Right to choose ignores right to life

A week after the pro-choice radicals blew out the candles of Roe v. Wade’s 30th anti-birthday cake, they are still licking the frosting from that fateful ruling. But The Daily Free Press editors must perpetually suffer anxiety because their golden “right” stands solely on the stilts of the precarious political balance of the United States’ highest court (“Oppose threats to abortion,” Jan. 27, pg. 6). Certainly their inner anxiety is thinly cloaked with an optimism about the rightness of their cause, but they are necessarily not disinterested observers of the political scales. The editors cannot expound why women have a “right to choose” in matters of their children’s life or death. If the cracking floor of Roe falls from underneath these advocates, then there is little basis for “choice” in protecting the life of the unborn.

Speaking of rights is a dangerous business, but the editors look neither to their right nor to their left in their wild sprint to defend a woman’s “right to choose.” Why do women have the “right” to end the life of another human being?

Well, one might answer that in the United States all humans are endowed with the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” (Interestingly enough, right to control over one’s body was not included.) And because we are stuck in the morass of moral relativism, we have little difficulty locating our most baseless desires or debauched thoughts under the umbrella of “liberty” or even “pursuit of happiness.”

The ordering of these rights is not insignificant. For without the first, one cannot possibly achieve rights two and three. Indeed, liberty referred to a “liberty of conscience,” meaning that all humans ought to be allowed free access to God. Through this individual access to God, democratic citizens would gain a capacity for self-governance and democratic government. The third right is manifest in citizens’ protection through this well-maintained government.

Nevertheless, the tirelessly dogmatic advocates of “choice” may still weakly argue that a “woman’s right to choose” is the corollary to her right of “pursuit of happiness.” One’s pursuit of happiness must not impede another’s right to life, since again, right to life is the first right, without which others could not exist. Strange as it may be, in our times, we must state the obvious: mothers do not have the right to kill their children.

Yet pro-choice advocates support this “right” to abortion by denying that a fetus is a “person.” Such language is impregnate with dangerous possibilities and precedents. For who is to determine what a “person” is? The Free Press has done so in a negative sense. But what about the disabled? The elderly? What are the qualities of a “person?” We cannot decisively say. No, we must not speak the ambiguous language of “persons,” but the clear and truthful language of “human beings.” As George Weigel points out, what is a human being can never be anything but a human being, and what is not a human being can never become a human being.

Finally, pro-choice advocates will forever be plagued with the irony of their cause, and indeed their label. For women in the United States are already allowed the “choice” to engage in as many sexual relationships as they so choose. What pro-choice proponents really demand is choice without consequences. Like all other utopian fantasies, this one, too, necessarily engenders the use of deadly force against other human beings.

We must live and defend the truths on which our society was founded. We must prevent the arbitrary and inevitable pulverization of human life that is given force through the use of the foggy term “persons.’ We must also accept the consequences or our choices. We cannot solve the insoluble, and attempting to do so results only in tyranny. Most of all, we must look upon all human life with the awe and dignity that this evokes.