By Douglas V. Gibbs
During the recent presidential election the Democratic Party tried to make a large part of the campaign about the issue of abortion. They put out the entire spread of arguments they use, and then some, promising that they would preserve the “right to an abortion,” and that Donald J. Trump, if elected President, would seek a national ban on the practice.
Trump has taken a very constitutional stance on the issue, arguing that it is up to the States. That is, after all, what the 2021 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson concluded, after all.
The abortion debate has been a constant one as long as I remember, and recently a friend of mine asked for help regarding a debate she was having with a friend who did not see abortion in the same way she did. Her opponent argued that abortion is about privacy, not abortion. Her friend also threw in the usual arguments like that it puts pregnant mothers at risk if the fetus cannot survive, and leaving the issue to the States will leave women who want abortions who live in anti-abortion States in a dangerous position and needing to be flown to other States to “receive the care they need.” Therefore, “there must be some sort of national law codifying the right to have an abortion.”
Abortion is not a new issue. The Founding Fathers discussed abortion, recognizing it to be against the rule of law. James Wilson, Signer of the U.S. Constitution, and defender of the Constitution at the Pennsylvania Ratification Convention, wrote: “With consistency, beautiful and undeviating, human life from its commencement to its close, is protected by the common law. In the contemplation of law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. By the law, life is protected not only from immediate destruction, but from every degree of actual violence, and, in some cases, from every degree of danger.”
In ancient Rome, after the republic became an empire, and as internal decay was leading the once great society towards its ruin, morality had become an afterthought. Wrong became right, and right became wrong. Abortion became legal up to the age of two years of age. A couple, if they decided they did not want their baby for any reason, could legally leave a child under two years of age in the window or on the side of the road to die from the elements. Underground Christians were fined, and often jailed, for stealing the babies away in an effort to save their lives.
When my friend asked me about the abortion issue, and what might be a few ways to defend her position, I immediately responded that arguing abortion is more complex than people realize, and any stance against abortion cannot be argued through a series of basic sound-bytes. The problem is those who support abortion, and those who stand against it, don’t speak the same language; not only literally through their tongue, but the two sides don’t even follow the same premises regarding the issue in their hearts and souls. One side believes that a baby is a person, while the other claims fails to recognize the personhood of unborn babies. If an unborn baby is indeed a person, then their death by the hands of a doctor or anyone else is murder, and violates that person’s right to life as per the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. One side believes our rights are God-given which would mean abortion couldn’t possibly by a natural right, while the other believes abortion is a fundamental reproductive right and that it must be guaranteed and protected at any cost by government. One side believe that abortion is none of the federal government’s business and that the issue must be left up to the States to decide, while the other side believes it is not only a federal issue but that by leaving it to the States women will die. Then, along with all of that, there are varying degrees of beliefs regarding the issue, from believing that abortion is wrong no matter what, or that abortion should be legal all the way up to the day of birth.
For many Americans the presence of abortion in our society is a symptom of the fact that our culture is suffering from decline. It represents a failure of our people holding on to their virtuous values and principles. How can one even begin to defend the destruction of the lives of over 63 million children since the advent of Roe v. Wade, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI)?
Those who support the institution of abortion argue that it was settled law until a rogue Supreme Court decided to upend it in 2021 with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
Let’s begin there. Was abortion the law of the land, as the supporters of Roe v. Wade argued?
Law is something that must be established by the legislative process. Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that all legislative powers belong to Congress, therefore, the Courts have no legal authority to establish law. That was the argument of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling – the court may not establish law, and there is no delegation in the Constitution granting to the federal government any authority over the power to establish any law regarding abortion in the first place. The Enumeration Doctrine holds that only powers expressly enumerated in the Constitution are granted to the U.S. Government, and since abortion is not mentioned as a power anywhere in the Constitution, including in any amendments, the power as per the Tenth Amendment belongs to the States.
The ruling by the Supreme Court in Dobbs was accurate.
