From the 1600s to early 1700s, many settlers came to North
America, including what is now the U.S.A., seeking religious and personal
freedom. With and after those, many came to seek personal security or wealth.
Since our founding and establishment as these United States of America, people
from across the world have come to seek personal freedom under the ideals of
our Constitution and other Founding Documents.
This discussion is about abortion-on-demand versus how “We
the People” constitutionally define Social Order and Law in these United States
of America. Our Founding Documents established us upon socially and morally
responsible Principles and Ideals, mostly based in Judeo-Christian Law. Our
Nation and its rule are not supposed to be based on emotions, mass hysteria, mob
rule, nor despotism. Our Documents say that we are supposed to be a God-fearing,
law-abiding People (“moral” People, as President John Adams said); free to
choose among a host of options in life, as long as we do not infringe upon the rights
of others among us. Our legal and judiciary system is supposed to judge if and when
anyone steps across that constitutional line and infringes on others. All who migrate
here or are born here are supposed to support our Basic Principles without
trying to circumvent or alter them from the original intent. Our public oaths
of office include the promise that the oath-taker “will support and defend the Constitution”
of the USA. If one acts in unconstitutional, immoral, or amoral manners, one
selfishly breaks the bounds and bonds of constitutional Society and Law. For
the sake of legal discussion about our existing social order in these United
States of America, it was the belief systems of the 17th and 18th
Century immigrants that formed and grounded the Ideals and Founding Documents
of this Nation, as we know them, today.
There have been many arguments for and against abortion,
over the last 100 years. Some of the arguments have been emotional, some
rational, some just legal maneuvering, some based on wishful thinking, some on biological
science, some based on the Bible and common moral sense. I shall strive to
focus on where our legal process derives its authority with respect to abortion.
In this, we must remember that God says that He does not change and that His
unchanging Word (Law) is settled in Heaven, forever.
In Genesis and throughout the Bible, God says that He is the
beginning of and Creator of all things. His Word (as manifest for the last 400+
years in the printed word of the King James English Bible) predates and is
foundational to all sound and good modern law in the USA. In Mark 12:28-31 we
see the definition of how one lives righteously, as it was questioned by those
who equivocated about Law, as they sought to justify themselves and their
desires. In those same passages, we see the equivocators answered by the Great
Advocate, Jesus Christ, wherein Christ states that all laws can be judged as good
or bad by whether the laws themselves obey God’s Two Great Commandments: 1)
whether the laws support and prove that we love God with all our heart, mind,
soul, and strength, and 2) whether the laws support and prove that we love our
neighbors as we love ourselves. If carefully examined by these Standards, vast
amounts of human law violate one or both of God’s Great Laws. Christ elaborated,
in John 12:48, that every letter and punctuation mark in God’s Word and Law
shall judge us all in the end.
Those who reject my inclusion of biblical and Divine foundations
neglect such beginnings at their own peril, if they expect to honestly discuss what
bears upon legal and constitutional matters. “Ignorance of the Law is no
excuse.”, is a famous saying, and especially true with God. I once was uncomfortable
to admit our accountability to God’s Authority, but, ignoring facts dishonestly
leaves one with incomplete information and weakens any relevant further
discussion. Therefore, I shall retain these relevant Divine and secular references.
In the “rebellious” 1960s-1970s, I ignorantly supported the
abortion crowd. Since the mid 1980s, I’ve heard and read much about abortion, biological
sciences, medical practices, and the Bible. Recently, I began reading about the
roots, development, and alterations of laws, including within these United States
of America. My most recent reading is, The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes
(a lecture series published on-demand, October 16th, 2022, North
Haven, CT).
Holmes lived and wrote between 1841 and 1935, and served on
the Supreme Court of the United States of America (SCOTUS). He was also a teacher
and lecturer of the law. To understand him, we need to recognize that he grew
up, was educated, worked, and wrote during the heyday of the American Industrial
Revolution (a time of great conflicts, social upheaval, technological advances,
archeological rediscovery, and humanistic self-justifying philosophies and revisionism;
a time of social excitement, with many societal calls to overhaul and overthrow
godly “old things” in favor of exploring worldly or ungodly things, new and old).
Holmes’ contemporaries included Charles Darwin (and evolutionary postulations);
Abraham Lincoln (and the nominal end of slavery); Westcott & Hort (and their
many unauthorized alterations to the King James Bible); Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin
(and their communistic and socialistic ideas); F.D.R. (and his unconstitutional
socialistic New Deal); Margaret Sanger (and the outcry for public support of
abortions as part of her eugenic aspirations). Holmes witnessed the official
demise of slavery in the USA, the American Civil War, World War I, Prohibition,
the Great Depression, and the rise of Adolf Hiltler. Obviously, Holmes lived in
extremely challenging social times; times when social and philosophical novelties
began growing more popular than God, God's Bible, and God's Law, as people
increasingly pushed God away.
