Roe must go: There is no ‘right’ to homicide against undelivered human beings

The Supreme Court draft opinion leaked to the public this week shows that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade when it releases its final decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In the draft opinion, five justices determine that Roe should be overturned — but those opinions can be changed at any time before the final decision, which is expected in June.

However, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the draft opinion, said that the decision hinges on the fact that there is no right to abortion.

Roe was decided on unstable, unconstitutional grounds

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overturned,” he wrote. “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.”

He continued, “We begin by considering the critical question, whether the Constitution, properly understood confers a right to obtain an abortion. […] 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.”

Alito explained the “Court’s decision left open at least three ways in which some combination of these provisions [the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and 14th Amendments] could protect the abortion right.” Roe, he said, argued that the right to abortion existed somewhere in the Constitution, but failed to specify exactly where. Alito goes on to explain this in-depth, but the fact that there is no right to abortion is fairly straightforward to even those without a law degree.

The right to abortion simply does not exist in the Constitution, as Alito explained. However, the legality of abortion has convinced people that there must be a right and the abortion industry has thrived off of this false right.

Humanity does not depend on arbitrary qualities

Scientifically speaking, each new human life begins at the moment of fertilization. Things such as location, age, gender, race, cognitive ability, or physical ability do not determine the humanity of that new human being. He or she is human — biologically — and therefore, is worthy of the right to life and protection from harm.

Abortion is, plain and simple, the homicide of an undelivered human being. And globally, what has happened is that stronger human beings have decided that legalizing the homicide of abortion against another weaker class of human beings is acceptable. But no one has an actual right to kill an innocent human being. The idea that one person’s bodily autonomy overrules another person’s right to life and to a natural death (instead of being killed by homicide) is an incorrect, dangerous, and inhumane notion.

The abortion pill starves a developing child, a first-trimester D&C uses powerful suction to tear a child to pieces, and a second-trimester D&E literally dismembers babies who are capable of feeling pain and some of whom are old enough to survive outside the womb. A third-trimester induction abortion uses a lethal injection of feticide to cause the child to go into cardiac arrest. And a D&X, commonly called a ‘partial-birth’ abortion, includes partially delivering the child before stabbing the base of his or her neck and suctioning out his or her brain.

Abortion Procedures: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Trimesters

If born persons were subjected to any of these deaths, this would be rightly viewed as a human rights crisis. Yet undelivered persons, who are no less human than born persons, are subjected to these deaths on a daily basis in the United States.

The state has a duty to protect human beings

Furthermore, there is no debt of justice that the state owes to women that would allow them to kill their babies through abortion. States do, however, have a duty to protect human beings and act for the common good of society. Abortion deliberately kills innocent human beings, and therefore, it does the opposite.

The authors of the Constitution did not determine that undelivered babies should be excluded from the umbrella of “personhood.” 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.”

He explained that the words “person” and “human being” were used interchangeably at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s adoption. “Person” included every member of the human race.

In addition, Craddock noted that “centuries of common-law precedent and state practice leading up to the Fourteenth Amendment’s adoption in 1868 indicate that the unborn were considered legal persons.” He also said the authors of the amendment expected that it protect all human beings, especially the weakest.

Roe v. Wade was egregiously erroneous. It failed to prove there is a right to abortion in the Constitution and labeled certain humans as unworthy of life, denying their very humanity. If the Supreme Court does indeed overturn Roe as the draft opinion suggests it will, it will be a step towards justice for undelivered babies, but it will only be a step. True justice will only come when human beings are protected at every age and stage, and women and their children are treated with the dignity, compassion, and respect they deserve.

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