The Right To Life America Still Denies

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories, from our featured writers to you.

***

Two hundred fifty years ago this week, our Founding Fathers declared the self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Most Americans know this phrase by heart. However, polling released by Quinnipiac University just a month ago found that barely one-third of Americans think our nation is “living up to the ideal.”

While many of those polled still firmly believe our nation’s best days are ahead of us, we certainly have work to accomplish, starting with equal rights for the preborn child.

After all, the Declaration of Independence noted our God-given rights in particular order: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our Founders knew that without life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are impossible.

Public discourse on abortion has shifted away from when life begins, especially after Roe v. Wade was overturned. This is a settled fact. Biologists, who Americans agree are the most qualified group to determine when life begins, nearly unanimously agree that life begins at conception. America now faces the question of personhood.

But knowing when human life begins, have the Founders failed to answer the question of personhood for us? By no means. “All men are created equal,” according to the Declaration, comes without qualification.

As a nation, we have been forced to self-correct time and time again after we have attempted to qualify what it means to be a legal person. Even the Constitution, signed only 11 years after the Declaration, fell from the founding standard of equal rights and accommodated slavery under the Three-Fifths Compromise.

Only three-fifths of the slave population, nearly all of them black Americans, counted when factoring state representation and taxation, and none were given the rights to own land, marry, or be educated, much less vote. Under the law, they were still wrongfully regarded as property, not humans endowed with the inalienable rights our nation should have always recognized.

Not even President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation nearly 100 years later provided a complete remedy to former slaves. Freed from the institution of slavery itself, black Americans would still suffer under Jim Crow laws and continued racism after Lincoln declared “that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.”

While the 14th Amendment, namely the Equal Protection Clause, established no citizen would be denied “the equal protection of the laws,” another century elapsed before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, upheld enforceability of equal rights for black Americans, including among private individuals and businesses.

Signers of the Constitution also failed to recognize and protect the rights of women, allowing others later to interpret the phrase “all men are created equal” to be qualified by sex. The U.S. movement for women’s suffrage fought for decades for the right to functional equality with men, first among this, the right to vote. It took the 19th Amendment to ensure no citizen was denied the right to vote on the basis of sex.

America has persevered, correcting these tragic distortions of the equal rights our nation was founded upon, but she has still failed to recognize the preeminent right to life that is core to any other rights our nation has historically transgressed.

After 250 years, we have still failed to recognize the personhood of the preborn child, even as the 14th Amendment revived the language of the Declaration, stating “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Abortion systematically denies preborn children due process. The right to life cannot be qualified by whether a human is born or preborn; otherwise, we undermine the spirit and ideals upon which this nation was founded.

On America’s 250th birthday, we must return to the founding principles we declared self-evident in 1776, first among these, life.

***

Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, with more than 1,700 groups on middle and high school, college and university, and medical and law school campuses in all 50 states. Follow her @KristanHawkins or subscribe to her podcast, The Kristan Hawkins Show.

John Mize is CEO of Americans United for Life, the nation’s leading pro-life legal advocacy organization.