I had
prayed that God would be involved in this, and I still feel the call to do
this. I must do this right. You see…O Fairest in the Land… O America… I am not
afraid of death, but I am afraid of a worthless life. Life is not—I repeat—not
worthless. God saved my life at least 4 times in 2012 alone, and that includes
the bet on the election. My Heavenly Father sees that I am not worthless, and I
am not to be sacrificed for the sake of power. I am a child of the living God,
and I was conceived after my baptism into the family of God when I received the
Holy Spirit. This also means that when a physical child is conceived in the
womb of the mother, that child is a new creation with God’s breath of life in
that child. That giving of God’s breath happens at conception. I believe this
is a biblical truth. I also believe it is the spiritual intent of God’s natural
right of Life written in the Declaration of Independence.
Here’s
what it says in the Declaration:
“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.”
(http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html)
Declaration of Independence, 1776.
What did
the founders believe was the intent for life as it is written as an unalienable
right endowed by our Creator? Let’s look at the words of James Wilson, a signer
of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, who said in “Of
Natural Rights of Individuals”:
“I
shall certainly be excused from adducing any formal arguments to evince, that life,
and whatever is necessary for the safety of life, are the natural rights of
man. Some things are so difficult; others are so plain, that they cannot be
proved. It will be more to our purpose to show the anxiety, with which some
legal systems spare and preserve human life; the levity and the cruelty which
others discover in destroying or sporting with it; and the inconsistency, with
which, in others, it is, at some times, wantonly sacrificed, and, at other
times, religiously guarded.
In Sparta, nothing was deemed so
precious as the life of a citizen. And yet in Sparta, if an infant, newly born,
appeared, to those who were appointed to examine him, ill formed or unhealthy,
he was, without any further ceremony, thrown into a gulph near mount Taygetus.w
Fortunate it was for Mr. Pope—fortunate it was for England, which boasts Mr.
Pope—that he was not born in the neighbourhood of mount Taygetus.
At Athens,x
the parent was empowered, when a child was born, to pronounce on its life or
its death. At his feet it was laid: if he took it in his arms, this was
received as the gracious signal for its preservation: if he deigned not a look
of compassion on the fruit of his loins, it was removed and exposed. Over
almost all the rest of Greece,y
this barbarity was permitted or authorized.
In China, the practice of exposing
new born children is said to have prevailed immemorially, and to prevail still.
As the institutions of that empire are never changed, its situation is never
improved.
Tacitus records it to the honour of
the Germans, that, among them, to kill infants newly born was deemed a most
flagitious crime. Over them, adds he, good manners have more power, than good
laws have over other nations. This shows, that, in his time, the restraints of
law began to be imposed on this unnatural practice; but that its inveteracy had
rendered them still inefficacious.
Under the Roman commonwealth, no
citizen of Rome was liable to suffer a capital punishment by the sentence of
the law. But at Rome, the son held his life by the tenure of his father’s
pleasure. In the forum, the senate, or the camp, the adult son of a Roman
citizen enjoyed the publick and private rights of a person: in his
father’s house, he was a mere thing;z
confounded, by the laws, with the cattle, whom the capricious master might
alienate or destroy, without being responsible to any tribunal on earth.
The gentle Hindoo is laudably averse
to the shedding of blood; but he carries his worn out friend or benefactor to
perish on the banks of the Ganges.
With consistency, beautiful and
undeviating, human life, from its commencement to its close, is protected by
the common law. In the contemplation of law, life begins when the infant is
first able to stir in the womb.a
By the law, life is protected not only from immediate destruction, but from
every degree of actual violence, and, in some cases, from every degree of
danger.
The grades of solicitude,
discovered, by the law, on the subject of life, are marked, in the clearest
manner, by the long and regular series of the different degrees of aggression,
which it enumerates and describes—threatening, assault, battery, wounding,
mayhem, homicide. How those different degrees may be justified, excused,
alleviated, aggravated, redressed, or punished, will appear both in the
criminal and in the civil code of our municipal law.”
(http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2074&chapter=166652&layout=html&Itemid=27)
James Wilson’s lecture “Of Natural Rights of Individuals”, 1790-1792.
I know
that I gave a lot of information from Mr. Wilson’s Lecture, but I wanted to
give all that He wanted to say about Life, and how it relates to Abortion.
He lectured about what man did to children, and his view was that life was to be protected and preserved. I believe that life should be protected and preserved. However, there is something that you need to take note of though. James Wilson thought
that the English Common Law was the best protection of human life. Here’s
what’s said about that specific law about abortion in William Blackstone’s
Commentaries:
“LIFE
is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual
; and it begins in contemplation of law as foon as an infant is able to ftir in
the mother's womb. For if a woman is quick with child, and by a potion, or
otherwife, killeth it in her womb ; or if any one beat her, whereby the child
dieth in her body, and fhe is delivered of a dead child ; this, though not
murder, was by the antient law homicide or manflaughter.”
(http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch1.asp)
William Blackstone’s commentaries on English common law, 1765.
The Founders
believed that Man has the right to life and to protect life, and James Wilson
clearly talked about children in the womb. However, the Founders adopted the English
Common Law into the laws of America. It was the best law of the day because
there was no medical way to find out about conception until the baby stirred in
the womb—which was around 14 weeks. Medical technology has advanced since the
18th century, and there’s ways to find that a woman have conceived way
before the baby stirs in the womb at quickening. There are ultrasounds that can
find out about the baby as early as 6 weeks into the pregnancy. But, the
spiritual intent is this: Life begins at conception, and is a gift from God.
Now, the
problem with Roe Vs Wade was this:
“An
AMA Committee on Criminal Abortion was appointed in May, 1857. It presented its
report, 12 Trans. of the Am.Med.Assn. 778 (1859), to the Twelfth Annual
Meeting. That report observed that the Committee had been appointed to
investigate criminal abortion "with a view to its general
suppression." It deplored abortion and its frequency and it listed three
causes of "this general demoralization":
‘The
first of these causes is a widespread popular ignorance of the true character
of the crime -- a belief, even among mothers themselves, that the foetus is
not alive till after the period of quickening.’”
Further into the Court Opinion by Justice Harry A.
Blackmun in 1973:
“This
right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept
of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or,
as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of
rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision
whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State
would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is
apparent.”
(http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0410_0113_ZO.html)
Roe V. Wade Opinion by Justice Harry A. Blackmun, 1973.
Now, O
America, have we become like the Greeks of Athens? That we can just be “empowered”
to throw away a gift from God? Roe v. Wade has given Americans the power to
pick up a child to preserve it, or remove it by exposing it. Should we even
have that power to destroy life that God says are His? As it is written in
Ezekiel 16: 20-22:
“Moreover you took your sons and your daughters, whom you bore to
Me, and these you sacrificed to them to be devoured. Were your acts
of harlotry a small matter, that you have slain My
children and offered them up to them by causing them to pass through the
fire? And in all your abominations and acts
of harlotry you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked
and bare, struggling in your blood.”
