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(LifeSiteNews) – “A person is a person no matter how small.” – Horton Hears a Who, by Dr. Seuss
Lincoln
On July 10, 1854 Abraham Lincoln was lying on the lawn outside of the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. By then Lincoln had had three children and lost a newborn. He had been an Illinois State Representative for several terms, a one-term U.S. Congressman, and had left politicking and returned to his lawyering. He had just finished a buggy ride from the county-seat of Danville, where he was in the Vermilion Circuit Court.
But something political happened that past May that “aroused him as he had never been before.” It was a new Act of Congress called the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This Act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. This new Act allowed for any new state in the union to decide for itself whether to be a Free or Slave state. In short, the Kansas-Nebraska Act uncorked the stopper which held back the evil genie of slavery – American’s Original Sin.
On that summer day in 1854, Lincoln knew the Union was in crisis, that it was in danger of disunion; additionally, he knew that the social evil of slavery was going to spread. While Lincoln was whittling, he listened to a fellow Kentuckian, an abolitionist named Cassius M. Clay.
The speaker’s anti-slavery message was not welcomed inside the Springfield statehouse. That summer, Lincoln decided that just as he would not freely be a slave to another man, nor would he ask someone to be his slave. That is how change begins: one man’s moral indignation joining with others can ending up transforming a nation.
In time, he would rightly became known as the Great Emancipator. However, three years on, in 1857, the Supreme Court issued its infamous Dred Scott decision. Blacks had no rights under our Constitution and as such they could constitutionally be held as slaves – as chattel. While the law is a moral guide, not all laws are moral and it would take a Civil War, 600,000 dead, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to free them.
Roe
Fast forward to January 22, 1973 and the infamous decision of Roe v. Wade. Writing for the majority, Justice Blackmun said that the Supreme Court justices were not doctors or biologists, that they did not know what went on in the womb and that they were not going to find out.
Under Roe, unborn babies were considered non-persons under the law. Hence, they would not be protected by the 14th Amendment’s clause that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”
Unborn babies had no rights – particularly, no right to life. While Blackmun acknowledged that abortion was not mentioned as an enumerated right in the U.S. Constitution, he had a feeling that the right could be found hidden in its “emendations” e.g. the “right to privacy.”
The phrase “right to privacy” is also not in the Constitution, but somehow stemming from the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and 14th Amendments the right to abortion was there; at least it was to the majority (cf. Dobbs’ critique of Blackmun).
After Roe, babies could be killed throughout all nine months of pregnancy.
Since 1973, 63 million children have been aborted – a large majority of whom were black babies, fulfilling Margaret Sanger’s quest of eugenically eradicating the poor.
Dissenting Justice White said of the majority opinion that it was just “raw judicial power” and that since then, many jurists concurred that Roe was bad law – even then-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg held it askew in 2013.
Bernard Nathanson
A doctor who was a founding member of the pro-abortion group NARAL and had committed thousands of abortions – even one on a women he had impregnated – came to realize that these aborted “parts” were babies. His name was Dr. Bernard Nathanson.
In 1984, he made a 28-minute movie of an ultrasound during which a baby is being aborted; it is called The Silent Scream. A few years later, he made a pro-life movie called Eclipse of Reason.
If God can touch a man who performed an abortion on his own child, God can touch any heart.
Dobbs
On Friday, June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court, after nearly 50 years, reversed Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. The Dobbs decision rightly stresses that the Court’s role is to decide the constitutionally of a law – not make the law, as Roe did.
The Dobbs ruling removes the onus of deciding the status of personhood for the unborn from the Court and remands it back to the States. As such, the Dobbs decision is not the end of abortion. One could even say it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning (peace to Churchill).
The main fault of Dobbs is that Justice Samuel Alito did not recognize the personhood of the unborn child and offer the baby Constitutional protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Writing for the majority, Justice Alito answers the questions of what goes on in the womb. These are answers that Blackmun left out of Roe viz. actual life v. Roe’s “potential life.”
Alito draws from State of Mississippi’s Chief Health Director, Dr. Dobbs, and recites the actual findings of previous law regarding the heinous crime of abortion and (praise God) describes what goes on in the womb.
A fetus’s heart begins to beat at five to six weeks; the fetus begins to move at eight weeks; at nine weeks “all the physiological functions are present”; and at 10 weeks, all the “vital organs begin to function.” Justice Alito does not relate other changes that are happening naturally to the mother to prepare for the health and future nurturing of the baby e.g. like the production of milk cells. But the point here in Dobbs is fully established: the child is a natural extension of the gift of life; the growing boy or girl baby is not a tumor or an otherwise unnatural growth within the woman. Or as Psalm 139 reads, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
Additionally, Justice Alito picks up the criticism of Roe v. Wade found in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision. Although Casey ultimately affirmed Roe, it did so with a divided court and it did so while reworking the arbitrary trimester guidelines of Roe.
In short, Casey stood on stare decisis but did so without explaining why — in fact, Casey even overruled Roe in part. Hence, Justice Alito in Dobbs easily dismisses Casey because it had no legs. By writing-in this critique of both Roe and Casey, Justice Alito eviscerates Blackmun; he vivisects the veil of ignorance, and exposes the truth that what we are discussing is a living human being and not an amorphous blot of tissue.
With Dobbs’ clarion analysis, no longer can politicians claim that they don’t know what is happening in an abortion. And no longer can Catholic bishops claim that the politicians don’t know.
As never before, with this Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, Catholic bishops need to publicly call out all politicians, both Catholic and non-Catholic, for their complicity in crimes against humanity. And they must refuse Holy Communion to politicians who self-identify as Catholic Christians.
Beyond Dobbs
While pro-life groups rejoiced and thanked God for the Dobbs Decision, abortion supporters from President Biden on down promised severe pushback – even violence toward pro-life entities, churches, and judges.
Such violence is not surprising.
If you are willing to inject a toxic solution into a baby in utero or pull him apart limb by limb, then a little ex utero violence is acceptable.
So is allowing the child to die after birth (as defended by Virginia’s former governor); even homicide, too, is acceptable as we saw in the failed assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh.
All the talk of women’s rights rings hollow when half the babies aborted are female. In any event, we now have on our collective hands a new existential “Kansas-Nebraska” crisis, but this time it is across all 50 states.
While this violence may be nascent, please God, let us not have a national “Bloody Kansas” in our future.
Through the Sacred Heart of Jesus, LORD, mitigate a “Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Woe” due to our country for the blood of 63 million aborted babies that seeks Divine retribution (cf. Thomas’ concurrence).
LORD, touch the ears and hearts of those who fail to hear the beating hearts of the unborn. Let the humanity of the unborn, their unalienable right to life, be held secure. May this new Dobbs decision, reversing Roe v. Wade, lead us to “fondly now hope, and fervently ….pray that the scrounge of [abortion] may speedily pass away.”
Let us be aroused like Lincoln to defend the innocent, the vulnerable baby. Further, let us call the medical community back to its founding principles of the Hippocratic Oath, namely of doing no harm nor committing abortion.
And further still perhaps, given recent controversy with the COVID-19 virus and questionable “science” and medical practices, an annual Hippocratic Oath ceremony may be a good thing, thereby stressing to all doctors, “first, do no harm.”
But finally, let us reflect upon the closing words of Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address and make them our own:
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the light, let us strive to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
We will never know what Lincoln was whittling that July day in 1854, but I like to think it would become a mold for a key for the bondman’s chains. Let us do likewise for the unborn.