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.
These most famous words from the most famous breakup letter
in history, the Declaration of Independence, set the tone for a government by
the people based on natural law. It was the acknowledgement of what was and is
already fact – rights do not exist because they are given by government. Rights
already exist because God created them when He created the universe. Therefore,
it is not a matter of if we are granted rights by our government; rather, it is
a matter of if the government acknowledges and protects those rights.
Time and time again, God says in the Bible that He is “no
respecter of persons”. He shows no partiality, fairly judging every individual
in the same way. It was this attitude that was captured in the Declaration’s
statement that “all men are created equal”. Natural law is the proper standard
for truly fair governing.
I love America. Our nation has in the past been a “city upon
a hill”, standing up for biblical principles. We’ve fought wars to keep our
freedom and the freedom of many others intact. We’ve aided our fellow man after
disaster. We’ve been the destination for millions upon millions of immigrants
that sought the shelter of democracy and opportunity. What I will lay out in
this post does not take away from such accomplishments, nor does it lessen my
patriotism. Since emigration is freely allowed, I encourage any who do not
share a love for America to utilize this right.
Thomas Jefferson penned the words of the Declaration as a
lofty ideal. It did not claim that these rights were fully being protected.
This was the picture of an ideal nation, one that stood for all people,
regardless of differences such as race or nationality.
In reality, however, these rights of “Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness” were not extended to all then, nor are they now. We live
in a fallen world, and a fallen world has no perfect civilization. When God is
pushed aside, His law, living in the consciences of men, is also neglected. It
is through this departure from the equality of all men that we have seen one
injustice after another in the United States. Unabated for 240 years has been
the deprivation of rights to certain groups that are seen no differently by
God, but are seen differently by a godless society.
Let us examine the history of “created equal” in the United
States:
African Americans
This seems the most likely starting point because
discrimination against and ownership of blacks is probably the most egregious
human rights violation in U.S. history, at least until recently. Jefferson, the
writer of the Declaration, was a slave owner. At that point in time, slavery
was legal in the colonies and there were no plans to end the slave trade, much
less slavery. As mentioned before, the Declaration stood for the ideal, not
reality. Ultimately, the desire would be equality, but slavery was a very
complicated issue. It had to be tiptoed around so as to avoid further tension
between the northern and southern states.
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| A slave woman is auctioned off |
When the Constitution was written, Article I, Section 9
protected the slave trade until 1808. It was banned at the earliest possible date,
which meant that no new slaves could legally enter the United States. However,
chattel slavery remained for several more decades. Children born into slave
families became slaves themselves.
Conditions varied widely for slaves. Some were treated more
fairly. Others faced regular whippings and other torture, such as brandings,
shackling, and mutilation. Imprisonment, apart from the company of other
slaves, was another punishment.
Torture was far from the only hardship. Living conditions
were cramped and dirty. Education was widely restricted, as the ability to read
could aid in escape. Dominance by owners was asserted through fear and abuse.
Some women were sexually abused or raped.
Paternalism was a dominant philosophy of slave owners.
Blacks were viewed as a lesser species, (belief
in soon-to-come Evolution has greatly aided injustice) that needed whites
in order to be civil. This is a common theme in human rights violations and
possibly the worst part about slavery: the victims are made out to be less than
human. That’s what was done in Nazi Germany. It’s what was done in Rwanda. It’s
what was done to women in England.
Essentially, under paternalism blacks were seen as whites’
lesser little cousin. They needed whites to teach them what is proper. The
mistreatment was discipline to show them the way. This was not the rationale of
every slave owner, but it was the intellectual reasoning.
When it comes to injustice, one either has to convince
himself that his victim is not equal or that what he is doing is not actually
that bad. It’s the only way to process the commitment of such crimes.
Slavery was afraid to be touched because of what it could
lead to. Unfortunately, many people against slavery were afraid to broach the
subject, choosing rather to cater to the demands of the pro-slavery
individuals. As long as they could maintain the status quo and preserve
harmony, the anti-slavery (in word only) individuals were willing to leave it
alone.
In 1857, the Dred
Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision (the SCOTUS has been a champion of
injustice in the U.S.) confirmed the belief that blacks were not persons equal
to whites, but rather were property that could be owned by whites. This
expanded the boundaries of slavery, as Dred Scott was a black man born in a
free state that had been enslaved nonetheless. As he was supposedly less than
human, he did not deserve the basic human right of Liberty.