Holmes was a student of history and the law, and, from my
reading of the above book, it appears that Holmes was heavily influenced by
secular history and philosophy, more than by any sense of Absolute Standards or
Law set by God. Without the Light of God’s Absolute Law, to which we all shall
be held accountable, the darkness of relativism takes root and profoundly colors
human law and experience.
God sets His Law above every human law and He shall judge
all laws by His Two Great Commands, but, Holmes’ lectures begin with mostly worldly
history, that includes only minimal reference to God’s Law. With respect to
God's Law, as Holmes says of other matters, Holmes has “put the cart before the
horse”, since God’s Word and Law, the kingdoms of Israel, Abraham, et al,
including “the ten commandments” all predated Greece, Rome, Babylon, the German
tribes, and all the legal systems that Holmes mentions in his initial lecture. Beginning
his lectures with slight regard for God’s ancient legal system, Holmes labeled God’s
Law, and others, “primitive”, thus allowing himself to build a legal analysis that
lacks significant regard for God’s Law. Such God-obscuring unscientific selective
attention is not uncommon to evolution-oriented philosophies or systems.
In the last paragraph of Lecture I (page xv), Homes states,
“It remains to be proved that, while the terminology of morals is still
retained, and while the law does still and always, in a certain sense, measure
legal liability by moral standards, it nevertheless, by the very necessity of
its nature, is continually transmuting those moral standards into external or
objective ones, from which the actual guilt of the party concerned is wholly
eliminated.”
While, on its face, Holmes statement is historically true,
one needs to recognize that that trend is a prime example of the impact of secular
relativism, whether modern or ancient, whereby anyone’s standards are valid in
the world; equally convenient as anyone else’s worldly standards. By that
reason, the worldly moral or legal value that prevails is the one with the most
worldly supporters, irrespective of whether any given moral and legal shift is in
line with God’s Great Laws, irrespective of whether it's good for individuals
and society, or not. Relativistic secular humanism and its law do not care
about eternal values or eternal consequences, as long as the loudest or most
populist group gets its way.
By contrast, godly Law, Truth, and Morality, all have clear and
eternal consistency and consequences, even as they also protect, strengthen,
heal, enlighten, and build up individuals and society. Godly things do not
change, for their Standard is eternally defined by God as pure and good, and they
cannot be altered by fluctuating unstable relativism or temporal focus of humanity.
Holmes’ observation about shifting morality and the secular dismissal of
personal guilt utterly fails God’s Two Great Laws. Currently, in their own
relativistic disregard for Truth and Law, some Attorneys General treat violent
criminals as if those malfactors are victims of society, rather than those
malefactors being personally responsible for their choices to perpetrate evil upon
members of society. God says that Government bears a sword to execute swift and
righteous judgment and punishment on all evildoers, to discourage others from
copying the evil and further spreading evil within society. But, humanism and
relativism do not want to hear God’s Law or eternal ways, and, rather, prefer
to indulge in self-centered self-interested
law and practices, neglecting to place personal responsibility where it
is due, maybe even hoping that their own guilt be overlooked by others.
The relativistic nature of Holmes’ quote, above, was
dramatically acted out, legally, when, in 1973, SCOTUS’ majority Roe v. Wade
decision forced the public to conform “legally” to an unconstitutional
unscientific anti-social anti-rights behavior (despite the general public’s
aversion to killing unborn children). That Court decision has had huge impacts
on our society. By that SCOTUS decision, voters of all States were stripped of
their sovereign right to self-determine what their own voting citizens wanted
for moral and social standards within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution. By its
twisted legal and moral impact, Roe v. Wade denied the real living humanity and
citizenship of unborn children. Proponents of the ruling attempted to popularize
and institutionalize abortion nationwide. Forcing Roe v. Wade onto the general
public was a legal maneuver by which SCOTUS’ abdicated its true constitutional responsibility:
the SCOTUS majority opinion refused to address the constitutional rights of living
unborn children or to defend those unborn against imminent torture and death: a
sin of omission: SCOTUS broke God’s Great Commands and violated our
Constitution. SCOTUS’ Roe v. Wade decision violated our Constitution by not
upholding the mandate to protect against “unreasonable search and seizure”, and
to protect against “cruel and unusual punishment”.
