In response to the recent leak of a potential Supreme Court opinion that could overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade decision which enshrined the right to abortion, former President Barack Obama wrote, “The consequences of this decision would be a blow not just to women, but to all of us who believe that in a free society, there are limits to how much the government can encroach on our personal lives.” After his party spent the last two years, locking everyone down, closing businesses, schools and churches, forcing us to wear masks, and mandating which medicine we can and can’t take, and creating a government run censorship board, he is suddenly worried about the government encroaching on our personal lives.
Obama claims to be all for government staying out of peoples’ private lives unless his signature legislation Obamacare, mandates every business to provide free contraceptives to their employees even when contraceptives violate the individual business owner’s religious beliefs. The Democrats pick and choose certain Constitutional protections and disregard others based on what fits their agenda. They are the most authoritarian party we have. The only rights they defend are the right to use drugs, the right of foreign nationals to illegally enter our country, and the right to kill an unborn baby.
There is not one word in the United States Constitution that addresses abortion, not one. The court in the Roe v Wade decision, made up the right to an abortion out of thin air by flimsily tying it to the “right to privacy” which is also never mentioned in the Constitution – not once. Yet, that the “right to privacy” is the so-called “right” that the right to an abortion hinges on?
The framers and ratifiers of our Constitution knew what an abortion was. There were laws on the books during colonial times regarding abortion, and they chose not to include abortion in the Bill of Rights as neither a protected right nor an illegal act. Even Obama tacitly admitted that abortion is not a right when he said, "it [overturning Roe v Wade] simply forces folks to give up any constitutionally recognized interest in what happens to their body once they get pregnant." Obama referred to abortion as an “interest”, not a right. That’s how they play with language to manipulate the Constitution. There is no such thing as a “constitutionally recognized interest”. That was made-up out of thin air.
But the Democrats do not care what the Constitution actually says. They treat the Constitution like they treat everything – if it serves their purposes, they support it; if it doesn’t, they go against it. Last year when Joe Biden was pushing for his gun control legislation, he said, "No amendment to the Constitution is absolute." He made that statement to justify passing a law which directly contradicts the 2nd Amendment that clearly states, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Last week the Biden administration announced the creation a Disinformation Governance Board which is designed to censor a citizen’s free speech. Once again, the language of the Constitution is clear. “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” There is no gray area, no wiggle room. But they will portray people who take the literal words of the Constitution on their face as “extremists”, “wackos”, “free speech absolutists” or “gun nuts”, but those who manipulate the Constitution for their own selfish purposes are characterized as sane and reasonable. According to them, the rights detailed in our Constitution are not absolute, but the ones that were made up out of thin air, that are not tethered to our Constitution, are. We are living outside of reality.
Abortion is never addressed in the Constitution, but since the left feels like it should be in there, they act as if it is. This is where we end up living in the post-modernist world that denies the existence of objective reality and truth, and embraces subjectivity and relativism. Feelings override tangible reality and objective truth. You end up arguing that rights written into the Constitution are not rights, and actions not written in the Constitution are rights. If there is no such thing as objective truth, by what standard is Nina Jankowicz at the Disinformation Governance Board going to use to determine what is disinformation and what is not? If everything is subjective, then nothing can be characterized as disinformation. If there is no truth, then there are no falsehoods.
When we do away with objective reality, we get to the point where an unborn baby is a living human being solely based on the feelings of the mother. In order to support abortion as a protected right, they must deny biological reality. If someone punched a pregnant woman in the stomach causing a miscarriage, in 38 states that person would be charged with homicide and could serve up to 25 years in prison. But if that same day, that same woman went to a clinic and got an abortion which killed the same baby, the doctor who killed her baby would be paid, and not charged with homicide. The only difference is the mother’s feelings about the unborn baby. The biological reality of the baby is not different in the two cases, the only difference is the feelings of the mother toward the baby. The biological fact that unborn babies are living human beings is irrelevant. If the mother wants the baby, then the baby is a human being and killing it is homicide, but if the mother doesn’t want the baby, then the baby is not a human being, and killing the baby is her right as an empowered woman.