In 1859, well-known abolitionist John Brown was executed.
Brown had led an unsuccessful raid on the army armory at Harpers Ferry,
attempting to ignite national slave rebellions. He believed, perceptively, that
the only way to end slavery was through armed conflict. A year-and-a-half
later, the Civil War began, the bloodiest war in American history. (Some claim
that Civil War was over states’ rights; while this is true, what states’ right
was being fought over? Slavery. Was slavery a dying institution? No. There
would have always been a use for it, if not in the plantations, in factories.)
At the end of the war, the 13th, 14th, and 15th
amendments to the Constitution were passed, banning slavery and establishing
personhood for blacks.
African Americans,
Part II
While liberty had been won for blacks, this was not
absolute. While slavery was abolished, racism remained. As the Reconstruction
era ended, the South was creating laws that would limit the rights of blacks
for another century.
In the 1880s, Jim Crow laws began to spring up in every
Southern state, and to lesser degrees in the North as well. These separated
blacks from whites in a wide variety of ways. Different restrooms. Different
water fountains. Different schools. Different parts of the bus stop. Many
restaurants were exclusively for whites. Same for hotels, amusement parks,
residences, colleges, even prisons. Blacks had to sit in the back of buses or
stand to make room for whites. Many states banned interracial marriages.
Such laws were solidified by the 1896 Supreme Court
decision, Plessy v. Ferguson. While
there had been similar decisions, Plessy
not only allowed but required segregation in America. It was done under the
guise of “separate but equal”, but things were hardly equal.
So Jim Crow laws stayed in the books for decades. Blacks had
finally seen the end of slavery, yet still faced violations of their natural
right to Liberty.
Some were deprived of their right to Life. Between 1890 and
1910, 3000 blacks were lynched in the South. Most were killed on only the suspicion
of a crime. Others hadn’t even been suspected of crimes, but were killed for
reasons such as testifying against a white man in court, insulting a white man,
indolence, eloping with a white woman, and trying to vote. For this twenty year
span, an average of almost three blacks were lynched every week, and 95% were
done by a white lynch mob. Lynchings continued – unpunished – until the civil
rights movement ended.
Some of the lynchings administered justice in the sense that
they punished someone that had committed murder or rape – though it was not the
job of a lynch mob to dole out punishment. Other times, though, a baseless
accusation led to the brutal killings. Such was the case of Henry Argo, accused
of rape by a woman who wasn’t trusted by many citizens of the Oklahoma town,
black and white. Neither the national guard nor sheriff that showed up on scene
interfered properly and allowed the teenager to be shot, and several hours
later stabbed by the woman’s husband. Argo died after being refused by a local
hospital.
The deadliest
mass lynching occurred in Arkansas in 1919, when a large group of whites
from the town and from afar unleashed terror on blacks that attempted to
unionize. As blacks were attacked, they attempted to defend themselves, which
resulted in further violence and more racists to show up on scene.
Indiscriminately massacred were 237 sharecroppers.
Other times, blacks were lynched for wrongdoing that was far
from a capital offense. Such was the case with the springboard of the civil
rights movement – Emmitt Till.
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| Emmett Till's corpse, splashed across national publications |
Emmitt had left Chicago to visit his cousins in Mississippi.
He boasted about his “white girlfriends”, unfathomable to his cousins that had
grown up in the Deep South. To prove himself, Emmitt whistled at a white woman
working in a convenience store. A couple nights later, the woman’s husband and
a few other men kidnapped Emmitt from his bedroom, castrated him, choked him
with barbed wire, beat him with pipes, and shot him in the head, then submerged
his corpse in a river. Naturally, the men were found not guilty by a white
jury. Emmitt’s mother chose to have an open casket funeral, and the picture of
Emmitt’s bloated and disfigured corpse was circulated across the nation.
A few months later, a woman that had seen the image was told
to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man. But Rosa Parks saw a
few boys playing outside, and thought, “If I don’t do something, those boys
will end up like Emmitt Till.” Her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott
and the modern civil rights movement, which had its share of human rights
violations.
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| Jim Zwerg, a Freedom Rider beaten by the KKK |
Many demonstrators were attacked for breaking unjust laws.
After marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama in 1965, an attack
left 17 in the hospital. Freedom Riders on one bus were savagely beaten by KKK
members, nearly killing several people. The other bus traveling at the time was
firebombed. The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed
in 1963, killing four girls. The Birmingham Campaign participants in 1963 were
met with fire hoses and police dogs. Three civil rights workers in Mississippi,
registering blacks to vote in 1964, were murdered and buried in an earthen dam.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
These just scratch the surface. What you, the reader, must
be reminded of in this lengthy history of oppression is that all of this was
allowed by law or in defiance of federal laws. White attackers were rarely
punished. For centuries blacks were oppressed. Finally, in the 1960s, the hand
of the U.S. was forced by the civil rights movement, and with legislatures and
courts finally on the right side of history, laws and court cases began to
topple Jim Crow laws and discrimination across America.
Native Americans
The Native Americans and European settlers were at odds
nearly from the beginning. As the newcomers spread west, they came into contact
with new tribes. Some were more welcoming than others. Some instigated
violence. But some did not. It must be acknowledged that the rights of the
natives were often placed below the rights of the American government and its
citizens. While the causes and culprits of wars and massacres are a bit
shrouded in mystery, there are many events that can be pointed to show the
oppression of these tribes.
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| Mass grave at Wounded Knee |
Dozens of massacres took place. In 1864, a militia in
Colorado killed and mutilated between 70 and 163 Cheyenne and Arapaho in the
Sand Creek Massacre. The Bear River Massacre in present-day Idaho in 1863 took
the lives of 210 Shoshone. Attacks on Indian Island in California in 1860 left
250 Wiyat dead. Over 150 Wintu were killed in the Bridge Gulch Massacre in
1852. The Gnadenhutten Massacre in Ohio in 1782 killed 96 Delaware. Probably
the most infamous of all was the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota in 1890,
when U.S. cavalry killed 146 Sioux.
For brevity’s sake, I will spare the details of these
massacres; you can research them further if you like as well as view others
from both sides on Wikipedia.
Suffice it to say that while some Native American tribes did instigate violence
and massacre Americans, there was certainly blame for the U.S. government. Some
of these, such as the Sand Creek Massacre and the Bridge Gulch Massacre, were
done in retaliation for other killings; however, many also took the lives of
women and children.
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| Removal of Native American tribes |
Forced removals were also common. These were especially
lethal to hunter-gatherer tribes, as they were forced onto small reservations
unsuitable for their lifestyle. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was passed under
Andrew Jackson’s administration and allowed the president to negotiate treaties
(sometimes under duress) for tribes to give up their lands for other land
farther west. Some tribes, such as the Choctaws, chose to cooperate. Others
fought, such as the Seminoles. Probably the best known was the removal of the
Cherokee and the other four of the “Five Civilized Tribes” on the “Trail of
Tears”. Over 10,000 combined perished en route from exposure, disease, or
starvation as they were forced to march by armed militia. One quarter of the
16,000+ Cherokee died on the Trail.
There are not as many Supreme Court cases involving the
violation of rights of Native Americans because rights were never conferred on
them. Once again we see the squashing of natural Rights – Liberty and Life
refused to thousands. It was not until 1924 that Congress extended citizenship
to all Native Americans born in the U.S. They would not receive voting rights
until the civil rights movement.
New Immigrants
This term refers to the new type of immigrants that hit
their peak numbers starting about 1880. The Chinese had been immigrating in
larger numbers before this time period. But in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act
was passed, which severely restricted the inflow of Chinese. At this time, they
only represented .002% of the population, but western workers complained about
the loss of jobs. This was one reason for the law being passed, the other to
maintain “racial purity”.
New Immigrants came from Southern and Western Europe, were
Jewish or Catholic, poorer, and had less in common with U.S. culture than did
the “Old Immigrants”, who were Protestants from Western and Northern Europe.
Much of the discrimination against these individuals was not government
mandated; rather, it was by society that didn’t want jobs taken away and
considered some of the facets of the cultures the New Immigrants came from
alarming. Mistreatment was widespread and occasionally led to violence, such as
the Lattimer Massacre in 1897 when 22 Polish and Hungarian miners were killed
during a strike.
