The largest annual pro-life demonstration of the year is about to take place this Friday in Washington, D.C., reminding everyone of the disastrous Roe v. Wade decision issued by the Supreme Court on Jan. 22, 1973, and legalizing abortion throughout pregnancy.
If we look closely at the argument the marchers are putting forward to counter Roe v. Wade, it’s pretty straightforward: Roe v. Wade is about exclusion; the pro-life movement is about inclusion.
At issue is whether the child in the womb is a member of the community of persons whose lives should be protected under the Constitution.
Roe v. Wade says, “The word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”
The pro-life movement declares that the unborn are, indeed, persons who deserve protection.
The march on Friday is not simply about the foundational ethic of “respecting life from conception to natural death.” It is more specific than that. It is about restoring protection to a particular group of people, namely, children living and growing in their mothers’ wombs during the first nine months of life.
The trajectory, indeed, of constitutional jurisprudence is a trajectory of growing inclusion. Slaves were once excluded; segregation involved excluding African-Americans in various ways; women were once excluded in many ways. The courts and the laws eventually introduced more equality, more inclusion for these and other groups as time went on.
Will children in the womb continue to be forgotten, or can we expect the constitutional trajectory eventually to include them, too?
The reason to include them, the marchers are emphasizing this year, is scientific. The theme of this year’s march is “Unique from Day One: Pro-life is Pro-Science.”
Indeed, anyone can find in five seconds dozens of documented sources about the scientific knowledge we have regarding when and how an individual human life begins. For instance, as Keith L. Moore wrote in The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology:
One can find many philosophies and ideologies that will say that life has no value or claim to constitutional protection. But likewise, one can find such philosophies and ideologies saying the same about life outside the womb. Such ideas have always been with us.
The question is whom will we protect, despite any such denials of their value.
One could indeed say that people like me hold that life begins at fertilization because of our religious beliefs. Indeed, our religion requires us to treat the unborn as persons. But we do not say our religion is the reason the law should protect the unborn.
The reason, rather, is that they are human, and that can be proven in the very same way it can be proven that you and I are human: the genetic makeup of our bodies. We have human DNA; we are, biologically, human organisms.
The humanity of an individual is the best standard to preserve equality because it is objective and cannot be taken away from someone based on changing circumstances.
When the pro-life movement says, “Protect all who are human,” and the abortion industry says, “Whether you are human is up to another person’s opinion or the court’s judgment,” it is clear who is on the side of inclusion.
In this regard, it is not the pro-life movement that has the burden of proof, but rather our opponents. By what evidence is the biology and embryology contradicted that tells us when it was decided that any of us would be male or female, or what color our eyes would be?
And by what standard is abortion any aspect of medicine? Before a doctor carries out any medical procedure, he has to have medical justification. The procedure has to be indicated, and the physician needs to be able to assert a medical benefit to the intervention.
Not only is it scientifically undeniable that an abortion destroys a living human organism, but the burden of proof that this procedure is indicated falls squarely on the shoulders of the abortionists.
As we confront a nation that permits elective abortion throughout pregnancy and a movement that calls for “abortion on demand without apology,” we certainly have reason to march, and we have reason for the greatest confidence, as we do so, in the rightness of our cause.
Father Frank Pavone (@frfrankpavone) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the national director of Priests for Life.
