Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) was officially announced this morning as Mitt Romney’s running mate, ending months of speculation. Pro-life Americans will be relieved knowing that Mitt Romney has kept to his promise to choose a running mate with values that uphold the right to life.
The congressman is an attractive candidate for many reasons. He is young and considered to be a handsome, strong, and outspoken leader with a bright future ahead of him. His qualifications will make for an interesting Romney-Ryan ticket as it appears in the press and for the upcoming vice presidential debate with Joe Biden, who is pro-abortion. He is also not merely a “safe choice.” Congressman Ryan is most well known for his fiscal policies. The biography of his website lists him as the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee. It also mentions his plan to take on the fiscal crisis of this country.
But Paul Ryan is also strongly pro-life. Serving as 1 of 8 Wisconsin representatives, the Congressman has a score of 100% from the National Right to Life Committee, having voted 78 times with the NRLC.
While the pick became official this morning, social media websites and the online press began speculating and even saying that Ryan was the pick. Yesterday morning, LifeNews published a piece which highlights Ryan’s pro-life views.
LifeNews’s piece mentions two other pieces, by Paul Ryan himself, which show a congressman who does not shy away from his pro-life convictions, and who makes a compelling argument about a belief in the free market and the right to life. The following are excerpts from the first paragraphs from an opinion piece by the congressman, titled “The Cause of Life Can’t be Severed from the Cause of Freedom,” which was published by in the Heritage Foundation’s Indivisible, in February 2010. The piece also appears on his website:
I write as an unswerving proponent of both free market choice and the natural right to life. It is unfortunate that “life” and “choice” were ever separated and viewed as alternatives. This is a false dilemma. Logically, each implicates the other.
As a champion of capitalism, I strongly support every person’s right to make these economic choices and to fight against government efforts to limit them. Freedom and the choice it implies are moral rights which Americans are granted, not from government but from the principles that have made this a great and prosperous society. These principles uphold the equal natural rights of all human beings to live, be free, and pursue happiness, insofar as the exercise of these rights does not violate the corresponding rights of others. Individuals grow in responsibility, wisdom, intelligence, and other human qualities by making choices that satisfy their unique needs and by avoiding things that do not. Government helps maintain the rule of law that makes all this possible, but government’s role is very limited when it comes to our specific choices. Under our Constitution, government’s job is to guarantee the universal human rights of its citizens. By virtue of its mission in this social contract, government cannot possess unlimited power.
Yet to ensure that this guarantee is consistently provided, the government first needs to determine whose rights should be protected—that is, what the concept of a human being entitled to natural rights denotes. The rights of any entity that qualifies as “human” must be protected.
The congressman also relates Roe v. Wade to the Dred Scott decision and equates slavery with abortion with compelling arguments. Perhaps the most compelling statements of all comes towards the end, which speaks to the future of this country regarding the issue of abortion:
Now, after America has won the last century’s hard-fought struggles against unequal human rights in the forms of totalitarianism abroad and segregation at home, I cannot believe any official or citizen can still defend the notion that an unborn human being has no rights that an older person is bound to respect. I do know that we cannot go on forever feigning agnosticism about who is human. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.” The freedom to choose is pointless for someone who does not have the freedom to live. So the right of “choice” of one human being cannot trump the right to “life” of another. How long can we sustain our commitment to freedom if we continue to deny the very foundation of freedom—life—for the most vulnerable human beings?
A piece from the Weekly Standard also portrays Ryan as dedicated to the pro-life movement. The title alone, “Paul Ryan: GOP Must Continue Fighting for the Right to Life,” says what kind of a candidate Paul Ryan is when it comes to defending the unborn. This paragraph does as well:
But Ryan hasn’t gotten on board with the idea of a truce on social issues. “I’m as pro-life as a person gets,” Ryan told me in July. “You’re not going to have a truce. Judges are going to come up. Issues come up, they’re unavoidable, and I’m never going to not vote pro-life.”
From a right-to-life perspective, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney hardly could have picked a better running mate than Paul Ryan, a true fighter for the unborn. With a Ryan on board, there is no question that a Romney-Ryan ticket embraces pro-life values. The contrast between Vice President Biden and Paul Ryan, and President Obama and Paul Ryan, for that matter, could hardly be more extreme.
