Partial Birthrights

The genesis for this column was a panel discussion held for Constitution Day at Owens Community College in Northwest Ohio. The “abortion panel” was convened on Sunday afternoon September 18^th, 2011, and consisted of Mr. Ed Sitter, Law Professor Lee Strang and me.

The following is found in The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 2:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons

From Wikipedia:

The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.
Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling by the Supreme Court (1857) that held that blacks could not be citizens of the United States.^[1]
Its Due Process Clause prohibits state and local governments from depriving persons of life, liberty, or property without certain steps being taken to ensure fairness. This clause has been used to make most of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states, as well as to recognize substantive and procedural rights.
Its Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction. This clause was the basis for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decision which precipitated the dismantling of racial segregation in the United States. In Reed v. Reed (1971), the Supreme Court for the first time ruled that laws arbitrarily requiring sex discrimination violated the Equal Protection

The point of contention that appears to be most vexing for those who are
inclined to protect life but unwilling to concede that “personhood”
begins at conception is when does life, personhood or humanity begin?
The historical and theological standard of “quickening” has been

broadened by the medical term of “viability.” Recent medical literature suggests that some babies can survive outside the womb as early as 18 weeks following conception. Clearly medical technology and advancements in pediatric care have greatly enhanced the life-chances for “preemies.” It seems, therefore, that to select “birth” as the determinate indicator for defining personhood and a person’s assumption of inalienable rights is much too indistinct. Why not latch onto historical precedence, original intent and horse-trading political compromise to delineate a starting point for a person’s individual rights?

Within the many communities and colonies in North America where human slavery was practiced, for the most part the slaves were not permitted to exercise their natural rights and had highly restrictive civil rights. Nevertheless as the Constitution was being negotiated and drafted, the slave-holding states wanted each slave to be counted for population and representation purposes. This would have resulted in a huge power advantage for the South in the Congress. Yankee politicians understood the ludicrous idea of counting someone’s personhood but not allowing them the full benefit of their humanity, so they countered that slaves had no rights therefore they should not be counted for representation. Even in the beginning of our Republic a toxic compromise was devised. As you will note from the constitutional excerpt previously given, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining congressional representation. The compromise was significant for two primary reasons: it maintained an equilibrium of power between the slave and the non-slave states; and placed into the Constitution of the United States the notion that slaves were human….that they were entitled to at least a portion of their personhood. It is possible that if the slave-holding states had been successful in their effort count each slave as a person for representation allotments, the power shift to the South may have prolonged the institution of slavery for a few more decades.

Denying personhood to someone just because of their status in the economic strata of the nation was finally forbidden by the 14^th Amendment. The Due Process Clause forbade the denial of life, liberty and property rights to anyone for arbitrary reasons. It was then generally understood that a former slave who attained freedman’s status was the same person under either condition. Why not, therefore, recognize the unborn as potential persons just as the three-fifths formula did for slaves. This may be an awkward parallel, but isn’t the humanity or personhood of an unborn child on a par with that of a slave who may ultimately be free? Should the child be deprived of its personhood simply because of its circumstances prior to attaining full humanity? Historically we are aware of slaves being summarily murdered at the whims of others. Most of us are revolted by such inhumane treatment. The unborn children whose lives are snuffed out before they are born deserve our protection for their lives and their liberty. They should not be sacrificed as victims of their circumstances just as those early slaves who preceded them were unjustly killed because of their powerless conditions.

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Life Choices

Eliminating undesirable people and prickly political minorities has been practiced by despotic governments for a long time. Our human history is replete with governments’ eliminating certain sectors of their own populations or slaughtering opponents in their villages and in their beds. Some people may be uncomfortable with this historical perspective and suggest that in our enlightened times, such butchery is no longer accepted. That attitude, Dear Reader, is what is known as a “pipe dream.” For all of our potential to imagine, create and build functional beauty, many of us allow the beast of sin or inhumanity to rule us. We have so much potential for good, and yet, we are severely flawed. Consider the episodes of genocide and mass murder in recent decades. This list is not exhaustive but there were Cambodians, Rwandans, Serbs, The Nazis, the Kurds, baby girls in China all represent either perpetrators or victims of heinous mass crimes. Progressives should be ecstatic with the continued human destruction of our own.

In 1968 Dr. Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist ( a freakin’ butterfly expert), released his legacy work, “The Population Bomb,” a woeful prediction of a planet (ours) overrun by people with inadequate resources to sustain human life. Liberals, who are now Progressives, lauded Ehrlich’s tome and have been dedicated to his themes for the past four decades. In fact, the Supreme Court of the United States was so enamored with Ehrlich’s thesis that shortly thereafter it discovered a formerly non-existent right to legally execute unborn children in the United States ( Roe v. Wade, 1973). With the deadly combination of almost constant warfare and legal abortion, the lefties who are squeamish about excessive population growth should be smugly satisfied. In our various global incursions we are sacrificing young men and women (mostly men) in the prime of their lives, and certainly abortion represents a pre-emptive approach to population limitation by eliminating the child before it reaches breeding age. The government has been complicit in this clumsy attempt at population control by its consistent funding of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States.

Although it may seem to be a feasible argument to some, large government necessarily must be a major role player when there are vital policy issues that include divisions among the populace. But a constitutionally limited government would not be as actively involved in the social issues that tear the nation apart. True, the states would be facing those issues, and it’s possible that any given life or death issue may have 50 different solutions among all the states. So what? In life affirming issues having one or more states that value life and nurture it is much better than our present-day circumstances wherein the government promotes much that is anti-life and certainly anti-individual. When government becomes too large and unwieldy, the natural inclination is to become more demanding and despotic and to limit resistance or protest. By endorsing the Ehrlich proposition of stressful overpopulation and also by encouraging and funding the radical feminist arguments for abortion, an impersonal monstrosity such as the United States’ Federal Government can treat individual lives indifferently. That ingrained indifference leads to multiple deployments for police actions and conflicts because the individuals are not significant. Their loss and their families’ grief are meaningless blips on the sensibility of an over sized governing apparatus.

This entire discussion springs from my personal mental gymnastics about the proper role for government regarding some of the most critical issues about life. Certainly because of its constitutional mandate to provide for the common defense, the federal government does have the capacity and the duty to order the military, guard, reserves and militia into harm’s way. One would hope that it happens so infrequently that the leaders of government do not rashly pursue military engagements. As in any other aspect of life, frequent repetition of acts that were once novel makes the action more commonplace and ordinary. Our national leadership has treated the U.S. military like a Welcome Wagon bully by dispatching them all over the globe to intervene in disputes that have been raging for decades….even centuries. I suspect that in the highest corridors of government respect and concern for individuals who must serve, fight and perhaps perish has been blunted. The minimization of the value of life leads directly to the diminishment of the worth of the individual which exaggerates the power of groups within the body politic.

Groups merge into democratic factions that value “members,” but carry no brief for life itself or the individual. My final analysis is that a nation that does not celebrate or nourish individualism is not committed to the preservation and protection of life. A country that does not cherish the lives of its individual citizens loses its moral authority to exist. After all, the government is an institution developed to allow the people to work together for common goals without excessive intervention. Cavalier attitudes about individual lives cannot be a universally accepted national policy. Life, individual life, and liberty must be the latchkeys for entering the hall of government’s moral reason for existing. A government that values neither life nor individuals has forfeited its moral foundation and has no right to its own life.

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