pro-life

Pro-Life Violence?

Calvin Freiburger abortion, abortionists, atheism, blogosphere, demagogues, evil, morality, pro-life, religion, violence
I’ve debated a number of folks of varying caliber on the ‘Net. Most recently, Thayne & G-Man have sparked a productive exploration of morality, religion, secularism, & abortion. I’ve also had some good discussions with Sean back during the Coulter Nation days and at Olbroad’s old site (by the way, this is her current site). On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve met some infantile commenters at The American Mind, the clowns of YouStinkLeft, (by the way, their latest brilliant question is—and I quote—“Why does Fox News want us to have a war with Iran?”), the unintentional hilarity offered by B&S regular Scott, and, of course, the Hacks4Rudy. But the sorriest I’ve encountered would be a truly-despicable fellow by the name of Jayce Commo. Since it’s impossible to have serious debate with the immature, bothering with them is usually a waste of time. But a recent post about Generations for Life on his aptly-named blog takes lazy guilt-by-association to such depths that I can’t let it go unchallenged:
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I generally don’t have any problems with pro-life supporters, so long as they’re not blowing things up, shooting doctors, or harrassing women. But a few things on the Generations site leave me feeling a bit uneasy…
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Since the overwhelming majority of America’s millions of pro-lifers would never even consider violence, then Jayce doesn’t have anything to worry about. Indeed, according to the second of these three articles, one of the killers “was disappointed with the anemic response from pro-life activists, who denounced Griffin’s use of violence” (the article also says “Most mainstream antiabortion organizations distanced themselves from him.” I’d sure like to seem them try to substantiate the implication that any pro-life group which could legitimately be deemed “mainstream” either stayed neutral or embraced the killings.).
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Anyway, the article in question is an announcement for a couple protests of a new abortion mill in Aurora, Illinois (I was gonna call the article a “call to arms,” but as we’ll see below, you never know what phrases might trigger liberal bed-wetting). Jayce is mortified that teen pro-lifers “are determined to do everything they can to stop Planned Parenthood” (his emphasis). “I hope ‘everything’ doesn’t really mean everything,” he says, with no evidence whatsoever that GFL harbors even a shred of sympathy towards anti-abortion violence. Jayce then complains that GFL describes participants of Families against Planned Parenthood’s 40-Day Prayer Vigil as “Prayer Warriors,” because it sounds “way to much like these psychos at Army of God.”
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The so-called Army of God supports killing abortionists. Take a look at what FAPP’s idea of a “Prayer Warrior” consists of, and you’ll see it’s juuust a little different. Take a look at any serious pro-life organization, like the several on CFO’s “Fighting for Life” sidebar (whoops! Can’t say “fighting!”), and the difference between us and the killers is self-evident—to the fair-minded.
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Speaking of facts, let’s take a look at some hard numbers. NARAL’s own statistics (PDF link) cover both the US and Canada & are up to date as of January 1, 2007. Now, bear in mind that an organization which advocates killing children is certainly unlikely to have any qualms about cooking the numbers (when you’re in their line of work, you need all the sympathy you can get), but for the sake of argument, let’s take them at face value. So how pervasive is the anti-choice reign of terror?
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– 7 murders
– 17 attempted murders
– 41 bombings
– 171 arsons
– 82 attempted bombings & arsons
– 574 fake anthrax letters
– 92,000 “acts of disruption” such as bomb threats & harassing calls
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Assuming none of the other cases were counted among the “acts of disruption,” that’s a grand total of 92,892 acts of pro-life extremism covering both the US and Canada. That sounds like a lot, but bear a couple things in mind. About 99% of the acts come from the “disruption” category, and we should be wary of exactly what constitutes a “harassing call” in NARAL’s view—I highly doubt they only counted violent calls; rather, I’ll bet there are quite a few in that number which only consisted of arguing abortion’s morality and/or offering to pray for their forgiveness. Say what you want about the productivity or decorum of such calls, but they certainly can’t be described as malevolent in any way. What’s more, NARAL puts the bomb-threat number at 596, which means the overwhelming majority of the pro-life extremism in general, and of the disruptions in particular, consists of lesser acts.
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As for the incidents of actual violence and genuine threat, each is inexcusable & deplorable, and no pro-lifer should tolerate them in any way. The good news is, the fanatics make up only a tiny minority of Americans against abortion. In contrast, how big is the real pro-life movement? Consider that Pro-Life Wisconsin alone boasts the support of 14,000 families (and that many pro-lifers only belong to one of a state’s multiple pro-life groups given their differences on things like rape exceptions), and the serious, honorable pro-life movement easily dwarfs the unhinged.
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So why does Jayce think saying inflammatory things without evidence is ethical? Because “submission of moral authority makes anything possible, including murder…the lines between morality, martyrdom, and terrorism are blurring more each day.” Is submitting one’s moral authority to religious belief likely to make somebody violent? It can; I’m not aware of any Christian who denies that the Bible’s been used to justify horrible things, and we’re in a world war sparked by Islamic fanaticism. But “submission of moral authority” alone doesn’t create bad results; submission combined with bad teachings does, as does submission in the absence of reason—fortunately, most Judeo-Christians embrace reason wholeheartedly.
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Moreover, if God-submission is to blame for all religious evil, then it deserves equal credit for all religious good. Believing that one is God-bound to do charity and oppose bigotry is just as powerful as believing that one is God-bound to kill. In fact, the secular should be thankful that believers overwhelmingly “submit their moral authority” to the former than to the latter (don’t believe me? Click here to hear Dennis Prager’s interview with Arthur Brooks, author of Who Really Cares).
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One more observation: why is submitting moral authority to something else inherently more problematic than the alternative: deeming oneself the highest arbiter of one’s morality? It seems to me the latter has its own potential to produce arrogance & rationalization. After all, Jayce’s atheism certainly didn’t keep him from smearing GFL without evidence.
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Only someone suffering from religious paranoia could seriously construe the work of Generations for Life as blurring the lines between morality, martyrdom, and terrorism. Neither critical thought nor honest concern could possibly yield such a result. Whether it’s Jayce, Christopher Hitchens, or Sam Harris, some people just can’t escape their prejudices when it comes to religion. That’s a shame, and we can only hope & pray that they’ll someday grow up.

The Case for Life – Part II

Calvin Freiburger abortion, evil, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, morality, pro-life, science
THE VALUE OF LIFE
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Personhood
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Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft writes:
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[T]he essential pro-life argument is as follows. The major premise is: “Thou shalt not kill”—i.e., all deliberate killing of innocent human beings is forbidden. The minor premise is that abortion is the deliberate killing of innocent human beings. The conclusion is that abortion is wrong.
