Similarly, those who defend abortion on grounds that “the United States Constitution guarantees a woman’s right to abortion, so I can’t sign laws restricting that right” are also demonstrating a lack of moral conviction, if not total moral depravity. Roe V. Wade (the Supreme Court Decision that legalized abortion) doesn’t, in fact, guarantee a “woman’s right to abortion” per se; it merely states that, because an unborn child isn’t a citizen with constitutional rights. With a woman’s right to privacy having been established in Griswold vs. Connecticut in 1967,the Supreme Court ruled that this right to privacy thus included a right to terminating pregnancy.
By itself, this is unimportant, but when contrasted with the Dred Scott decision, the moral parallel becomes blatantly obvious. Scott vs. Sanford has been memorialized in US history as the case that brought about the civil war; by explicitly denying that blacks had citizenship rights under the Constitution, a “right to slavery” was thus recognized by the US government much the same way as a “right to choose” became a Constitutional right following Roe V. Wade. Had the Dred Scott case been accepted as sacrosanct by politicians of that era as Roe has in our contemporary political environment, slavery would never have been eradicated as it was.
Of course, the moral imperative of opposing an immoral public policy such as slavery is demonstrated quite easily in retrospect. It’s far more difficult to convince citizens (much less politicians) to support the right to life of a child in a society that oftentimes refuses to recognize it. Yet this is precisely what the institution of slavery was in early 17th-century America: to support abortion today on Constitutional grounds today in morally congruous to the position of a politician of the 17th century that opposed slavery, but refused to legislate the issue because of the Constitution. Politicians that support such an absurd political position deserve to be held accountable, and voters should know better than to be swayed by the sound-sounding rhetoric of a placid supporter of murder.
References:
Court Blunders on Slavery and Abortion. National Right to Life Committee. http://www.nrlc.org/news/1999/NRL699/slave.html
Aborting the unborn is barbaric. “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves”
Proverbs 31:8