Fundamental human rights are not 'for states to decide'

On Sunday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett defended the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which gave states the authority to determine their own abortion laws. She told CBS's Norah O'Donnell that Dobbs did not decide the morality of abortion, leaving the question of whether "abortion is immoral" to each state to decide.

While this may be the current status of abortion law in the United States, that doesn't make it ethically valid.

Key Takeaways:

• Justice Amy Coney Barrett (ACB) spoke with CBS about the Dobbs decision, which gave states the authority to determine if abortion is legally allowable.

• Since Dobbs was handed down in June 2022, state laws on abortion have ranged from full protection for preborn human beings to zero protection at any point in pregnancy.

• The right to life is a fundamental human right which should never be put to a popular vote in order to determine which innocent human beings are worthy of life and/or who can be legally killed despite committing no crime.

The Details:

In 1865, when the US ratified the 13th Amendment, it ensured that states did not have the power to allow slavery. Slavery was abolished nationwide, regardless of whether the voting population of a certain state wanted it to be abolished or not. In other words, through the 13th Amendment, Congress ensured that states did not have the authority to allow citizens to vote on whether or not it is acceptable to own and enslave other human beings, treating them as property.

Likewise, no government — at any level — should have the power to allow its citizens to cast a vote on which human beings are worthy of the human right to life and which are not. Yet that's exactly what Dobbs allowed.

Denying the Right to Life... by "Democratic Process"

Overturning Roe v. Wade was a massive step in the fight for equal human rights, but the fight doesn't end there.

In giving states the (false) 'right' to hold votes and pass laws and amendments allowing the killing of humans in the womb, the Court essentially said that human rights (specifically the right to life) are up for debate. It determined that the citizens of a state determine whether a certain group of human beings — in this case, those existing in their mothers' wombs — can be stripped of their human right to life and be legally killed.

Dobbs didn't declare preborn humans to be persons. Instead, it simply took the abortion decision away from the courts and gave it to states; now the voting majority get to decide that certain innocent humans can be legally killed for any reason at all, no matter how minor.

ACB told O'Donnell (emphases added):

Dobbs did not render abortion illegal. Dobbs did not say anything about whether abortion is immoral. Dobbs said that these are questions that are left to the states. And all of these kinds of questions – decisions that you mention that require medical judgments – are not ones that our Constitution connects to the courts, you know, to decide how far into pregnancy the right of abortion might extend.

You know, the court was in the business of drawing a lot of those lines before, and what Dobbs says is that those calls are properly left to the democratic process. And the states have been working those out. There's been a lot of legislative activity and a lot of state constitutional activity since the decision in Dobbs was rendered.

There definitely has been. As of 2024, 10 states have enshrined abortion as a state constitutional right for women, and nine states (plus Washington D.C.) have laws stating that abortion — the direct and intentional killing of preborn humans — is allowable and acceptable through all 40 weeks of pregnancy.

On the flipside, 11 states have laws protecting the majority of preborn children from the violence of abortion. The rest of the states fall somewhere in between, with some allowing abortion in the first weeks and months of pregnancy, with a prohibition on the killing after a specific, varied, and sometimes random gestational age.

There's a glaring problem as well in claiming that "the democratic process" gets to determine which innocent human beings can be killed (that's what abortion is, after all).

The right to life is a fundamental (basic, crucial, or essential) human right. Life isn't given to humans by the government or by democratic process; life is given by the Creator — and without existence, no other human rights can be realized. Violating someone's right to life means that someone has been robbed of every other human right as well. Humans do not have the legitimate "liberty," "freedom," or "right" to end other innocent humans' lives.

No Legitimate Right to Deprive Innocent Humans of Life

We don't need another constitutional amendment to tell us these things. The right for every innocent human being in the United States to not be deprived of life already exists in the 14th Amendment, which states:

No State ... shall ... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

We must, therefore, ask the questions:

• Are preborn children persons under the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment?

• Is abortion unconstitutional?

The answer to both is yes.

The 14th Amendment was written after the Civil War to ensure that no person would be deprived of basic human rights, including the right to life and liberty without due process of the law, or be deprived of equal protection. Wording from when the amendment was ratified, along with historic state practices surrounding abortion, help prove that preborn children do qualify as persons with an inherent right to basic rights and equal protection under the law.

In 1865, virtually every state understood that the legal phrase "person" included preborn humans, and abortion was widely viewed as murder.

Equal Protection & New Strategies for Protecting Life w/ Josh Craddock

As legal scholar Josh Craddock explained in a video for Live Action, “Legalized abortion discriminates against preborn children because it means our general laws against homicide don’t apply when the victim is an unborn child. And those are precisely the sort of wrongs that the 14th Amendment was designed to dissolve."

The Bottom Line:

With the 14th Amendment securely in place for the last 160 years, it is unconstitutional to allow states to hold votes on whether or not certain human persons can be legally killed.

As a society, we understand that murder is wrong; therefore, the mob mentality claiming the right to kill innocent human beings in the womb cannot be allowed to reign.

The right to life should never be up for debate or for a vote.