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There are two significantly different pro-choice answers to this argument. The more radical, or “hard” pro-choice position denies the major premise; the less radical, or “soft” pro-choice position denies the minor. “Hard pro-choice” denies the sanctity or inviolability of all humans; “soft pro-choice” denies the humanity of the fetus.
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Part I was in response to “soft pro-choicers.” The following is intended for “hard pro-choicers.”
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Incredibly, we are told that being alive is insufficient to justify protecting unborn humans from deliberate killing, because personhood develops by degrees. Their theory says the unborn are partial humans at different stages of development, so their moral worth increases gradually. This is also described as weighing two conflicting sets of interests, or claims to rights.
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There are glaring problems with this theory, however. The ideas of which gradations of development merit what treatment & protection proposed by pro-choicers always have an unmistakable quality of arbitrariness to them. As Kreeft writes, “It looks very suspiciously like the category [of human non-persons] was invented to justify the killing, for its only members are the humans we happen to be now killing and want to keep killing and want to justify killing.” The various qualities preborn humans lack, supposedly making them less worthy of protection, all fluctuate not only in the womb, but well after our births as well. For example:
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Consciousness: We are not conscious when we sleep, suffer a severe concussion, or are in a coma. Do we cease to be persons under these conditions?
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Pain: Anesthesia and painkilling drugs take away our capacity to feel pain temporarily, as do severe injuries to our nervous system. Is killing us more permissible if our murders will be painless?
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Viability: Just as all of us required natural life support—umbilical cords to nourish us and wombs to protect us—in our earliest stages of growth, many need artificial life support—pacemakers, iron lungs, oxygen tanks, dialysis machines, feeding tubes, etc., to say nothing of various life-saving drugs—in their later stages. Are people who aren’t “viable” without such aid less deserving of protection against homicide?
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We would never dream of applying such standards to born children or adults (well, most of us wouldn’t); why should we take them as persuasive guides to treatment of the preborn? Furthermore, we know that, even after we’re born, we still are not completely developed. Kreeft points out, “If it is more permissible to kill a fetus than to kill an infant because the fetus is less of a person, then it is for exactly the same reason more permissible to kill a seven-year-old, who has not yet developed his reproductive system or many of his educational and communications skills, than to kill a 27-year-old.”
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(And again, those who defend abortion this way, if they are intellectually honest, have no choice but to acknowledge that at least some abortions, and many motives for abortion, are indefensible by their own standards, because all these qualities develop well before birth.)
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Women’s Autonomy over “Their Own Bodies”
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It is also claimed that, because an unborn baby is inside of and dependent upon a pregnant woman, the mother is the dominant party in the relationship has a basic right to dispose of her child. First, this argument ignores the fact that unborn humans are individual, separate human beings. That they are connected to their mothers does not change this—a fetus’ unique genetic identity is his/her own, not the mother’s; a fetus’ developing bodily systems are his/her own, not the mother’s; etc. To say abortion is about control over “women’s own bodies” is simply a falsehood (a falsehood which Kreeft lightheartedly demonstrated as follows: “if the fetus is a part of the mother, then the parts of the fetus must be parts of the mother. But in that case, every pregnant woman has four eyes and four feet, and half of all pregnant women have penises!”).
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Second, why does a fetus remain in his/her mother’s body for nine months? The umbilical cord supplies the fetus with oxygen and nutrients. He/she remains inside Mom’s body for protection from the outside world while developing. The means of delivery may be different, but the needs themselves do not differ from the basic needs of any person: food, air & protection from the elements. Obviously, these differences between pre-birth & post-birth are too small to constitute differences in moral worth.
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Third, babies cannot seriously be said to be “imposing” themselves upon their mother because no human being asks to be conceived in the first place. Coming into existence is completely beyond his/her control. Doesn’t the act of creating a new human life come with any obligations to that life? To say it does not carries an unmistakable air of narcissism.
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Furthermore, no responsible observer could pass judgment on the proper treatment of human beings without seriously considering the thing which makes all the difference in the world between a worthless collection of molecules and an individual of incalculable worth: the soul. If humans are endowed with souls, then their unique moral worth is tied to them, not to any particular trait or ability. Secular pro-choicers will try again to play the religion-in-politics card, or mock the very idea of considering the soul. The religion angle is addressed in Part I, and the fact that belief in the soul has a long, rich and thoughtful history, combined with its centrality to the issue of human moral worth, demands that we take the possibility seriously. And nobody but the most fanatical atheist could conclude there’s zero chance of the soul’s existence, so basic moral responsibility demands that we err on the side of caution—life—in such a serious matter.
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The folly of soft pro-choice is very easy to demonstrate objectively, since it is based on nothing more than ignorance and/or lies. Hard pro-choice is a different animal—it doesn’t claim to accept the same starting premise (that deliberately killing innocent humans is wrong). Unlike pro-lifers, who place moral worth in what something is (a human being), hard pro-choicers place moral worth in what something can do and what qualities it possesses. I must confess that I find their utilitarian philosophy on life so bizarrely alien and incompatible with mine that I can’t even begin to imagine the mind which could adopt such callous & repugnant beliefs. Because of that, I’m somewhat at a loss to dissect it further myself. Fortunately, others have done so far better than I ever could. Everybody with a sincere desire to find the humane, just, and intellectually-honest answer to the issue of abortion really ought to read Peter Kreeft’s two painstaking essays “Human Personhood Begins at Conception” and “The Apple Argument against Abortion”, as well as Ramesh Ponnuru’s aforementioned book The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life. Also, thanks to G-Man’s spirited challenges, the comments section explores the issue in further depth, too.
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Lastly, we’ll return to the matter of doubt. Even if one is ultimately unconvinced by the case & evidence for life, any rational & objective pro-choicer who examines it should at least be able to recognize the possibility, however slight, that pro-lifers are right. So, as President Ronald Reagan said:
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[A]nyone who doesn’t feel sure whether we are talking about a second human life should clearly give life the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn.
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With that in mind, here’s a challenge to all pro-choicers: just how certain are you that you are right and we are wrong? Concerning uncertainty, there are two obvious moral principles. First, while people can take risks for themselves based on personally weighing the evidence & choosing what they feel comfortable with, they are most certainly not entitled to take risks with other people’s possible lives or well-being. Second, the amount of caution & restraint one must exercise is dependent upon the consequences of being wrong. Taking a chance on a brand of TV you’re not familiar with is one thing. Taking a chance on the fate of over a million humans annually is quite another. Consider the following two scenarios:
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First, let’s say pro-lifers are ultimately wrong, but win the Culture War.
