnant woman and her unborn child are harmed or killed during commission of a federal crime. It is a giant step in the effort to restore the promise of the Declaration of Independence. Here’s why.

When our founding fathers signed the Declaration nearly 228 years ago they presented to the world a document that was profoundly remarkable. The Declaration was unique at the time, not because it spoke of liberty and the necessity of separating the American colonies from Mother England — other people in other places had rebelled before — but because it said that human rights came from God, not the State.

Until then, the prevailing concept of governance throughout the world was that the rights of human beings were derived from and subject to whoever was in power. The Declaration set forth a remarkably different concept — that human beings were endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights by virtue of their humanity. And it said that foremost among these were the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

By so doing the signers of that magnificent Declaration, our founding fathers, made a promise to all those who would join them in the American experiment — those rebelling with them then, and the millions of immigrants who would flee tyranny later. The promise was that America would honor and hold sacred the principle that their inalienable rights could not be set aside by the government. It was fulfilled in the Bill of Rights, in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that abolished slavery, in the 14th Amendment that guaranteed equal protection for all, in the 15th and 19th Amendments that gave blacks and women the right to vote, and in the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’60s.

In 1973, however, the infamous Roe v. Wade decision broke the promise when it denied the most basic of the inalienable rights, the right to life, to the unborn. Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of that decision, used a subterfuge to break that promise. Relying heavily on theories provided by those who sought a right to abort, he claimed that the issue of when human life begins was a question yet to be answered.

At a time when abortion rights advocates, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, were publicly describing the unborn as "blobs of tissue" and "tadpoles," Blackmun wrote in his decision:

"We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."

That was then. Now apologists for the abortion industry rarely describe the unborn as "blobs of tissue" or "tadpoles." Too many people have seen too many ultrasound pictures of too many unborn babies to make the "it isn’t human or alive yet" argument feasible. In fact, abortion advocates rarely use the word "abortion" anymore, preferring instead the euphemism "choice" while paying homage to a Supreme Court decision that is based on an ignorance argument that is no longer believable. At this point "in the development of man’s knowledge" the Court "need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins" because too many people already know the answer.

In the 31 years since the Roe decision the abortion industry has consistently challenged in court any attempts by either Congress or state legislatures to regulate that industry. One piece of legislation they are terrified of but are not likely to take to court is the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA). Although the bill specifically excludes abortion from its purview, abortion advocates are rightly concerned by this definition of "unborn child" incorporated into the bill: "the term `unborn child’ means a child in utero, and the term `child in utero’ or `child, who is in utero’ means a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

They won’t challenge the UVVA because a challenge would invariably require an unhappy (for them) answer to the human life issue dodged by Blackmun. It could conceivably bring about a reversal of the Roe decision and a renewal of the promise broken by that decision.

Copyright ©2004 Arlington Catholic Herald.  All rights reserved.