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We do not sentence convicted killers to death unless their guilt is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet we abort 1.5 million fetuses every year with their humanity clearly in dispute and with pro-abortion advocates unwilling or unable to define either when life begins or by what mysterious process merely passing through the birth canal bestows humanity and human rights upon us. It has been said that if ultrasound pictures of the unborn had been available in 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision would have been different. Three decades of medical advances have changed the meaning of the word “viable.” But our human rights should not be dependent on technology.
Suppose the homosexual lobby is right. Suppose there is a “gay” gene. Would that be considered a birth defect, something to be eliminated? Wouldn’t it be ironic if the human and civil rights of gays are ultimately denied by the denial of life itself, with abortion becoming a constitut- ionally protected method of gay-bashing? After all, the liberals tell us, the fetus is not a human being.
This may seem to fly in the face of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and be ripe, even if passed, to be declared unconsti- tutional, but it was in the majority opinion written by the late Justice Harry Blackmun that the door was left open to congressional action to protect the unborn. Blackmun wrote: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.” He also wrote that if the unborn life was proven to be a person, “the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’s right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.”