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That means about 1 million additional births annually. Hardships will be attached to each, of course, but most of those new lives will also enrich the future in ways too numerous to mention. In addition, no abortions would mean no dangerous consequences of abortion.
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Embryo-involving methods of research have been banned, maybe leading to a delay in medical advancements, but (despite liberal lies) adult stem cell research would still be vigorously supported. Plus, drawing a line in the sand at embryo experimentation would also be likely protect ethical lines which many pro-choicers would agree shouldn’t be crossed, such as giving birth to children for the sole purpose of harvesting their organs.
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Second, let’s say pro-choicers are ultimately wrong, but win the Culture War.
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That means over 45 million murders have taken place since Roe v. Wade, with society’s blessing, and the death toll will keep rising by a million every year. Every victim is utterly innocent & defenseless.
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Every. Last. One.
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The physical & psychological side-effects of abortion will continue to plague women. Embryonic stem-cell research may lead to medical breakthroughs, but an addiction to human life will have been created within the scientific world, potentially opening the door to speciously-rationalized horrors we can’t yet fathom.
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It’s obvious that the consequences of pro-lifers being wrong are nowhere near as dire as the consequences of pro-choicers being wrong, and it’s clear that pro-life victory is far more likely to make the world a better place. That alone should be enough to determine what the ethically-responsible position is.
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These are risks the pro-life community isn’t willing to take. Are you?
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The Case for Life – Part I

Calvin Freiburger abortion, Christianity, evil, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, morality, pro-life, science
WHEN DOES LIFE BEGIN?
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What Are We Protecting?
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First, let’s lay a ground rule. By “life” we refer to any individual organism which is a member of the human species—not individual cells, sperm or eggs, hair follicles, skin, etc. (though a seemingly-needless distinction, these comparisons actually come up in debate—the pro-life movement is sometimes characterized as some strange mission to prevent the destruction of mere organic matter, a straw man which is then “discredited” with challenges like “You kill life every time you get a haircut!”) The latter are merely parts of other organisms, not organisms themselves. Nor are embryonic & fetal humans sacred because they are “potential life;” we seek to prevent their destruction because their lives already exist.
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Theologically Speaking, When Does Life Begin?
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If you claim to believe in the Old Testament or Torah’s veracity as the Word of God and absolute Truth, then the answer is simple. God told Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” Before we have a physical form we have a soul, an identity which God can and does know.
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The Bible has many such references to children within the womb as human and spiritual, and the Catholic Church has recognized this for the majority of its history. Many of these references obviously apply to Judaism as well, but as a Christian I defer to Bonnie Chernin Rogoff, founder of Jews for Life:
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Judaism does not believe in the Christian concept of ensoulment, that at the time of conception the soul enters the embryo making that new life equivalent with a born person. In the earliest stages of pregnancy, up to 40 days post-conception, the fetus is considered “mere fluid” (Mishnah Niddah 3:7). However, after 40 days the fetus is considered formed and a woman who miscarries or aborts has to undergo the ritual cleansing process (mikveh) just as she would if a living child were born (Mishnah Kritot 1:3-6). In the Talmud Arakin 7a-b, the passage indicates it is permissible to desecrate the Shabbat to save the life of an unborn child. Further, while a traditional Jew is forbidden from carrying a knife on the Shabbat, a Jewish surgeon may do so, and use it, to save an unborn child’s life […]
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The view of Judaism is that abortion, while not considered murder, should be strongly discouraged. While the fetus is not accorded full human status, it is still considered a developing life with value, that must be protected and saved whenever possible, unless the life of the mother is in danger. In that case, it is permissible to abort the fetus. The Mishnah Oholoth 7:6 along with Rashi’s commentaries in Talmud Sanhedrin 72b make it very clear that the life (and not the ‘choice’ or ‘health’ of the mother) is the only permissible reason for abortion. Had abortion been performed in Rashi’s time for birth control, convenience, or economic reasons there would have been an outcry from rabbis and the religious community and the practice would have been condemned. Under no circumstances should abortion performed for frivolous reasons be given a stamp of approval by rabbis, under the pretext of “health.”
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Life is a precious, priceless gift from our Creator. Believers have a moral duty to recognize life from the beginning and to stand in defense of lives that cannot defend themselves…but some on the Left would have us believe otherwise.
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Even the Devil Can Quote Scripture
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Abortion is sometimes defended from a theological standpoint, with claims such as:
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Exodus 21: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.” Violence against a pregnant woman causing premature birth is punished monetarily rather than with death; therefore, we are told, killing pre-birth is less grievous than killing post-birth. But what abortion defenders leave out is that the phrase “and yet no mischief follow” means, quite simply, “if the baby survives the attack.” The lines immediately following the passage make this clear: “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye…” In this regard, the fetus’s death is no different than an adult’s.
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The description of Adam’s creation in Genesis says “God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” This supposedly indicates that life does not begin until the first breath is taken. But there are two problems with this view. 1.) As the first humans, Adam & Eve could not have resulted from a pregnancy, so the process by which God created them would likely be different. It seems plausible to assume that He created their bodies and souls separately, then put them together, and once they were in place, our God-given system of sexual reproduction took care of the physical self and God created the spiritual self earlier in development for all of His subsequent children. Subsequent references to humans in the womb suggest this, especially verses 13-16 of Psalm 139. 2.) Like all bodily functions, breathing starts prior to birth. Pro-choicers who define life in this way have themselves inadvertently rendered many abortions unacceptable—near the end of the second trimester, the baby is, in fact, breathing.
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Genesis 38 recounts the tale of Judah and his widowed daughter-in-law, Tamar. Upon discovering her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, Judah orders Tamar to be burnt to death—a punishment he cancels upon discovering that he is the father (he slept with her, mistaking her for a prostitute when she was disguised). Pro-choicers note that the sentence would also have killed Tamar’s unborn twins; therefore, the unborn must have less moral worth than a person. But this theory fails immediately: considering that Judah has “married outside the faith, raised [at least] two wicked sons, wrongfully accused his daughter-in-law of his sons’ deaths, lied to his daughter-in-law, refused to keep the law of levirate marriage and, of course, had sex with a prostitute;” he’s not exactly a moral compass! “But nobody other than Tamar prevented him from carrying it out, did they?” True, but that only means people deferred to his judgment & authority; it doesn’t say those people were right to do so. Since the primary message of the story concerns Judah’s wickedness and redemption, not babies, it can hardly be seen as a barometer to treatment of the unborn.
