By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny.”—Ron Paul
The government wants to play god.
It wants the power to decide who lives or dies and whose rights are worthy of protection.
Delve beneath the rhetoric and spin that have turned abortion into a politicized, polarized, and propagandized, frontline in the culture wars, and you will find a greater menace at work.
The Left would suggest that unborn babies do not have constitutional rights and the only right that matters is a woman’s right to privacy in choosing whether or not to abort a pregnancy.
The Right, while fixated on saving the lives of unborn babies, seems less concerned about what happens to those lives from birth to death.
What few seem willing to address is that in the nearly 50 years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade, the government has come to believe that it not only has the power to determine who is deserving of constitutional rights in the eyes of the law but it also has the authority to deny those rights to an American citizen.
It is how the abortion debate, a politicized tug-of-war over when an unborn child is considered a human being with rights, plays into the police state’s hands by laying the groundwork for discussions about who else may or may not be deserving of rights.
Even if, when a leaked draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization suggests) the Supreme Court overturns its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, that will not resolve the larger problem that plagues us today: Namely, that all along the spectrum of life, from the unborn child to the aged, the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry:
Families killed by errant SWAT team raids. Unarmed citizens shot by police for daring to hesitate, stutter, move a muscle, flee, or disagree in any way with a police order. Pedestrians and motorists subjected to roadside strip searches and rectal probes by police. American citizens subjected to government surveillance. Protesters and activists being labeled domestic terrorists and extremists and accused of hate crimes. Hard-working Americans having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police.
Take a good, hard look at the many ways in which Americans are being denied their rights under the Constitution, and you’ll find there’s a common denominator.
These are nearly all American citizens, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, rights that no person or government can take away from them, among these the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and they are all being oppressed in one way or another by a government that has grown drunk on power, money and its own authority.
If the government, whether the president, Congress, the courts or any federal, state or local agent or agency—can decide that any person has no rights, then that person becomes less than a citizen, less than human, less than deserving of respect, dignity, civility and bodily integrity. He or she becomes an it, a faceless number that can be tallied and tracked, a quantifiable mass of cells that can be discarded without conscience, an expendable cost that can be written off without a second thought, or an animal that can be bought, sold, branded, chained, caged, bred, neutered, and euthanized at will.
It’s a slippery slope that justifies all manner of violations in the name of national security, the interest of the state and the so-called greater good.
Yet those who founded this country believed that what we conceive of as our rights were given to us by God, we are created equal, according to the Nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, and that government cannot create, nor can it extinguish, our God-given rights. To do so would be to anoint the government with god-like powers and elevate it above the citizenry.
Unfortunately, we have been dancing with this particular devil for quite some time now.
If we continue to wait for the government to restore our freedoms, respect our rights, rein in its abuses and restrain its agents from riding roughshod over our lives, our liberty and our happiness, then we will be waiting forever.
All ready, the politicos are beating war drums to herald the next phase of the abortion wars.
Just like clockwork, we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of yet another political circus that could get scary, ugly and overwhelming really fast.
Before you get too distracted by this conveniently-timed diversion that has everyone forgetting about spiking gas prices, inflation, housing shortages, and warring empires, remind yourself that no matter how the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Dobbs, it will not resolve the problem of a culture that values life based on a sliding scale. Nor will it help us navigate the moral, ethical, and scientific mine fields that await us as technology and humanity move ever closer to a point of singularity.
Humanity is being propelled at warp speed into a whole new frontier when it comes to privacy, bodily autonomy, and what it means to be a human being. As such, we haven’t even begun to wrap our minds around how present-day legal debates over bodily autonomy, privacy, vaccine mandates, the death penalty, and abortion, play into future discussions about singularity, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the privacy rights of the individual in the face of increasingly invasive, intrusive, and unavoidable government technologies.
Yet here is what I know.
Life is an inalienable right.
By allowing the government to decide who or what is deserving of rights, it shifts the entire discussion from one in which we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights” (that of life, liberty property and the pursuit of happiness) to one in which only those favored by the government get to enjoy such rights.
If all people are created equal, then all lives should be equally worthy of protection.
There’s an idea embraced by both the Right and the Left according to their biases that there is a hierarchy to life, with some lives more worthy of protection than others, but there is no hierarchy of freedoms.
All freedoms hang together.
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we must never stop working to protect life, preserve our freedoms, and maintain some semblance of our humanity.
Freedom cannot be a piece-meal venture.
—The Rutherford Institute