Vice President Kamala Harris met with abortionists during a White House-hosted virtual meeting on May 19, telling abortionists that they “are on the front lines against this war on women’s rights” and calling Oklahoma’s new law restricting abortion from the moment of fertilization “outrageous” and “extreme.” She claimed that laws protecting undelivered babies are “designed to punish and control women” and that abortion is about the “power a woman has.”
Abortion is not a constitutional right
During her introduction of the event, Vice President Harris spoke to the abortionists about the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that indicates the court will overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that forced states to legalize abortion through at least 24 weeks. “If they do [overturn Roe], it will be the first time in the last 50 years at least, that the court has recognized a constitutional right only to take it away,” she claimed.
Abortion, however, has never been a constitutional right, and Roe was decided on unstable, unconstitutional grounds. As Josh Craddock, an affiliated scholar with the James Wilson Institute and the former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, argued in an article for The Public Discourse, “The Fourteenth Amendment’s use of the word ‘person’ guarantees due process and equal protection to all members of the human species. The preborn are members of the human species from the moment of fertilization. Therefore, the Fourteenth Amendment protects the preborn. If one concedes the minor premise (that preborn humans are biological members of the human species), all that must be demonstrated is that the term ‘person,’ in its original public meaning at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s adoption, applied to all members of the human species.”
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the draft opinion, also referenced the Fourteenth Amendment when he said, “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any Constitutional provision including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
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He continued, “The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text. Roe, however, was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.”
A right to privacy does not mean a right to kill
Vice President Harris also said:
The strength of our country has always been that we fight to move forward. That we believe in the expansion of rights, not the restriction of rights. So this, if and when it happens, will be an extreme step backward, and it represents a threat, not just to women, but to all Americans.
The right to privacy that forms the basis of Roe is the same right to privacy that protects the right to use contraception and the right to marry the person you love, including a person of the same sex. Overturning Roe opens the door to restricting those rights. It would be a direct assault on the fundamental right to self-determination — to live and love without interference from the government. At its core, this is about our future as a nation. About whether we live in a country where the government can interfere in personal decisions.
However, as Alito stated, there is no right to privacy mentioned in the Constitution. The Bill of Rights protects certain aspects of privacy, such as privacy of beliefs and privacy against unreasonable searches. Amendment Nine states that “[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Griswold v. Connecticut used this amendment to create a privacy right for married couples when it comes to the use of contraception. That interpretation wrongly crossed over to Roe, allowing this right to privacy for married couples to open the door for legalized abortion. The overwhelming majority of abortions are committed on unmarried women and their babies and no right to privacy could ever rightly allow for causing harm to another human being. Applied this way, the right to privacy could allow for child abuse, marital rape, and spousal abuse.
As for whether or not the decision to overturn Roe would impact contraception use or marriage, Justice Alito specifically states that the decision only applies to abortion because abortion is unique in that it involves killing innocent human beings.
Pro-life laws are meant to protect life
The pro-life laws that Vice President Harris calls “extreme” are meant to protect the lives of innocent human beings who are being violently destroyed in the name of women’s liberation — turning women into oppressors. Women do not need abortion to be equal. They are inherently equal to men because they are human beings — just as undelivered human babies are.
Overturning Roe would not move the United States backward, but forward. Since 1973, medical advancements have given us a window into the womb and proven that human life — and therefore the right to life — exists from the moment of fertilization. Restoring the right to life by ultimately banning abortion throughout the United States would restore justice for undelivered human beings and finally right the wrongs that Roe and the Supreme Court imposed on women and children nearly 50 years ago.
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