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“Jesus never mentioned [abortion] even once.” Jesus never mentioned drive-by shootings, either. But (obviously) he did mention murder. Value systems such as Christianity don’t need to list off every conceivable method of doing wrong as long as there is a clear set of moral principles in place to determine whether or not particular actions constitute sin. Since “thou shalt not murder” is about as unequivocally Christian as possible, one need only show that the unborn have lives of their own to establish that Jesus would forbid their deliberate destruction.
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When faced with contrary interpretations of Scripture, it is important to do two things: first, examine the context of the quotation in question, and second, weigh it against the entirety of the Biblical evidence. In the final analysis, Judeo-Christian teaching firmly sides with the sanctity of life.
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Religious Convictions in Politics
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“Even if God wants us to personally recognize life from conception onward, we can’t apply a personal religious belief to public policy.” Wrong again.
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The First Amendment guarantees that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson famously referred to this as a “wall of separation between Church & State.” Fashionable though it may be to “evolve” the Constitution’s meaning over time, here we’ll stick to a literal read of its actual text, as understood by the Founding Fathers.
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The Founding Fathers understood “establishment of religion” to mean what it did under “the Church of England: a formal union of political and ecclesiastical authority in the hands of the state,” as Dr. Mark Levin writes in the excellent Men in Black (hardcover, p. 36). In other words, the Amendment prevents a church from imposing enforced regulations or punishments upon people, such as ineligibility from public office, taxation of minority sects, and jailing or executing heretics; as well as the converse: preventing the state from suppressing the religious activities of churches and private citizens. Hence, it is a rather straightforward separation of two organizations.
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Separating religious principles from politics is very different. There is nothing in the Constitution that dictates what values, ideas, or motivations are allowed to animate people. Indeed, such a restriction—regulating the intellectual or moral criteria by which American citizens are allowed to judge candidates & policies—would be un-American to the core.
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Consider the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Written by Thomas Jefferson, it is rightly hailed as a prime example of American enlightenment. But its actual text would surprise many who only hear it mentioned in passing as a victory for church-state separation. Jefferson wrote (emphasis added):
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“Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others…”
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In Jefferson’s mind, freedom of thought was God’s will, and he had no qualms about positing that the country should follow such a Judeo-Christian value. The Constitution allows us to make such judgments; the only limitation is that in doing so, we cannot infringe upon the other rights outlined in the Constitution (“But I thought abortion was a constitutional right!” Patience; we won’t forget to address that one.).
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(There is a lot of eye-opening reading on the Founding Father’s true religious intentions for America; William J. Federer’s America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations is a great resource to start with.)
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“I still think opposing abortion is a religious teaching, so we can’t legislate it.” Consider that prohibitions against murder, theft and lying in the Ten Commandments are among the most explicit religious teachings of all, more so than those against abortion. Does that mean our laws against homicide, theft, slander, libel, or perjury are unconstitutional because they force people to abide by the Ten Commandments? While religious belief must not infringe upon our natural rights in public policy, there is nothing unconstitutional about accepting religious advice on how best to protect those rights. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Democrat Sen. John Kerry cited his religious convictions as “why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice.” In other words, he wanted to “impose” his religious beliefs about poverty, nature, etc. upon the American people. Until Kerry’s stances infringe upon actual rights, he is entitled to persuade a majority of his fellow Americans of their merits. The same holds true for marriage activists (on both sides), for pro-lifers, and for the aforementioned “Christians for choice.”
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Think of it this way: protecting innocent people is a goal that transcends belief, one that all believers and unbelievers ought to agree upon. Believers simply accept religious insight to help determine whether or not the unborn fit into the category of innocent people. Right or wrong, it’s a proposition that is fully appropriate for public discourse and the will of the people—not censorship or disqualification.
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Scientifically Speaking, When Does Life Begin?
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Of course, the religion-out-of-politics line is little more than a ploy to disqualify rather than debate pro-lifers, or to avoid taking a firm stand. In fact, if there is one truth that must be driven home, it is this: the question of life’s beginning is not by any means exclusive to religion. Science can answer it—and it has.
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In his magnificent The Party of Death, Ramesh Ponnuru writes:
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We have developed ways of talking that enable us to pretend that the point can be blinked away. In the case of abortion and embryo research, the main technique is to suggest that there is some great mystery about “when life begins,” and that this alleged question is a religious or philosophical one. Yet science has since solved the mystery. From conception onward, what exists is a distinct organism of the human species. The philosophical question is what we make of that fact. To jumble these issues together—the essentially scientific question of categorizing an embryo as human and living, and the moral question of whether it follows from that categorization that it has a right to life—is a logical error. Justice Blackmun, of course, proceeded in just this erroneous fashion in Roe. And if we are not careful, talking in terms of “meaningful life,” or, as [author Ronald] Dworkin does, of “life in earnest,” can lead us into this error as well.
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All of us who read this page were once human embryos. The history of our bodies began with the formation of an embryo. We were those embryos, just as we were once fetuses, infants, children, and adolescents. But we were never a sperm cell and an egg cell. (Those cells were genetically and functionally parts of other human beings.) The formation of the embryo marks the beginning of a new human life: a new and complete organism that belongs to the human species. Embryology textbooks say so, with no glimmer of uncertainty or ambiguity.
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That new organism is alive rather than dead or inanimate. It is human rather than a member of some other species. It is an organism distinct from all others. It is not a functional part of a larger organism (the way a kidney is part of a larger organism). It maintains its own organic unity over time. It directs its own development, according to its genetic template, through the embryonic, fetal, and subsequent stages. Such terms as “blastocyst,” “newborn,” and “adolescent” denote different stages of development in a being of the same type, not different types of beings. At each of our earlier stages of life, we have been, as we are now, whole living members of the species Homo sapiens. (hardcover, p. 77-78)
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And medical textbooks do indeed say so:
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Human Embryology, 3rd Edition by William Larsen, Lawrence Sherman, S. Steven Potter, & William Scott: “In this text, we begin our description of the developing human with the formation and differentiation of the male and female sex cells or gametes, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual.” (p. 1)
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The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th Edition by Keith Moore & TVN. Persaud: “Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” (p. 18)
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Human Embryology & Teratology, 3rd Edition by Ronan O’Rahilly & Fabiola Muller: “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a ‘moment’) is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte.” (p. 8)
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Developmental Biology, 6th Edition by Scott Gilbert: “Fertilization is the process whereby two sex cells (gametes) fuse together to create a new individual with genetic potentials derived from both parents.” (p. 185)
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Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia, 7th Edition by Douglas Considine: “At the moment the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the union results in a fertilized ovum (zygote), a new life has begun.” (p. 943)
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Langman’s Medical Embryology, 7th Edition by TW Sadler: “The development of a human begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.” (p. 3)
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Patten’s Foundations of Embryology, 6th Edition by Bruce Carlson: “Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)… The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.” (p. 3)
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It doesn’t take much to see the common pro-choice line “clumps of cells” is empty, simplistic propaganda: Eye-opening information about fetal development is no secret, we know that preborn children are capable of feeling pain (note: link is a PDF file) at approximately 20 weeks, and the latest ultrasound technology shows us these “clumps” are surprisingly familiar.
