Abortion is a Civil Rights Issue

By: John M. Grondelski, originally published September 16, 2024, American Thinker

Abortion is a civil rights issue, though not in the way pro-abortionists want to spin it. We should not forget that, after Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, there were liberal Democrats who opposed the ruling as a civil rights violation. Senators William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Harold Hughes of Iowa spring to mind, as do congressmen like Jim Oberstar of Minnesota.

The fundamental duty of any society is to protect the lives of its members. There is no more basic function of a society than to keep its members alive. That means protecting them from foreign assault by providing for national defense. That means protecting them from domestic violence by making and enforcing criminal accountability.

This is the bottom-line purpose of any society. English philosophers as different as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke agreed on this point. When Thomas Jefferson opines about “unalienable rights” of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, he was not just putting in some “nice words” before he got to his point: declare American independence. Go back and reread his argument (which, while changing “property” to “pursuit of happiness” basically comes straight out of Locke).

1. There are “inalienable” rights.
2. Those rights do not come from any government or even democratic majority. They come from God and nobody — not even a democratic majority — can take them away.
3. When governments “become destructive” of those rights, they forfeit their subjects’ allegiance.
4. When that destruction becomes grievous enough, people even have the right to overthrow such rights-destructive governments.

That’s where Jefferson’s independence argument comes in: King George III and the British Parliament had so systematically violated the rights of people in these colonies that any claims of allegiance were dissolved.

Now, the list of rights Jefferson enumerates as divinely conferred and inalienable are limited and ordered. They start with “life.” Not with “liberty.” Not with “happiness.” Life is prerequisite to the other two.

So, if a government exists to protect “certain unalienable rights” which include “life,” that government has got to conclude who is alive. Think that through: if governments exist to protect the unalienable right to life, governments have to determine who is alive. It is very clear from Jefferson (and Hobbes and Locke) that question cannot be one of private judgment: everybody decides it for himself. No society can fulfill its basic responsibilities if everybody has his own opinion of what constitutes life. Nor did Jefferson or Hobbes or Locke consider that question a purely religious or doctrinal question, even far less one that was epistemologically insoluble. They all would have considered the notion that everybody makes up his own mind on that question utter nonsense, an example not of deep thinking but not thinking.

Yet all these arguments are amassed today against addressing the question of when life begins. “It’s a religious question.” Well, no it isn’t. It’s a scientific question. Different religions may take different viewpoints, but the scientific question of when a separate human life comes into existence is pretty clear and definitively settled (unless you happen not to believe in DNA just as you doubt the relevance of X- or Y-chromosomes). “It’s up to everybody’s decision.” Extrapolate that answer beyond the unborn and you would create a society in which no life is protected: every murderer’s defense would be “it’s my choice.”

If an argument cannot be applied beyond the narrow circumstances for which one has tailored it, it’s not an argument. It’s an excuse, a special pleading to carve an exception tailored to one’s own liking. Why does the argument “it’s a choice” apply nowhere else where a question of ethical or moral responsibility is thought to be at issue? Would anybody take seriously the argument that taking somebody else’s property is a “choice?” Taking somebody else’s life? Committing perjury just a different kind of “truth?” Again, if an argument fits only a narrow case and fails everywhere else, you ought to ask yourself: who benefits by this specially tailored excuse?

A society which is agnostic or ambivalent about whom is encompassed by its legal protection is a society at fundamental conflict with itself. It is a society failing in its fundamental civil rights guarantee.

Abortionists want to present “freedom of choice” as the civil rights argument. They do so by systematically refusing to engage the question of when life begins. They pretend it’s not an issue. But if it were not a question, nobody would be arguing about abortion. It is precisely because that is the question that its evasion constitutes intellectual dishonesty.

Defenders of “choice” would argue it is a question of liberty. But, as we saw with Jefferson (and his philosophical predecessors), there is a hierarchy of rights for which societies are responsible and, in that enumeration, “life” precedes “liberty.” To bypass “life” as if it is a non-question is not to expand “liberty” but to deform it, to degrade a society by pretending it can ignore the prior question. That is not expanding civil rights but contracting it.

In the immediate wake of Roe, the decision was frequently compared to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that decided blacks were not human beings but property, the enjoyment of whose possession was a “liberty” right of Southern slavers who could not be denied their “pursuit of happiness” even if they went North with their “property.” Dred Scott was reversed not by the Supreme Court but by history through a bloody Civil War: within ten years, that judicial abomination was dead. Roe survived 49 years before the Supreme Court corrected its own civil rights violation. Today’s James Buchanans — Joe Biden and Kamala Harris among them — want to reimpose that “right’ on the whole country.

It’s time we went back to ask ourselves fundamental questions: why do societies exist if not to protect all their members?

John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. He is an author and contributor to the National Catholic Register.