This item is about life and laws relating thereto. The reason for writing this is my revulsion upon hearing about the atrocious Massachusetts “healthcare” act signed into law by that state’s governor last week.
Commenting on a law that allows abortion “up to birth,” eponymous talk-show host Greg Gutfeld satirically asked, “Why not wait until they’re in kindergarten and get them while they’re napping!” One of his guests, after questioning its appropriateness for comedy show fare, soberly described the law’s permissiveness as “not healthcare but homicide.”
Massachusetts’ law and the laws of nine other states that allow the procedure at any point in pregnancy reflect a disorder in Western civilization that was for centuries informed by Judeo-Christian principles and the English common law.
In the 20th century political law began to be separated from moral law. The most dramatic shifts came by brutal force in the form of communism in the Soviet Union and fascism in Nazi Germany. A shift away from religion-informed considerations in other Western governments also began during the last century and continues in this one. I am not talking about direct involvement of a particular church, merely pointing out a shift from the traditionally accepted and understood recognition that moral guidelines provided by religion belong in public political discourse for the good of society and society’s government.
The result of this shift in America is that Christianity, a key foundational reason for our government of long and successful duration, has been largely removed from the public square and relegated to private observance. Increasingly, morality becomes relative and the state becomes God.
When human life begins cannot be validly decided by academic theory, religious belief, personal opinion, public policy, or nine (or 13) judges on a court, because doctrine, opinion, and policy are not always objective and are often not verifiable. Such is not the case, however, for when life begins. That question can be and has been scientifically determined by those in biological science and medicine. New human life begins at conception, the date a woman gets pregnant. And the life in her womb is separate from the mother’s.
I found a psychology website article where the author claimed that a life cannot be “human” until it has a mind. (But the Catholic Church holds that the soul makes a life human; that life and soul are co-created at the moment of conception.) Another site used “personhood” dicta from Roe v. Wade to ignore science and religion in favor of social politics. (And one having no legal standing as a “person” has no legal rights, including a right to live.)
Veiled excuses for killing unborn humans are beyond strange, considering that there are laws protecting unborn animals. The fine for killing an unborn eagle is $100,000, imprisonment for one year, or both, for a first offense under The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, 16 U.S.C. 668, et seq.
An unborn human’s right to life is a fundamental principle of law that predates this country’s founding, or even the continent’s discovery. In 1765, William Blackstone, professor of law at Oxford University and Solicitor General to the English Monarchy, published his Commentaries on the Law of England.
Blackstone’s four-volume treatise on ancient common law was considered legally authoritative in America before and after her independence and used in academia and law practice well into the last century. (Note the publication dates referenced below.) Research gives numerous citations of the Commentaries in the U.S. Supreme Court reporters as well as in lower federal and state court decisions.
In the section, “Rights of Persons,” Blackstone said this about the right to life:
This right is inherent by nature in every individual and exists even before the child is actually born. [An unborn child has rights and] is supposed in law to be born for many purposes. [Among these], it is capable of having a legacy made to it. It may have a guardian assigned to it, and may have an estate limited to its use, and to take afterwards by such limitation, as it were then actually born. The same ruling [as that inherent by nature] holds in the civil law.
Foundational sources of American law are being ignored. Secular government now makes unqualified enactments and pronouncements on worldly social and utilitarian bases in areas that require religious and moral bases.
Like situational ethics, moral relativism “allows” a person (individual or government body) to rationalize a moral action or failure to act. Another English champion of individual liberty, Lord Acton, said about moral relativism: “Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on tablets of eternity.” Individual autonomy and secularist government are not valid excuses for going against Natural Law and God’s.
Blackstone and his Commentaries and God and his Bible are no longer favored authorities. The result is that we equivocate between good and evil, tolerate what our hearts and reason tell us is intolerable, and watch our country suffer spiritually and temporally from the creeping “progressive” direction and policies of politicians in states like Massachusetts. This situation is not true to the nature of a people whose country proclaims, “In God We Trust.”
Chip Williams is a Northsider.