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So where does all this leave us? The life of a human being does, in fact, begin at conception; so every abortion, every embryo discarding (either via stem-cell research or in-vitro fertilization), and some types of birth control destroy a human being. Yet when faced with this reality, pro-choicers have developed new criteria for human rights, which are designed to deny them protection based upon factors other than their biological humanity…factors which will be explored in Part II: The Value of Life.
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The Case for Life – Introduction & Index

Calvin Freiburger abortion, Christianity, evil, morality, pro-life, science
The First Right
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We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—US Declaration of Independence
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So reads the founding document of our nation. The unalienable right to life can be thought of as the First Right of our Republic, because without it, no other right can be exercised. Thus, protecting that right is the paramount duty of our government and society. And in order to best fulfill that duty, we must carefully determine exactly what constitutes life, and when we have it.
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In this troubled age, when respect for life remains in doubt even within the Republican Party, there is no more important cause than standing up for America’s soul and turning back the callous disregard for the innocent which has infected our nation like a cancer in the past decades. In this upcoming five-part essay, I shall attempt to articulate both the case for life and its proper role in the GOP & conservative movement as comprehensively as possible.
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Part I: When Does Life Begin?
Part II: The Value of Life
Part III: Life and Public Policy
Part IV: Life and the Constitution
Part V: Pro-Life Strategies
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Part I examines when life begins & why it deserves protection, and will be posted shortly after this Introduction.

Memo to Governor Doyle

Calvin Freiburger evil, good news, pro-life, science, stem cells
More stem-cell advances, and they’re not embryonic:
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Research reported this week by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice. The race is now on to apply the surprisingly straightforward procedure to human cells.-If researchers succeed, it will make it relatively easy to produce cells that seem indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells, and that are genetically matched to individual patients. There are limits to how useful and safe these would be for therapeutic use in the near term, but they should quickly prove a boon in the lab.
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[…]
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But the iPS cells aren’t perfect, and could not be used safely to make genetically matched cells for transplant in, for example, spinal-cord injuries. Yamanaka found that one of the factors seems to contribute to cancer in 20% of his chimaeric mice. He thinks this can be fixed, but the retroviruses used may themselves also cause mutations and cancer. “This is really dangerous. We would never transplant these into a patient,” says Jaenisch. In his view, research into embryonic stem cells made by cloning remains “absolutely essential”.
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Do we still have a way to go? Of course. I’m not going to take the Doyle route and pretend my favored research is a bed of roses completely devoid of thorns, but the potential of not just this development, but past advances such as umbilical cord blood, is undeniable. Given that we know the embryo to be a living human, and that embryonic-stem-cell research would be years off anyway, what possible rationale is there to justify killing in science’s name?

The Pro-Life Case Against Rudy Giuliani

Calvin Freiburger 2008, abortion, conservatism, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, National Review, Ponnuru, pro-life
Hat tip to EFM for Ramesh Ponnuru’s powerful article on “why abortion should doom Giuliani’s campaign.” It’s a long one, but I’m posting the whole thing due to the message’s importance:
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In April, a reporter overheard Rudy Giuliani explaining his theory of the campaign: “that the other candidates would divide up the ‘right-wing’ voters, as he called them, leaving him to consolidate the moderates and the economic and military conservatives who aren’t fixated on social issues.” It was a perfectly reasonable analysis. People for whom prohibiting abortion is a top priority are not going to favor the presidential campaign of a man who wants to keep abortion legal and, indeed, to subsidize it. It would be irrational if they did favor it, and it would be irrational for Giuliani to court them.
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Since Giuliani’s campaign began, however, vast quantities of political commentary have been devoted to obscuring these simple truths. Generally this commentary has come from writers who do not themselves care about protecting unborn life but feel qualified to lecture people who do about how they should advance their agenda. While the emphases of the commentators vary, their basic argument is that presidents cannot do much to affect abortion policy except to appoint judges, and that Giuliani is just as conservative as the other candidates on that question.
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This argument has not swayed many of the “right-wing” voters Giuliani mentioned. But they are not, as Giuliani’s boosters often note, the entirety of the Republican electorate. Some Republican primary voters, perhaps a third of them, think that abortion should usually be legal. In the middle are those who might be called the party’s swing voters on abortion: They are pro-life, but not vehemently so, and may pay more attention to issues such as the war on terrorism and taxes than they do to abortion in determining for whom to vote. It is this group that Giuliani is trying hardest to court. But all three groups have reason for concern about Giuliani’s position on abortion.
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NO MODUS VIVENDI
So far, not even pro-life organizations have gone to the barricades against Giuliani. As yet, there is no movement afoot for “Anyone but Rudy.” Perhaps pro-life leaders had the same initial reaction to Giuliani’s campaign that I did. I doubted that Giuliani could win the nomination, not least because of his support for abortion. But I did not want pro-lifers to close the door on him, either. Instead, I thought, pro-lifers should encourage him to meet us halfway. If Giuliani somehow won the nomination, I wanted it to come only after he had sweated blood trying to appeal to us. A painful nomination process would limit the damage that his precedent would set: It would establish that a pro-choicer could win the Republican nomination only if he had exceptional qualities to offset that flaw and reached a modus vivendi with pro-lifers.
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But while thinking the pro-life movement and its allies should give Giuliani a chance, I thought it unlikely that I would be able to vote for him in the primary myself even if he made the right gestures. There was, for one thing, his past support for partial-birth abortion.
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In 2000, Giuliani had briefly run for the Senate. He sought to replace Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a pro-choice Democrat who opposed partial-birth abortion, calling it “too close to infanticide.” The Democrat in the race, Hillary Clinton, disagreed — and so did Giuliani. He said, “I would vote to preserve the option for women.” He had said the year before that he didn’t “see my position on that changing.” He would not change his position even to get the Conservative party to endorse him in the Senate contest.
