Abortion was never a right!

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision, there seems to be a lot of confusion over what has just happened. The erroneous idea seems to be that Roe v. Wade gave us the “right” to have an abortion and the recent decision took that right away. I blame the public schools and main stream media for the confusion. We have an entire generation of people who has not learned history nor do they receive “news” with any more substance than your average bumper sticker. Tsk tsk. A lot is being said about the subject right now and I don't want to repeat the same things everyone else is saying. Instead, I'm going to try to give you a few original thoughts I have about the matter.

The first thing we have to understand is where our rights come from. There are too many people who suffer under the delusion that the government gives us our rights. The danger in this way of thinking is that, if the government gives us our rights, the government can just as easily take away our rights. Our liberties would rise and fall at the whim of judges and legislators. That's scary and it's a quick path to tyranny.

When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, he explained very succintly from where we derive our rights. From that document, we can read the following.

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.

Wow! How much profundity we can learn from just these few words!

RIGHTS COME FROM GOD

One thing I've noticed about the left is that they are very noble-sounding and puffed-up when talking about protecting people's rights but they are rather vague on explaining how these people came to have these rights. They scoff at the idea that rights come from God. They're all about “separation of church and state” so to say that rights come from God is an affront to their sensibilities. So I have to ask, where do rights come from if not from God? Some might answer that rights are determined by society. If that were true, then a majority of people could simply vote to oppress the minority and it would be “fair.” But that doesn't sound very fair, does it?

Others will say that our rights are given to us by the government. Well, the government is not really a sentient being by itself but is merely just a body of people. Government officials are supposed to represent the views of the people who elected them so this is simply another case of rights determined by society.

Finally, some people will appeal to some cosmic sense of “fairness.” Rights are somehow universal and simply belong to humanity. This is a very subjective standard. Are these cosmic rules absolute? Where can I go to find them? Show me this universal right to an abortion because I don't believe it exists.

I heard a great definition of “wrong” from Dinesh D'Souza. He said, “wrong” means it's not the way it out to be. In a godless, impersonal universe, it would be very hard to say anything is wrong. The universe doesn't care what happens and there is no way things “ought to be.” Things are only how they are.

Christians, on the other hand, have a reason to believe in right and wrong. In Genesis 1:31, after God had created the universe, the Bible tells us, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” God created the world the way it ought to be and, whenever something isn't the way God intended it, it's wrong. I've said before, it's God's world so it's God's rules!

If any absolute standard exists, then I say it must be the standard of the Bible. If our rights are endowed by our Creator, it seems fairly certain that something specifically prohibited by God in the Bible (namely murdering or harming a child) could never be considered a God given right. God is the author of life and only God can determine when it would be just to end life. The Right to Life was among those rights Jefferson said had been endowed upon us by our Creator.

THESE TRUTHS ARE SELF-EVIDENT

When Thomas Jefferson penned the famous words I cited above, he said the truth of them was “self-evident.” He didn't need to explain why they were true. He didn't need to offer a long defense or detailed apology. He merely presented the words in bold confidence, knowing they cannot be denied by any rational person. I believe the truth of them is just as obvious today.

I remind you again, the self-evident truths that Jefferson claimed we possess included life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Can anyone deny we have a right to life? Hardly! And I assert that a conceived child also has a right to live. It's obvious and I don't see any need to justify my assertion. To the contrary, if someone should deny that an unborn child has the right to live, then the burden would be on him to justify that claim.

Some people believe that abortion is a “right.” Really? It is somehow “self-evident” that a woman has the God-given right to take the life of her unborn child? Just seeing how shrill they become while trying to defend their position is evidence of how ridiculous it is to describe it as “self-evident!”

RIGHTS ARE UNALIENABLE

Because the left is confused about where rights come from, they seem to think we can lose our rights. I guess they think if the government gives us a right, then the government could also take it away. Let me use the 2^nd amendment for a moment, as an example. From time to time, there are calls to “repeal the 2^nd amendment.” Take a moment and read the 2nd Amendment. Pay attention to how carefully it is worded:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Notice that the amendment doesn't say, “the people will have the right to bear arms.” Instead, it presupposes that people already have that right and the amendment specifically forbids the government from infringing upon it. Repealing the 2^nd amendment doesn't take away our right to bear arms; it merely takes away our protection from a tyrannical government that might seek to infringe upon our right. Get it?

Because our rights are given by God, governments do not have the authority to take them away. Roe v. Wade did not give a woman the right to have an abortion. There is no God-given right to an abortion. All Roe v. Wade did was overturn the laws that protected the unborn babies right to life!

Rather than looking to the government to give us rights, the Founding Fathers understood that the job of the government is to protect our rights. They said this overtly in the Declaration of Independence:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

When we won our independence from England, we wrote our Constitution. In the Preamble, we again read that this is a stated purpose of the new government:

[To] secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

Our rights were endowed on us by the Creator – not by any man or body of men. We establish governments for the expressed purpose of helping to protect our rights. Also, it's not just our rights but also the rights of our Posterity – the generations that come after us. The right to life belongs even to the unborn! It always has. Even after Roe v. Wade, abortion was never a right!