Several weeks ago, I asserted
that Hunterdon
County should not do business with Planned Parenthood. Never once did I say I was doing this because
I am Catholic or because my faith tells me too.
But that is exactly the spin on my stand by the press. They cited my service to and attendance at St
Ann’s Church as the motivation for my policy choice. While I am proud to be Catholic you need not
be conservative (see Mary
Meehan), Catholic, Christian or even a theist (see Nat
Hentoff) to oppose abortion, all one needs is to have passed high
school biology and a normal sense of right and wrong.
Life begins at conception, the
spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female join to form the blastocyst,
zygote, a new distinct organism [Langman, Jan. Medical Embryology. 3rd edition.
Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1975, p. 3].
That organism has DNA, that DNA is human, that human DNA is unique and
distinct from the father and the mother.
It is its own human life. There
is no moral difference from a zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler,
adolescent, teenager, adult, or senior citizen.
Each is entitled to respect and dignity and the government must protect
each equally.
The right to abortion as
embodied in Roe vs. Wade relies on the premise of a right to privacy. The notion that a right to privacy is greater
than the right to live is folly. As the
Reverend Jesse Jackson stated in his article in Right to Life News in 1977:
“If one accepts the position that life is private, and
therefore you have the right to do with it as you please, one must also accept
the conclusion of that logic. That was the premise of slavery. You could not
protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was
private and therefore outside of your right to concerned.”
Roe is not the first grave
mistake our Supreme Court has even made.
The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was overturned by the 14th
Amendment following our Civil War and
Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896 was reversed in Brown vs Board of Education
in 1954, 58 years later. One day Roe too
will be overturned.
The other assertion is a
right to one’s own body. True enough,
you have a right to do with your body what you please up to and until the point
you do harm to another. You cannot use
your body to hurl your fist at another or kick someone nor can you use your
body to do harm to the unborn baby.
Some also state that an
abortion ban would lead to many social problems like unwanted children,
handicapped children, etc. While these
concerns are usually overstated and beside the point, the answer is not to kill
children who would present problems, but solve those problems. We don’t kill seniors because social security
is insolvent, we don’t kill the poor to solve poverty, nor should we slay the
unborn to avoid some social ill.
Another familiar line of
attack is to dehumanize the unborn baby.
You aren’t killing a baby you are aborting a pregnancy. This is the same tactic used to justify
passed evils this country long ago overcame.
Again as Jesse Jackson wrote:
“That is
why the Constitution called us three-fifths human and then whites further
dehumanized us by calling us "niggers." It was part of the
dehumanizing process. The first step was to distort the image of us as human
beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do and not even feel like
they had done anything wrong. Those advocates of taking life prior to birth do
not call it killing or murder; they call it abortion. They further never talk
about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather they
talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human and therefore can
be justified.”
Whatever linguistic gymnastics
and contortions abortion advocates use, it is inescapable that abortion is the
taking of a human life, an innocent, defenseless one. This is not a statement of religious dogma
but one of science and reason, morals and ethics.
Once one concludes that life
begins at conception, our policy choices become clear, although sometime
painful. Our Declaration of Independence states our nation’s credo in direct
unapologetic terms:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.
If the right to life can be taken
then how can a right to bear arms, to assemble, to exercise your religion, and
on and on have any credence. The first
job of government is to preserve our rights, first among them is life.
The main criticism of my stand
has been that I am imposing my religion on others. This
is false. I am not advocating putting
statues of Mary at our county parks, I
am not promoting closing county offices on the Feast of the Immaculate
Conception, I am advocating respecting the wishes of our constituents and not
have tax dollars go to an organization that provides elective abortions.
We can still provide the health
care for low income residents without subsidizing abortions. Recently the 5th Circuit Court of
Appeals upheld a
state health program that excludes abortion providers from receiving
government funding. We should do the
same, not because it is the teaching of the Catholic Church, but because
science and ethics demonstrate that it is wrong, gravely wrong to abort babies.
Furthermore and perhaps more importantly
from a governing standpoint, a majority of Hunterdon taxpayers, prolife and
prochoice do not want their tax dollars spent on providers of elective abortions.
I do not mean to diminish the
importance of my faith. My faith informs
and buttresses all that I do. My faith
gave me the strength to stand up for the unborn, the perseverance to withstand the
anti-Catholic condemnations, the assaults from intolerant abortion advocates
for whom it is not enough to have the freedom to obtain abortions, rather they demand that taxpayer fund their choices. Most importantly it’s put into perspective
the judgment that I will get from the residents of Hunterdon County. While I am concerned about representing my
constituents well and cognizant that I will face their judgment in 2014, I am
far more concerned about passing the judgment of my Lord at the end of my days. I believe my position will be approved by both.
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