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This year, Giuliani’s position changed. He said that he now supported a ban because it included an exception for the life of the mother. This explanation made no sense. He had never previously mentioned this concern, and earlier versions of the bill that he opposed had included a life-of-the-mother exception. But Giuliani’s nearly pointless dishonesty was not as troubling as the mere fact that he had once supported partial-birth abortion at all.
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Think, for a moment, about the reasons the pro-life movement had highlighted this issue to begin with. Our society does not, to put it mildly, cultivate in its members a sensibility that recoils viscerally from the intentional destruction of human lives at their earliest stages. The case for protecting those lives does not come easily and naturally to people in this society, unless they happen to belong to sub-societies, almost always religious, that try to form people’s consciences against such destruction. So it is that people of generally sound mind and good will can reach what pro-lifers regard as incorrect conclusions about abortion and related issues.
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But partial-birth abortion was different. Our society is not so far gone that people cannot grasp its horror. Even many people who can see nothing wrong with allowing early-term abortion instinctively knew that partial-birth abortion should not be allowed. For his part, Giuliani could not see that his indifference to the practice meant that he was either far gone in the ideology of “choice” or willing to override his moral intuitions for the sake of apparent political convenience. If a politician had, in 2000, declared that he had found Peter Singer’s arguments for infanticide persuasive, but then later announced that he had changed his mind, we would not have let bygones be bygones. We would have had serious nagging doubts about the man; and so we should, if to a lesser degree, about Giuliani.
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A CLEAR RECORD
As it turned out, Giuliani went no farther in pro-lifers’ direction. In a series of confused and confusing comments, he even declared that he believed state governments should fund abortions for women who cannot pay for them. It may be that his rival Mitt Romney’s attempts to present himself as a convert on a large number of issues, combined with the ferocious reaction to those attempts, caused Giuliani to think it better to stay in place. Pro-lifers, and everyone else, will have to take him as he is.
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Lazy and biased reporters have been calling Giuliani’s position on abortion “centrist.” It has been no such thing. The libertarian columnist Deroy Murdock, a fan of Giuliani’s, thinks that his fellow pro-lifers can take solace in the fact that abortion rates fell when he was mayor. They fell faster than the national average (but more slowly than the state average). But if Giuliani’s policies caused any portion of this decline — and that is a big if — it was an incidental effect. They were certainly not designed to bring the abortion rate down.
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Murdock further points out that Giuliani did not promote abortion when he was mayor. But consider the context. Late-term abortions are easily available in the city, it’s a destination for women elsewhere in the country who are seeking them, and parental notification is not required. The city, moreover, funds abortions for all who cannot afford them. Giuliani showed no discomfort with this state of affairs. Indeed, believing in private charity, Giuliani and his then wife provided a little extra funding of their own to Planned Parenthood. How much more could Giuliani have done to make abortion prevalent in New York? Murdock’s standard — that he didn’t go out of his way to promote abortion in what has rightly been called the country’s “abortion capital” — amounts to giving Giuliani credit for not going around performing abortions himself.
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In a way, Giuliani’s nomination would cause more trouble for the pro-life cause than his election would. The pro-life cause can survive without a pro-life president: It emerged from the Clinton years stronger than it had been at their beginning. But it will find it harder to survive without a pro-life party. And that would be the meaning of his nomination, even if most Republican congressmen and governors remained pro-life, and even if the party platform, left unread and unheeded, continued to offer solidarity to the unborn. America has been a presidential nation, politically, for almost a century now. The parties are, in the public mind, their leaders; and those leaders are their presidential nominees.
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The most specific polls on abortion policy ask respondents whether they think abortion should be banned altogether, banned with exceptions when the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life or resulted from rape, or allowed. Such polls consistently find that the people who want to ban abortion altogether and the people who want to ban it with rare exceptions add up to a majority of Americans. If Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, that majority will have no representation at the level of presidential politics. We will instead have a contest between a candidate who believes that taxpayers should fund abortion through the federal government and one who believes they should do it through state governments.
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In 1973, the Supreme Court tried to declare an end to the state-by-state debate on abortion by setting abortion policy nationally. The New York Times, the next day, reported on the decision as a “historic resolution” of the abortion controversy. Before that day, supporters of legal abortion had claimed that their policy was necessary for women’s equality, or population control, or the promotion of liberty. On that day, however, they acquired the most powerful arrow in their quiver: the assertion that abortion policy was a settled matter, an assertion that had the strong support of the country’s journalistic, financial, and legal elites. The principal reason that the question has not been closed is that over the last 30 years the Republican party has stood — shakily at times, it is true, but always officially — against this elite consensus.
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The abortion lobby would not be alone in declaring the Republican party to have capitulated to this consensus with Giuliani’s nomination. So would neutral observers; and even some pro-lifers would give up the fight.
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EYEING THE JUDICIARY
But Giuliani’s judicial appointments will make up for all of that, we are told. Giuliani has promised to nominate “strict constructionists” to the federal bench. The phrase drives actual judicial conservatives, such as Justice Antonin Scalia, up the wall; but we know what he is getting at. Or do we? Giuliani says that the judges of his ideal might vote to overturn Roe, or might vote to keep it as a precedent. He is, evidently, pro-choice about his judges. He will not share with us his opinion of what the Court should do, or even whether Roe was correctly decided as an original matter. (He has been perfectly willing to sound off on other constitutional issues.) He does not stand against abortion; he does not even stand for democracy on the issue. Giuliani’s party would no longer be a pro-life party. It would instead be a party committed vaguely to a judicial philosophy that he can’t even quite name.
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Now, in one sense, Giuliani’s views of Roe do not matter. None of our last three Republican presidents, all of them pro-life, has interviewed possible judicial nominees to get them to declare that they would vote to overturn Roe. If they had vetted nominees in that manner, it would have been very hard to get them confirmed.
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But Giuliani’s nomination would change everything. By moving the politics of abortion to the left, his nomination would also — regardless of Giuliani’s intentions now — move the politics of judicial confirmations to the left. If the range of acceptable opinions on abortion policy narrowed, so would the range of acceptable opinions on Roe. A nominee who followed the pattern of Samuel Alito, with a history of hostility to Roe and no extravagant shows of respect for it in his confirmation hearings, would seem more extreme than Alito in fact did. If Giuliani nonetheless sent up such a nominee, would he really fight for him if the Democrats chose Roe as the battle line?