But, what about the right to privacy?
When abortion became an issue just prior to the Roe v. Wade case, the practice was generally viewed by the general public as being wrong – the murder of an unborn person. In order to even get the court system to consider overturning laws against abortion they needed to convince the judges that abortion was a constitutional right – so, they devised that it was a right to privacy.
The concept of a right to privacy stems from Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, a case that had nothing to do with medical procedures, and instead was regarding one’s personal records. The right to be left alone by government is a long-standing American belief, and is an important component of liberty. Government is told that it has no authority to interfere with the rights of Americans in a number of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. The Court determined that based on their interpretation the Constitution implies a “zone of privacy.” The problem is, as already stated in this article, the original intent of the United States Constitution is that in order to possess a power the federal government must be expressly authorized by the Constitution to have that power. The right to privacy is nowhere in the text of the document, and it is a stretch to include abortion under the definition of the right to privacy as provided by the courts.
The right to privacy argument has elevated abortion to the same level of the freedom of speech, trial by jury, and the right to be secure in one’s person, home, papers, and effects. As far as the proponents of abortion are concerned, abortion ranks right up there with any and all other American bedrock principles. Gloria Feldt, a former president of Planned Parenthood, has proclaimed that abortion is a “guaranteed basic human right…a right as intrinsic as the right to breathe and to walk, to work and to think, to speak our truths, to thrive, to learn, and to love.” Anyone who opposes abortion, therefore, seeks to undermine and threaten the constitutional rights of women.
Edward Lazarus, a former law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun who wrote the majority opinion regarding Roe v. Wade, wrote:
As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather. . . . .
What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent. …
The proof of Roe’s failings comes not from the writings of those unsympathetic to women’s rights, but from the decision itself and the friends who have tried to sustain it. Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the almost 30 years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.
- Lazarus, “The Lingering Problems of Roe v. Wade,” Oct. 03, 2002, available at
https://writ.findlaw.com/lazarus/2002/1003.html.
In other words, the ruling exceeded its constitutional authority; and as Dobbs v. Jackson later determined, neither guaranteeing the right to privacy, nor abortion, is expressly enumerated in the Constitution as an authority of the federal government.
As for calling abortion a woman’s “reproductive right,” abortion is not akin to childrearing or child-production; it’s child destruction that not only kills an unborn child, but negates a man’s role in bringing children into the world, relegating him to only being the potential fertilizer of an ovum. A right to privacy might be able to be argued to cover one’s private sexual behavior that would result in producing a child, but the destruction of a child is hardly something that occurs outside of the view of others. And if one wishes to argue the point that there are occasions that abortion is necessary because of the hardships of raising unwanted children, there is a non-lethal means to resolve the same “problem.” Adoption.
Ryan T. Anderson, co-author of a book published by Regnery titled “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing” explains that abortion has also been used to anchor the feminist argument about “equality.” Anderson suggests that “besides the physical, emotional, and mental harm done to women by abortion, great harm is done as a result of the worldview suggesting abortion is necessary for equality.” Abortion advocates basically argue that a normal function of a woman’s body is somehow dysfunctional, and in order for her to be equal to men she needs to kill her child.
Alexandra DeSanctis, Anderson’s co-author, said that “many seem to think abortion is empowering, and she thinks that’s fueled by this underlying assumption that freedom is just participation in sex at any point with anybody with no consequences. A man can walk away without physically bearing a child, but a woman cannot without committing a violent act against her own child.”
DeSanctis challenged those who are pro-abortion by saying, “What kind of society are we if the best solution we have to any set of problems is to kill the most vulnerable people among us? If you believe abortion is necessary, think about why, and think about: ‘Are the problems that you identify that make you think abortion is the solution really solved by perpetrating violence against innocent, vulnerable human beings?’ How are any of us really better off?”