The Roe v. Wade majority ruling was sinful in many ways. In
the 49 years that it was law, before being struck down in 2022, more than 60
million babies were killed inside their mothers, far more deaths than from all
other USA violence, combined, during that same period in our nation. Ironically,
based on those two constitutional principles, above, many who hate violence are
the same abortion supporters who fight for more lenient treatment of violent
criminals, even removing the death penalty in many states. Supporters of the killers
of unborn children continue their unconstitutional and immoral thrust, as, out
one side of their mouths, they cry for life and leniency toward violent
offenders; out the other side of their mouths they yell and scream for death
and destruction of defenseless babies: moral and legal hypocrisy.
God and history shall show that most of those abortive
murders were, and are, rooted in self-interest and not the interest of the unborn
child. During abortions, the discrete biology and biological systems of the
unborn child are ignored in favor of unscientific disinformation claiming that
babies are just part of the mothers’ bodies. Besides what God says about
conception and babies, since the scientific discovery of human blood Rh factors
in the mother and child, real biological science has proven, repeatedly, that
each baby and its placenta are separate biological entities from each mother’s
body, and that the child is not part of the mother, systemically or
genetically. Basic science and God agree about what and who that child really
is biologically. But, modern willful ignorance of facts, coupled with emotional,
financial, and political arguments for abortion, still rails against the unborn
child, claiming it is part of the mother, as if the child were a sick appendage
(to be cut off the way one would treat a gangrenous limb of a diabetic). That latter
false reasoning lies against scientific and godly Truth; against principles of
modern medicine.
Judeo-Christian cultures, historically, say that either a
mother is “with child” or that a mother has “conceived a child”. Most doctors
and other medical professionals will do everything in their power to preserve
the sick limb of a patient, yet, today, too quickly, a large noisy public minority
and many medical practitioners choose to support the killing of healthy living
unborn children. Unborn children are not diseased body parts in the mothers.
By approving abortion, our legal and medical communities, as
well as our government and many citizens, have overridden God’s moral
imperative to care for the weak, defenseless, and innocent among us, especially
with regard to unborn children. Unborn children do not vote or pay taxes, so
they are often looked on as out-of-sight burdens, like cancer; treated as
inconveniences to be eradicated, regardless of their intrinsic worth as human
beings or their potential future contributions to society. The current
relativism of our contemporary social and legal systems has embraced the mistaken
automatic presumption that the unborn healthy child is legally worth nothing
more than any other undesirable ‘thing’ or possession to which one ascribes
minimal or negative value when it’s no longer wanted: to be carved up for scrap
and disposed of as a junk automobile or an ailing ‘appendage’ of the mother:
legally condemned; morally, spiritually, and biologically ignored.
Abortion seeks to humanistically and legally strip the unwanted
healthy unborn child of all legal or intrinsic value of her or his own. That
relativistic rationale disavows God’s Law, our Constitution, and rights of the
child; and yields a practical legal meaning that the unborn child has been legally
and humanistically reclassified as waste, an offender, an annoyance, or an inconvenience,
like a moth-eaten garment, a biting dog, or a lemon-law vehicle, but to be
treated worse than a deadly violent felon.
In denial of the defenseless healthy unborn child’s
constitutional Rights, secular legal judgment and sentence are carried out on
the unborn child despite the child’s God-given life for which it fights to
survive. Whether it is physically butchered, suctioned, or poisoned during an
abortion, abortionists often use anesthesia on the unborn to stop unborn
children from squirming, as each unborn child fights against being tortured,
killed, and aborted. Grievous is the loss of our dead children, but, no one seems
to want to count or popularize the mental, emotional, social, moral, or financial
damages that abortion heaps onto our society. I’m sure that many of us have met
women that suffer great guilt for decades, if not the rest of their lives, for
having aborted their children. How sad, unproductive, and what a waste of human
gifts: over sixty million children destroyed by abortion.
We must ask ourselves honestly why are we, socially, so
intent on killing off our children? By contrast, God tells us that He knows who
He makes each of us to be and what He wants each of us to do with our lives (before
we are even conceived in the womb: see Jeremiah 1:5). If one looks honestly at
history, one must admit that there are no civilizations or societies that
survived very long after they began to kill off their own children: in decades
or centuries, they all died out or were altered into different social and legal
entities.