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And once a nominee made it to the bench? We have reason to think that the justices are exquisitely sensitive to political cues. It has been speculated that the three Republican appointees who wrote the plurality opinion rescuing Roe in 1992 thought they were doing their party a favor; and when the current administration signaled to the justices that it did not want them to abandon racial preferences in university admissions, a decisive number of them seemed to follow the advice fairly closely. Under a President Giuliani, we can expect Justice Kennedy’s pro-Roe inclinations to harden. His own nominees might, on the bench, read the political climate the same way. The message of Giuliani’s nomination on the abortion cases would be simple: The elected branches of government are not interested in a reopening of this question.
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But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that President Giuliani did, indeed, nominate stalwart conservatives to the Supreme Court; that he saw them through successful confirmation hearings; and that, with their votes, Roe was finally overturned. Let us assume, that is, that thanks to Giuliani, states would have the freedom to move against abortion. That is the maximalist case for a pro-lifer to have hope in Giuliani. What would happen the next day? If the Democratic Congress sent Giuliani legislation to codify Roe — and thus to take back that freedom from the states — would he really veto it? He has not even promised to veto abortion-funding legislation. If he let it through, pro-lifers would have gained almost nothing.
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And they would have lost on other fronts. Pro-lifers have some business outside the courts, and both they and Republicans generally have deemed that business important. Most Republicans have fought to restrict federal funding on embryo-destructive research, for example, and to keep federal funds from going to organizations that promote or perform abortions overseas. The case that pro-lifers can live with Giuliani assumes that none of these legislative issues matter.
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A NET GAIN
The pro-life position has carried real costs for the Republican party, in terms of lost votes. But those costs have been more than offset by the gains the party has made. For more than two decades, exit polls have shown that people who vote on the basis of abortion are far more likely to be pro-lifers than pro-choicers. (Using that measure, the issue netted George W. Bush 2.4 million votes in 2000.) Without the realignment of American politics based on social issues — a realignment caused by abortion more than any other issue — the Republicans would never have attained the near-parity they have today.
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Now would be a strange moment in our politics for Republicans to abandon the pro-life cause, or even to weaken their commitment to it. The party is in serious trouble these days, for all kinds of reasons — but its pro-life position is not one of them. The public has been moving in a pro-life direction. In this season of Republican discontent, for the first time ever, a few polls show more Americans identifying themselves as pro-life than pro-choice. The 2006 elections went badly for pro-lifers: But pro-lifers, as a group, did better than Republicans, as a group. In the tightest races, the Democrats were far more likely to emphasize their economic liberalism than their social liberalism; and in a few of the tight races the Democrats won by running an out-and-out social conservative.
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Some of Giuliani’s supporters have argued that his candidacy offers the Republican party a chance to “move beyond” the social issues. If Giuliani ever embraced that rationale himself — if his campaign ever became an explicit effort to sideline pro-lifers — then pro-lifers would be crazy not to respond in kind. But that rationale would also make no sense for the party’s future. Campaigning on economic and national-security issues alone, Republicans would almost certainly do worse.
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In 2004, George W. Bush carried 80 percent of voters who chose their candidate based on “moral values,” but lost 80 percent of voters who cited “jobs” and “the economy” as their top issues. The New York Times that year ran a story about voters in swing states such as Ohio and Iowa who were torn between the presidential candidates: They thought their economic interests lay with John Kerry, but their values lined up with Bush. Nominating Giuliani would make such voters’ choices a lot easier. (And that’s leaving aside the possibility of a party split, a convention walkout, or a third-party challenge.)
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If Giuliani lost because he alienated those voters, the damage might outlast 2008. If the Republicans nominated a pro-lifer in 2012, that candidate would have to overcome these voters’ suspicion that the party did not really care about the issues that drew them to it.
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Many Giuliani supporters favor him in spite of his social-issue positions, not because of them. They do not assume that his pro-choice position would make him more electable or a better president. Rather, they assume that his virtues — his competence, his proven leadership ability, his accomplishments as the mayor who saved New York City and bucked up the nation during Sept. 11 — more than make up for that position.
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Perhaps it would work in November 2008. The political danger for Republicans is that they would then be trading a one-time victory for future trouble. The next Republican nominee will, after all, almost certainly not have Giuliani’s distinctive strengths but will have to deal with his impact on the party’s structure. Win or lose, then, Giuliani could damage the brand.
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The most serious case for Giuliani is that the country needs his strong leadership, particularly since we are engaged in a war on terrorism. This case cannot be dismissed out of hand, but it is not a slam-dunk either. We don’t really know how he would handle national-security policy. We can guess that he would have fired underperforming generals in Iraq; but we have no idea whether he would have launched the Iraq War in the first place. Toughness and competence are not a policy; and it is not obvious that Giuliani is more competent, or tougher, than his principal rivals.
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Some of Giuliani’s pro-life opponents are single-issue voters. But all pro-lifers should rank the sanctity of life somewhere above, say, telecom policy in evaluating a candidate. There are other considerations that argue for and against Giuliani. His nomination would, however, set back causes that most Republicans have rightly considered important, and for that very reason could weaken conservatism generally. That is reason enough to reject him.

Planned Parenthood Outrage

Calvin Freiburger abortion, crime, Planned Parenthood, pro-life, scandal
Still think Planned Parenthood is a swell outfit? Look no further. I understand the Justice Department has a lot on its plate, but you’d sure think they could devote more focus to such grievous conduct against minors and to obstruction of justice, both from a group that gets funding from we the people. And of course, that’s just the legally-recognized wrongs they do…

Cultural Crusader

Calvin Freiburger 2008, abortion, conservatism, culture, gay marriage, homosexuality, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, pro-life
Yesterday, Mitt Romney delivered a powerful speech in front of Massachusetts Citizens for Life:
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It is an honor to receive this award.
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I recognize that it is awarded for where I am on life, not for where I have been.
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I respect the fact that you arrived at this place of principle a long time ago.
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And I appreciate the fact that you are inclined to honor someone who arrived here only a few years ago.
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I am evidence that your work, that your relentless campaign to promote the sanctity of human life, bears fruit.
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I follow a long line of converts — George Herbert Walker Bush, Henry Hyde, Ronald Reagan. Each of them has made meaningful contributions to this cause.
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It is instructive to see the double standard at work here. When a pro-life figure changes to pro-choice, it hardly gets a mention. But when someone becomes pro-life, the pundits go into high dudgeon.
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And so, I am humbled and grateful to be welcomed so warmly and openly tonight.
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And as many of you know, you were always welcome in my office when I was Governor.
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Together we worked arm in arm. And I can promise you this — that will be the case again when I am President.
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I am often asked how I, as a conservative Republican, could have been elected in Massachusetts. I tell them that there were three things that helped account for my improbable victory.
