Joseph: The Senate Is About to Vote on Allowing the Professional Killing of Little Children

On Wednesday, the Senate is to vote on a bid to codify abortion “rights” into federal law.

The very title of the Women’s Health Protection Act is deceptive; it’s not really about protecting women’s health. Women are not even mentioned in the bill — only “persons.” So what’s it really about?

It’s about setting up once and for all across all 50 states the legalized killing of unborn children in their mothers’ wombs.

The act constitutes a masterpiece of language manipulation.

In defining “abortion services,” “health care providers,” “pregnancy” and “viability,” it contrives to avoid any mention of the unborn child or the mother. For example, we are told that “‘pregnancy’ refers to the period of the human reproductive process beginning with the implantation of a fertilized egg.” But there is no mention of the natural and normal end of a pregnancy when the baby is born.

The bill craftily avoids any mention of a child or a baby even when it defines “viability” as “the point in a pregnancy at which … there is a reasonable likelihood of sustained fetal survival outside the uterus with or without artificial support.” Why use the clumsy term “sustained fetal survival outside the uterus” instead of just saying that the baby, the mother’s child, the little son or the little daughter, can be born alive?

Only one patient in a pregnancy?

This attempt to de-recognize the smaller patient in a pregnancy so that he or she may be directly and professionally killed can have no standing under the rule of law today when fetal medicine and surgery are providing such advanced care for these patients.

With rapid advances in embryology and fetology, together with the new embryoscopy and fetoscopy, in which a camera can be placed right up against the amniotic sac, it has become increasingly possible to view, monitor, diagnose and treat each one of these smallest human beings.

Yet this absurd bill is based on the assumption that abortion is a benign medical procedure involving only one person. It glosses over the fact that abortion is the only medical procedure involving two patients that has as its purpose the direct and deliberate killing of one of the patients. Why is there no mention of this patient?

The act goes on to babble about “safety,” but the safety record of abortion is abysmal because the life of the unborn child is not taken into account. For the second and most vulnerable patient, abortion is purposefully and lethally unsafe. The natural safety of the mother’s womb is penetrated by the abortion “provider” and the child being nurtured and protected there is destroyed, deliberately and without due process.

The patient seeking the medicalized execution of her unborn child is not required, the act says, to disclose any reason or reasons for doing so. Why is there no due process, as required under the 14th Amendment? Because the supporters of the bill have agreed that the unborn child at risk of abortion is not a human being like us but just a person’s property.

So the Women’s Health Protection Act is not about women’s health but about the supposed right to terminate a pregnancy. But there is no recognition that this “right” translates into the terrible injustice of exterminating the second patient in the pregnancy — the mother’s unborn child.

“Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize any government to interfere with a person’s ability to terminate a pregnancy, to diminish or in any way negatively affect a person’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.”

Paradoxically, there is no “right to terminate a pregnancy” in the Constitution.

“Congress shall have power…”

It is first and foremost the duty of Congress to provide legal protection to people across the United States; this constitutional authority is given specifically to Congress in the 13th Amendment, Section 2, and in the 14th Amendment, Section 5. In both these sections, Congress is furnished with the implied duty to enforce by “appropriate legislation” the states’ conformity with these amendments.

Thus, the Supreme Court in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954) recognized what had been understood from the nation’s beginning, an understanding shared by so many of the framers of the 14th Amendment — that the whole Bill of Rights, including the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, was a guarantee that all persons would receive equal treatment under the law. With regard specifically to children, Bolling reaffirmed that discrimination against children and the arbitrary deprivation of any child’s liberty may be so unjustifiable as to be in violation of the Due Process Clause.

We can establish that the “unwanted child” of Roe is being mistreated at the present time as a chattel — the personal property of the child’s “owner,” viz., his or her mother — to be destroyed at will in a lawful abortion.

Sooner or later, Congress must exercise its constitutional power to enforce by “appropriate legislation” sensible and protective statutes that prohibit mothers (and their abortionists) from lethally mistreating these daughters and sons while in their mothers’ wombs. Our posterity are not to be abused as chattels, as possessions to be kept or discarded on the glib but false grounds of “my body, my choice.”

A majority in the House and in the Senate must be persuaded to take a new and clearer look at the 13th Amendment’s veto of treating human beings as property. Slavery (the ownership of a human being) shall not “exist within the United States.” It is to be prohibited, not merely regulated by the states.

Building on this principle, the 14th Amendment provides that the states shall not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

As in the 13th Amendment, Congress is given in the 14th the power to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

Here again is a direct instruction to Congress: the deprivation of the life of any person (irrespective of one’s size or age or status or “unwantedness”) must not proceed without due process and the equal protection of the law. Where the states do not provide them, Congress is to enforce their provision by “appropriate legislation.”

It’s time that Congress honors that instruction.

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