By Brian Festa, Esq.
Vice-President & Co-Founder, We The Patriots USA, Inc.
This June, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a landmark decision regarding the right to life for the unborn. On December 1, 2021, the Justices heard arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a challenge to a Mississippi law that bans abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. The case is unique in that, unlike previous challenges to reach the high court, the petitioners have specifically asked the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the infamous pair of cases that have made the “right” to abortion the law of the land in the United States.
A bit of mud that is often slung at organizations like ours, that fight for the right to refuse vaccinations and public health mandates, is that we are harming others in an effort to selfishly protect our own bodies. The same folks who go about with “my body, my choice” forever on their lips have no problem telling us what we should be injecting into ours. Meanwhile, they fail to recognize the irony in the fact that they are asking us to harm our bodies so that the lives of others can be saved, while telling women that they should have the right to intentionally end another person’s life so that they will not have to bear the “horror” of bringing new life into the world.
Except, of course, that they refuse to acknowledge that a baby in a mother’s womb is a separate and distinct person from the mother. While the pro-abort crowd has long drawn the arbitrary line in the sand called “viability” (a goalpost that has moved earlier and earlier in pregnancy as medical technology advances), the fact of the matter is that a person is no less a person simply because that person is dependent on outside assistance to survive. Do we say that a person on life support in a hospital has no right to life simply because that person is dependent on the assistance of machines to keep his heart beating, or his lungs breathing? Do we say that a person who is able to perform most of the tasks of ordinary life, but who, because of a disability, requires the assistance of another to bring some of those tasks to completion, is not a human being who deserves an independent right to continue living? Since when is a life defined by whether it can be lived in solitude?
Just as perplexing is the high court’s refusal to afford infants in the womb their Constitutional right to not be deprived of life without due process of law, all the while admitting that it cannot say with certainty when life begins[1] (for what it’s worth, this right to not be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law” is the only right recorded twice in the Constitution, using the exact same words in both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments). In nearly every other instance in which the court is unable to define something so monumental or draw a bright line, it errs on the side of caution, either by avoiding the question altogether (if possible), or by creating some multi-factorial test. You would expect, then, that the Roe Court would have concluded that, since we cannot prove with any degree of scientific certainty when life begins, we should provide the unborn with their right to life from the moment of conception. That would have been the judicially “safe” path, the erring on the side of caution we have seen time and again from the court. But no. Not in this case. In the case of the most important right of human existence, the right to life itself, the court chose instead to leave it to what amounts to a shot in the dark, the hazy cloud of viability being selected as the starting line for what has become known as “personhood.”
Even more baffling still is the fact that the court recognizes corporations as legal persons who must be afforded Fourteenth Amendment—see Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886)—and First Amendment—see First Nat’l Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978); Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)—protections. Read that again. Read it a third time. That’s right. A corporation is a person, but an unborn child is not.
I don’t know what else to say after that. When a civilization slaughters its most defenseless members and provides legal protection for it, it ceases to be a civilization. We here at We The Patriots USA, Inc. have at the core of our mission the goal of protecting individual rights. That does not include the right to murder unborn children. That DOES include the right to life itself. We stand proudly together with the millions of brave American Patriots, like our friend Abby Johnson, who will stop at nothing to defend the right to life, from conception to natural death. As we await the Supreme Court’s critical decision in Dobbs, let us pray that it will be the watershed moment when this country finally says, “enough is enough,” and the right to life is once again hailed as the most sacred of all human rights.
[1] As Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority in Roe, remarked: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”