Biden questioned the potential decision to overturn Roe vs Wade when he said, “the existence of a human life and being is a question. Is it at the moment of conception? Is it six months? Is it six weeks?” After lecturing us for a year and a half about “believing the science”, Biden conveniently ignores the science on when life begins to support his abortion agenda. From a scientific point of view, the moment of conception, a new life begins. The newly conceived egg is growing at a faster rate than at any other point in its existence – and growth equals life. An abortion at any point after conception, ends that life. This living being also has its own set of human chromosomes, so it is a separate human life from the mother, a distinct human being.
But the left never has a problem denying biological facts to support their agendas. Their radical gender ideology is dependent on rejecting biological facts like the difference between XX and XY chromosomes, and the distinction between male and female reproductive organs. The physical reality of a person’s biological sex is irrelevant, how the person feels about their gender is the only thing that matters. They will claim that there is no such thing as a woman, then claim abortion is a woman’s rights issue, and men are not allowed to comment. Once again, there is no male and female until they can use that distinction to deny people who they disagree with the right to speak.
The leaked brief from Justice Alito did not outlaw abortion; it simply turned the question of the legality of abortion back to the states where it belongs based on our Constitution. Allow the states which means allow the voters to determine whether abortion should be legal. Isn’t that the democratic way? If we as a country want to make abortion a Constitutionally protected right, then we must either pass an Amendment to our Constitution which makes it so, or hold a Constitutional Convention and rewrite the Constitution. Those are the three ways to legalize abortion; do it on a state level, amend the Constitution or rewrite the Constitution. The way it was done 49 years ago, smuggling it in using contrived and implied rights, was an abomination to the court and to American jurisprudence.
Nobody wants to tell a woman, or anybody, what they can do with their bodies. Bodily autonomy is one of the most important rights we have as free human beings. The reason why abortion is such a contentious issue is because it is a clash between two human beings claiming their individual bodily autonomy. The mother asserts her bodily autonomy to decide whether she remains pregnant, but that conflicts directly with the baby asserting his or her bodily autonomy of not being killed. So, abortion is an issue for the same reason why all of our other issues are issues – it is a clash of two very compelling rights. And how do we resolve this type of conflict? In order for the mother to exercise her bodily autonomy, the baby must be killed – losing its life for eternity. In order for the baby to exercise its bodily autonomy, the mother must carry the child for nine months or until term. What the baby loses when the mother claims her rights is exponentially more horrific and tragic, than what the mother loses if the baby’s rights are upheld.
Knowing what we know as the true horrific nature of abortion, the fact that it is the willful taking of human life by poisoning or dismemberment or worse, we would think that there would be no need to have laws prohibiting abortion. Abortion would be such a horrific act in the eyes of everyone, that no one, or very few people would ever consider having an abortion. But once again, they have to step outside of reality to make the actual act of abortion palatable, couching the dismemberment of tiny babies as “pro-choice”, “reproductive rights”, “woman’s rights”, or simply “terminating a pregnancy”. Only in a world without objective truth, a world that is governed by subjectivity, can abortion be defended by rational and reasonable people.
The problem with the abortion issue is that both sides look at it from a myopic point of view. The pro-choice side only wants to affirm a woman’s right to abortion, asserting her bodily autonomy, and if that means killing a baby, then so be it. The pro-life side only wants to affirm the baby’s right to life, without a care or concern for what the mother goes through in pregnancy and when giving birth. This issue more than any other, we must view it from both perspectives. And I wonder how many actually do? The fact that these myopic battle lines have been drawn so deeply and clearly is the main reason why we have not arrived at a workable societal solution to the unwanted pregnancy crisis in our country fifty years after Roe v Wade. We must affirm the tragedy that is abortion, but also the tragedy of the circumstances that lead to abortion. Changing the law may be a first and necessary step, but we must also change the hearts and minds of people on the true nature of abortion, and where we are as a society, as a culture that leads to almost a million abortions per year.
Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.