In Lecture II, Holmes develops the history of Criminal Law,
including the fixing of blame and discussions about vengeance. With regard to
abortion, there is a significant problem with secular humanistic evolution-based
law and its neglect of God’s Law. This is evident in Holmes’ comment that, “The
desire for vengeance imports an opinion that its object is actually and
personally to blame. It takes an internal standard, not an objective or
external one, and condemns its victim by that.” (Holmes: TCL, page xvi). This truism
about fleshly secular law denies and ignores the externality, accountability,
and eternality of God’s Law. Holmes’ comment establishes that that is how most abortion
supporting people would seem to see, treat, or justify their killing of an
unborn child: as if the child itself were the offending party assaulting the
mother by virtue of the child’s very existence within the attaching placenta
and pregnancy. Holmes’ premise establishes parental vengeance as the basis for
the mothers’ disdain for the unborn children that women and their “helpers” abort.
Parental vengeance against unborn children, legally
speaking, is contrary to God saying that children are a blessing for parents;
to be received as blessings; to be multiplied. Parental vengeance against unborn
children is contrary to our Constitution concerning “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness” for all citizens. Conceived by the union of the parents’
living gametes, as well as being alive as a God-defined self, in the womb, IF that
child were outside the mother’s body, then it should have full constitutional
rights in these United States of America. Any attempt by anyone to destroy that
child’s life (outside the womb) would or should bring criminal charges against
the one attempting to harm or kill that child. All abortion-supporting legal
wrangling to the contrary, the abortion-supporters’ pretense, that a biologically
conceived living child in the womb is not alive or not a person, is a self-delusional
construct that flies in the face of all historical and scientific evidence, even
as God says. Abortion-on-demand is a conspiracy to commit premeditated murder,
the perpetrators of which would be convicted in any godly responsible court, IF
the child were outside the womb. Socially and by God’s Law, we’re condemned by allowing
abortion.
It is relativistic secular anti-God thinking and emotionalism
that seek to deny the reality of the scientific biological truth of life evident
in the living unborn child. The proper legal analysis is that those who seek to
kill the unborn seek to punish unborn children for being conceived; to punish
the child for attacking and inconveniencing the mother. Legally, then, in order
to protect rapists and allow them to go on with their lives, women who are
raped should be beaten, shot, incarcerated, sterilized, or killed because they
are victims of rape. Thank God we don’t seek that kind of twisted legal illogic
regarding victims of rape, but, by abortion, we force such cruelty onto our defenseless
unborn children. By choosing abortion over birthing, mothers claim and assert
that mothers are valid legal human beings, but that their unborn are not
legally valid nor discrete human beings. By her choice to abort her unborn
child, a mother asserts and claims that she is being assaulted or injured by her
child, and she seeks vengeance against her defenseless child. She accuses her
child of offending her and assaulting her, even though the child had no part in
conceiving the pregnancy. Pro-abortion logic lies in emotion and secular relativism,
like sandcastles at the edge of a rising tide. But, in reality and God’s Law,
as a product of the conception, the unborn child is the real “victim” who had
no responsibility or part in the mother’s willing or unwilling participation in
sexual contact or pregnancy.
God wrote and gave to Moses, “Thou shalt not kill”: it
literally means premeditated planning and lying-in-wait to kill an innocent
person. Contrary to worldly misinformation, that commandment does not forbid executions
by governments that God raised and appointed to rule each culture: God says government
is to conduct swift trials and speedy executions of many types of criminals,
especially the violent. “Thou shalt not kill.”, applies directly to premeditation,
planning, and killing of defenseless unborn children. Most God-fearing Judeo-Christian
cultures, and others, honor that. Ignorant ignore it.
We’ve seen that secular evolution-based relativistic
reasoning and law categorize abortion into a legally guiltless matter of removing
some offending ‘thing’ from the mother, whether the child is called a fetus or
an unborn child; unborn children are, too often, falsely claimed to be part of
the mothers’ bodies. We’ve, also, seen that secular legalisms allow for society
to shift and dodge the issue of the life that God gives to each child at
conception. Worldly relativistic dogma and legalistic dodging do not change our
God-given personal and collective responsibility to defend and raise children the
way that God wants them to live and grow. Parents, abortionists, and all our society,
we shall all answer for each of the 60,000,000+ children that we have killed by
abortion in these United States of America. We need to repent of this great
evil.
We can choose to stop slaughtering the unborn; be less
selfish; stop supporting relativistic self-serving laws; offer godly love and
education to all; protect the weak and downtrodden; offer work to those who
need it; offer support and comfort to the abused; be willing to adopt children;
stop tax dollars from killing children; speak out and take action against all evil
things that God hates; stop being fearful or feeling sorry for ourselves; dismantle
all bad laws; focus on God, His Word, His Light; do Right. We cannot save
ourselves from sin. To obey God’s two Great Laws according to His truth, we
must repent of our sin and return to God's Word and His only salvation through
our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
