This week, Live Action and a coalition of 26 pro-life groups and individuals launched the New North Star Coalition Letter, explaining what the future of the pro-life movement looks like after the fall of Roe v. Wade. In a new video, the concept of equal protection for preborn children, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, is further explained.
Narrated by Josh Craddock, a legal scholar with the James Wilson Institute, viewers learn about how American ideals revolve around the protection of every single human life — and how our legal traditions say that every living human being is a human person. And no person, according to the Constitution, can be deprived of equal protection under the law.
In 1973, the Supreme Court enacted Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a federal “right” which every state must uphold. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which was decided in 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion through the 14th amendment. However, Craddock explained that it didn’t correct all of Roe’s legal errors.
“In order to wrongly say the Constitution guaranteed a right to abortion, the Roe court first said that preborn children are not persons entitled to equal protection,” Craddock said. “‘If personhood is established,’ Justice Blackmun wrote in Roe, ‘the case for abortion collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the 14th amendment.’ Now, the justices in Dobbs were not asked to address the issue of preborn personhood. And the court didn’t have to answer that question to decide the case. But we must ask: are preborn children persons within the original public meaning of the 14th amendment? Is abortion unconstitutional?”
The 14th amendment was put into place after the Civil War to ensure that no person would be deprived of basic legal rights, such as life or liberty, without due process of law, nor deprive them of equal protection under the law. By all interpretations of the 14th amendment — definitions from when it was ratified, historic state practices related to abortion, and the framer’s understanding of the amendment — preborn children are human beings with an inherent right to basic legal rights and equal protections under the law. For example, at the time the 14th amendment was enacted, virtually every state understood that the legal phrase “person” included prenatal life, and viewed abortion as child murder. Typical objections to the inclusion of preborn children are often due to misunderstandings of the verbiage used in the amendment.
“Legalized abortion discriminates against preborn children, because it means our general laws against homicide don’t apply when the victim is an unborn child,” Craddock continued. “And those are precisely the sort of wrongs that the 14th amendment was designed to dissolve.”
The video, along with the New North Star Coalition letter, calls for every branch and level of government to adopt policies consistent with a framework of equal protection for all persons, including the preborn. Policies endorsed by the coalition include enforcing fetal homicide laws, wrongful death laws, and child endangerment laws; extending state and federal child tax credits to include preborn children; ruling that frozen embryos are not legal property or quasi-property under state law; and enacting prenatal child support laws to compel men to take responsibility for the children they father.
“Preborn children are constitutionally entitled to due process, and the equal protection of the law,” Craddock concluded. “The Constitution, properly interpreted, prohibits abortion through the 14th amendment, and everyone who swears an oath to uphold the Constitution has a duty to ensure those rights are protected.”
