Choice

A week after the “pro-choice” radicals blew out the candles of Roe’s thirtieth anti-birthday cake, they are still licking the frosting from that fateful Supreme Court ruling. But the editors of the Daily Free Press must perpetually suffer anxiety because their golden “right” stands solely on the stilts of the precarious political balance of the United States’ highest court. 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. This attention is necessary because the editor’s cannot expound why it is that women have a “right to choose” in matters of their child’s life or death. If the cracking floor of Roe falls from under 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 the right nor to the left in their wild sprint to defend them. Why do women have the “right” to end – without justification – 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 (property).” (Interestingly, 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.”

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

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.” Right? No. 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. Pedantic as it may be, in our times, we must re-state the obvious: that mothers do not have the right to kill their children, since they too are given the right of human life.

Yet pro-choice advocates support this “right” to abortion by denying – as the Free Press does – that a human fetus is a “person.” The use of 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 speak the language not of “persons”, but “human beings.” For we know what human beings are. 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. All well and good – in the legal sense. What pro-choice proponents really demand is for choice without consequences. Like all other utopian fantasies, this one, too, necessarily engenders the use of deadly force against other human beings. Choices indeed have consequences, and the results of one’s own choices must not be allowed to remove another’s most basic right.

We must live and defend the truths upon which our society was founded. We must prevent the arbitrary and inevitable pulverization of human life that is given force through the use of “persons”. Instead, we must speak the clearest, and most truthful language of “human beings.” 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 – the greatest of all mysteries – evokes.