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First, the state was in a fiscal crisis. A meltdown, of sorts. Beacon Hill couldn’t get budgets done on time. Another big tax hike looked like it was on the way. I promised to balance the budget without raising taxes. And, as you know, together with the legislature, that’s what I did. We eliminated a $3 billion shortfall. And by the time I left, my surpluses had replenished the rainy-day fund to over $2 billion.
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Second, we were in a jobs crisis. Massachusetts was losing jobs every month. People were afraid. I went to work to bring jobs back to our state. From the end of the recession, we added 60,000 new jobs. And, we finally got our economic development act together — it was in large measure responsible for the economic growth that we continue to experience even today.
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And third, I think that values also played a role in my campaign success. My opponent said she would sign a bill for gay marriage. I said that I would oppose gay marriage and civil unions. My opponent favored bilingual education. I did not. I said that to be successful in America, our kids need to speak the language of America. And as you will surely recall, my opponent wanted to lower the age of consent for an abortion from 18 to 16 — and I did not.
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And so, social conservatives, many of them Democrats and Independents, joined fiscal conservatives to elect a Republican.
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That being said, I had no inkling that I would find myself in the center of the battlefield on virtually every social issue of our time.
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The first battle came when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, by a one vote majority, found a right to same sex marriage in our constitution. I’m sure that John Adams would be surprised.
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The Court said that traditional marriage as we have known it, “is rooted in persistent prejudices” and “works a deep and scarring hardship … for no rational reason.”
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No rational reason? How about children? Isn’t marriage about the development and nurturing of children? And isn’t a child’s development enhanced by access to both genders, by having both a mother and a father?
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I believe that the Court erred because it focused on adults and adult rights.
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They should have focused on the rights of children. The ideal setting for the raising of a child is a home with a loving mother and father.
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Many of you joined the effort to stop, to block or to slow down this unprecedented Court decision. We took every step we could conceive of, within the law.
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First, we pushed for a stay — denied.
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Then, we fought for an amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman — lost the vote in the legislature by only 2 votes.
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We upheld the 1913 law that prohibited out of state gay couples from marrying here, thus preventing Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage.
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And in the final analysis, we went to work to secure a vote of the citizens, a battle that took us to court, with a win. And now we are just one step away from putting it on the ballot.
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The issue now is whether a single vote majority of the Court will be allowed to trump the voice of the people in a democracy. If it is, then John Adams would truly be astonished.
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By the way, we all learned that the phrase “slippery slope” describes a very real phenomenon. The implications of the marriage decision quickly went well beyond adult marriage. Efforts were made to change birth certificates by removing “mother” and “father” and replacing them with “parent A” and “parent B.” I said no to that. And parents of a child in 2nd grade were told that their son is required to listen to the reading of a book called the “King and the King,” about a prince who marries a prince. The school’s rationale was since gay marriage was legal, there was nothing wrong with such a policy.
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And then another slide along the slippery slope. The Catholic Church was forced to end its adoption service, which was crucial in helping the state find homes for some of our most difficult to place children. Why? Because the Church favors placements in homes with a mother and a father. Now, even religious freedom was being trumped by the new-found right of gay marriage. I immediately drafted and introduced legislation to grant religious liberty protection, but the legislature would not take it up.
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I have taken this message to Washington, explaining the far-reaching implications of gay marriage and the need to support a federal marriage amendment. I testified before Congress. I wrote to every US Senator. Unfortunately, several senators from my own party voted against the marriage amendment.
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The fight is not over.
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In the midst of that battle, another arose. It involved cloning and embryo farming for purposes of research. I studied the subject in great depth. I have high hopes for stem cell research. But for me, a bright moral line is crossed when we create new life for the sole purpose of experimentation and destruction.
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That’s why I fought to keep cloning and embryo farming illegal.
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It was during this battle on cloning and embryo farming that I began to focus a good deal more of my thinking on abortion.
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When I first ran for office, I considered whether this should be a personal decision or whether it should be a societal and government decision. I concluded that I would support the law as it was in place — effectively, a pro-choice position.
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And I was wrong.
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The Roe v. Wade mentality has so cheapened the value of human life that rational people saw human life as mere research material to be used, then destroyed. The slippery slope could soon lead to racks and racks of living human embryos, Brave New World-like, awaiting termination.
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What some see as a mere clump of cells is actually a human life. Human life has identity. Human life has the capacity to love and be loved. Human life has a profound dignity, undiminished by age or infirmity.
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And so I publicly acknowledged my error, and joined with you to promote the sanctity of human life.
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And my words were matched with my actions. As you know, every time I faced a decision as governor that related to human life, I came down on the side of the sanctity of life.
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I fought to ban cloning.
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I fought to ban embryo farming.
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I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation.
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I fought for abstinence education in our schools.
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And I vetoed a so-called emergency contraception bill that gave young girls drugs without prescription, drugs that could be abortive and not just contraceptive.
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That is my record on life as your governor.
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It was fought against long odds. You know, you go up against those same odds every day. I always appreciated the strong support I received from you, the pro-life community, for these actions.
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But not everyone agrees with me. You can’t be a pro-life governor in a pro-choice state without considering that there are heartfelt and thoughtful arguments on both sides of the question. And I certainly believe in treating all people with respect and tolerance. It is our job to persuade our fellow citizens of our position.
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The problem is there are some people who believe that their views must be imposed on everyone. More and more, the vehicle for this imposition is the courts. Slowly but surely, the courts have taken it upon themselves to be the final arbiters of our lives. They forget that the most fundamental right in a democracy is the right to participate in your own governance.
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Make no mistake: abortion and same-sex marriage are not rights to be discovered in the Constitution.
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I think Chief Justice John Roberts put it best at his confirmation hearing, when he described the role of a judge. Chief Justice Roberts said, “Judges and Justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them…and I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”
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Now that’s the type of Justice that I would appoint to the court.
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On the tenth anniversary of Roe v Wade, Ronald Reagan observed that the Court’s decision had not yet settled the abortion debate. It had become “a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation.”
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More than thirty years later, that is still the case. Numerous court decisions have not settled this question, but have further divided the nation. And Roe v. Wade continues to work its destructive logic throughout our society.
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This cannot continue.
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At the heart of American democracy is the principle that the most fundamental decisions should ultimately be decided by the people themselves.
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We are a decent people who have a commitment to the worth and dignity of every person, ingrained in our hearts and etched in our national purpose.
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So these are the challenges that face the next President: strengthening our country and our families, protecting marriage and human life and preserving for our children the true blessings of liberty.
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These are noble purposes, worthy of a great people.