What the Declaration of Independence Says About the Unborn’s Right to Life

You can’t legislate morality. This is a proven fact. You can’t tell anyone what they can and can’t do to their own bodies. Certainly lawmakers and meddling do-gooders of every stripe have tried, but to no avail. When it was illegal to consume alcohol, people still consumed it. Where people demand others eat ‘healthier,’ the ‘unhealthy’ among us continue to feast, especially on this Super Bowl Sunday. Today, most people will be doing a lot of drinking and eating. Nothing short of a famine or beer embargo is going to stop it. Same with sex. People are going to do it. Women are going to get pregnant as a result, but unlike other over-indulgences, sex often comes with a life attached. A pregnancy changes everything. Yes, the mother can do whatever she wants to her own body, but can she destroy the life of an unborn child? One look at the Declaration of Independence and the answer becomes a clear no.

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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

All men (read: people) are created equal. Not born equal, but created that way. The endowment of unalienable rights occurs at creation, or conception. At that moment, the right to life attaches. It’s so obvious that the Founders didn’t think they needed to belabor the point—it was self-evident. Plain as day. So why are we still arguing about it? Women who don’t want to get pregnant, but choose to be sexually active had better take precautions, because once conception has occurred, the Founders of our legal system clearly intended that on creation an unalienable right attaches, as does the penalty for denying the right.

No one’s suggesting we return to the days of teenaged girls dying from botched abortions performed in squalid backrooms. Rather, all methods of pregnancy prevention need to be openly, honestly, and vigorously discussed with young women. This includes abstinence. However, young women must make that choice for themselves, and if they choose to be sexually active do so with as much information as possible. For those of you who will no-doubt be offended that I don’t see abstinence as the only viable route for our young women, I have only one question. Would you rather your teenaged daughter used contraception before having sex or after having sex, deny an unborn person their unalienable right to life, endowed to them at the time of their creation? This choice isn’t all that difficult.