During the recent election the proponents of legalizing abortion across America told us that most Americans support that position. A Harvard/Harris poll just a couple years ago says otherwise. According to the poll, 54% of likely voters want abortion restrictions, and only 8% support abortion at any stage of pregnancy. While I believe that this country was designed to be a republic, rather than a pure democracy, the fact is that even those who claim they are the preservers of democracy don’t have the numbers on their side as they claim.
One might argue, as has a number of pro-choice advocates in recent years, and Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election, that outlawing abortion places the lives of pregnant women at risk because doctors will be fearful to perform abortions when those cases arrive.
I spent four years on the board of a Pro-Life Pregnancy Center’s board of executives, and in all of my dealings with persons in the pro-life community it was understood that each pregnancy case must be dealt with individually – and typically when the mother’s life is at risk should the pregnancy continue, the baby will not survive the pregnancy anyway. Those pregnancies are ectopic pregnancies, which typically involves when an egg plants inside a fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. A full-term pregnancy, in those cases, will always ultimately kill both mother and child, so a medical procedure to terminate the pregnancy to save the mother’s life then would be acceptable. No Pro-Life Advocate has ever argued that in those cases there should be no termination of the pregnancy when it is well-understood that if the pregnancy goes full-term both mother and child will not survive. The fact that the pro-abortion lobby is untruthful about that accusation, and is content to use a situation that is actually pretty rare in the grand scheme of things, to support the argument that abortion on demand for any reason should be legal, is disingenuous at best.
The Daily Signal reported on ectopic pregnancies and the argument by pro-abortionists that pro-life laws prevent doctors from treating those kinds of pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancies are when a fertilized egg attaches outside the lining of a woman’s uterus. It is a rare occurrence, happening in less than 2% of pregnancies. Medical technology is not yet able to save the baby, so the goal has become to at least save the life of the mother. Doctors are fully away that an ectopic pregnancy termination is not an abortion, and the laws the pro-abortion lobby is screaming about recognizes that fact. An abortion is the intentional, unnatural procedure that kills the baby in the womb that would otherwise be able to progress and develop to a successful life birth if left alone. The termination of an ectopic pregnancy is a medical procedure that must be performed to save the life of the mother. The claims that women fear going to the doctor to end an ectopic pregnancy in States where anti-abortion laws are in place are simply not true. There are no laws in any State that denies a woman’s needed medical care for an ectopic pregnancy. In all States, even those with the strictest anti-abortion laws, removing an ectopic pregnancy is legal, and not considered abortion.
Regardless of which side of the aisle one might reside on, the reality is that the topic of abortion is serious business and is not something that should be taken lightly. Lives are involved. Mother’s lives, and the lives of the unborn children. Unfortunately, there are those on the pro-abortion side that might not agree with that statement. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky CEO, Betty Cockrum, said, “the mood of the abortion industry is total misery…it’s just no fun anymore. It just gets harder by the day. That’s tough.”
No fun anymore? Was Ms. Cockrum suggesting that the abortion of unborn lives is fun when it is not hindered by any opposition?
When Donald Trump first emerged on the scene in 2016, the abortion rate had fallen to the lowest level it had been since Roe v. Wade in 1973, so for pro-abortionists like Cockrum there was indeed cause for alarm, not just because it might get in the way of their fun of killing babies, but because abortion as a business needs the numbers to keep going up.
The business of abortion, we have learned, goes way pass the claim that it is all about reproductive rights. Last year the University of Pittsburgh was discovered to have been “illegally harvesting fetal tissue from aborted babies for experimentation.” Dr. Warren Hern at his clinic in Boulder, Colorado has been carrying out late stage abortions for decades. The film, “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” put on the big screen the story about Kermit Barron Gosnell who provided illegal late-term abortions at his clinic in West Philadelphia. He was later convicted of the murders of three infants who were born alive after using drugs to induce labor. One woman under his care died during an abortion procedure, and he covered up the death. When his clinic was investigated the visiting detectives found the feet of aborted babies in jars, saved as trophies by Gosnell. Earlier this year a memorial service for five infants killed under the services of Gosnell was held, and members of Congress have called for transparency regarding the issue.
