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.
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