Why would doctors perform late-term abortions like that?
Undercover journalists working with James O’Keefe in 2015 posted a video during which a Planned Parenthood doctor admitted using partial-birth abortions to sell baby body parts. Late term abortions work best because the body parts are more developed. Rather than being exposed at the party of death, the leftist political establishment attacked James O’Keefe for exposing them for selling baby body parts, the courts turned against the whistle-blowers and sent those who exposed the sickening crimes of Planned Parenthood to jail. The whole thing was so ridiculous that even the left-wing Los Angeles Times agreed that the charges and legal attack against the undercover journalists was uncalled for, and politically motivated.
Then, there’s the harm that abortion causes that goes way beyond the killing of the baby. When I was on the board for the pro-life pregnancy center, one of the issues was that young girls were popping the Plan-B pill like tic-tacs. Not only are these girls self-sterilizing their bodies, but in many cases they would take the pills later in the pregnancy and then abort the child and be horrified upon viewing the little body with arms and legs and fingers and toes that had fallen into the toilet, or wherever else the self-induced miscarriage occurred.
According to a recent study regarding Danish medical records, there is a 50% increased risk of the need for a woman to seek out psychiatric treatment during the year following a first abortion. The elevated risk was highest (87% increased risk) for personality and behavioral disorders. The numbers regarding the mental health of a woman after an abortion far exceeded any mental health needs by a woman after a live birth. Women have become so desensitized regarding killing their babies that every once in a while we’ll see horrifying stories about babies left for dead after birth.
Elizabeth Warren has argued that pro-lifers claim they care about life before birth, but could care less after birth. That, also, is a lie. For example, the pro-life pregnancy center I worked with provided resources for young mothers who had changed their minds about abortion thanks to the work of the counselors at the center for the first couple years. Providing such services is a norm at the pro-life pregnancy resource centers around the country. These centers offer diapers and other needed products, medical testing, parenting classes, ultrasounds, maternity homes, and job training referrals – typically at no cost, or very little cost.
Ultrasounds are the biggest help in changing a woman’s mind about having an abortion. While pro-abortion advocates try to convince people that an unborn pregnancy is nothing more than a blob of tissue, or just a group of undeveloped cells, the reality is that the baby is formed rather quickly, and at 21 days the heart begins beating – a reality detectable within about six weeks of the pregnancy. When a woman receives an ultrasound, and she sees the moving child within her belly on the screen, it becomes a very powerful moment. California’s purveyors of killing unborn children realize the effectiveness of the ultrasound, and has actually worked to outlaw pro-life pregnancy centers from being allowed to provide that service.
Although the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal taxpayer funding for most abortions, federal dollars pour into Planned Parenthood every year. Pro-abortion forces in Washington D.C. are now targeting the 1976 law, calling for it to be eliminated and for there to be no limit on federal funds being used on abortions. Kamala Harris planned to try to eliminate the filibuster to make it happen should she become President of the United States, but the election of Donald Trump has stopped that from becoming a reality.
On my radio programs I have suggested that abortion is simply a new version of an old barbaric practice: Child Sacrifice. Liberty Daily earlier this year released a video that explains exactly that, titling their video “There’s nothing new under the sun: Child Sacrifice never stopped.”
Seth Gruber, a leading voice in the pro-life movement, explains quite well how it is that a baby in the womb is not simply a lump of cells. He explains the science of the development of the human being inside the womb from the moment of conception. Even at the time of conception, the person inside the mother is a distinct, living individual.
My argument has always been that like our natural rights and the rule of law, the fact that inside a woman’s uterus is a baby, not something else, is self-evident. After all, we don’t walk up to a pregnant woman and ask, “Ah, when is your fetus due to be born?” We instinctively know that it is a baby, and that is what we call it when we approach a pregnant woman.