The National Origins Act in 1924 limited annual immigration
to 2% of people from that country already living in the U.S. in 1890. This
clearly targeted New Immigrants, whose countries had smaller numbers in America
at that time. This Act was not done away with until the 1960s.
Women
The women’s rights movement has covered a wide variety of
issues over its history, much more than could be relayed in this abbreviated
history. Women in the United States had limited political, economic, and social
rights at the beginning. Each of these were focused on to some degree, but
starting in the 1840s much of the emphasis was placed on political rights,
specifically the right to vote.
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| Elizabeth Cady Stanton |
Suffrage was finally, at least officially, granted to all
men in the 1860s. Women, though, still did not share in this. What publicly
began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 was one of the longest consistent
civil rights movements, as 70 years of planning and lobbying ensued. Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the Women’s Loyal National League in
1863, which initially started the largest petition in American history at the
time to abolish slavery. At the end of the decade, Lucy Stone split from these
two to work towards the same goal with a different philosophy, and was joined
by Julia Ward Howe and her husband, Henry Blackwell.
Per usual, the courts stepped in several times to ensure injustice remained. In 1875, the New Departure strategy begun by husband and wife duo Francis and Virginia Minor – which argued that disenfranchisement of women violated the 14th Amendment – was stopped by the Supreme Court’s Minor v. Happersett ruling, which stated that the Constitution guarantees voting rights for no one, thus they could not argue that their constitutional rights were being violated. A lower court found Susan B. Anthony guilty of voting in the presidential election of 1872, which she was arrested for doing. However, Anthony refused to pay her fine, and she was not forced to for fear of appeal.
In 1869, the first territory, Wyoming, granted women the
right to vote. An amendment to the Constitution was introduced in 1878 to grant
this right nationally. Towards the end of the 19th century, the
rival suffrage groups combined to create the National American Woman Suffrage
Association, and Anthony became president of it in 1892. Carie Chapman Catt
emerged as another leader a few years later.
As the suffrage movement continued to pick up steam,
opposition increased. The East and South, which held to traditional gender
roles, saw women’s suffrage as a danger and were not bashful in saying so. From
politicians to church leaders to other women, many came out in opposition.
Things came to a head during World War I, when women entered traditionally male
jobs to replace men going off to war. This caused women to press harder for the
right to vote, as they were partnering with men in the war effort. President
Woodrow Wilson, affectionately known as “Kaiser Wilson” by suffragists, agreed
with this sentiment in a 1918 speech to Congress. Earlier, the White House had
been picketed for the first time in history by women demanding the right to
vote. Some people reacted violently to these picketers, tearing the banners out
of their hands. The police arrested over 100 protestors. Sentenced to seven
months in prison, Alice Paul led a hunger strike, which resulted in the women
being force fed, painting the administration in a bad light.
In 1917, New York – the most populous state in the union –
became the fifteenth state to grant full suffrage. States that allowed women to
vote in presidential elections controlled over half of electoral votes.
Political parties could see the writing on the wall and began pressuring
legislators so they could claim credit. With the Democratic Party finally
behind suffrage (in 1915 they were the only party to vote against it), the
amendment that had sat since the 1870s was passed in Congress and ratified by
35 of the 36 necessary states by 1919. Tennessee became the deciding state the
next year, and the long battle for voting rights was over.
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| Alice Paul in prison |
Even after the 19th Amendment, women still faced
discrimination in other areas. It was traditional for a woman to perhaps take a
job in “woman’s work” such as being a secretary or teacher while single, then
quit to be a housewife once married. (Please understand, I have no issue with a
woman being a stay-at-home mother; however, this should not be forced.)
Another world war again offered a chance for women to work
in male-dominated fields, and served as a partial catalyst for future movement
into the workforce. Overall, though, women mostly went back to traditional
roles after the war’s end. Fifteen years later, in 1960, 70% of nuclear
families had only the father employed, with 25% being dual-income.
The baby boomer generation women began to fight harder for
workforce equality for women, fighting things such as sexual harassment,
unequal pay, and male-dominated fields. Gradually, women earned laws against
sexual harassment, equal pay when all other variables are equal, and broke into
new fields in the workforce.
Disabled
Discrimination against the disabled almost didn’t seem like
discrimination at the time. It was assumed that a disability inhibited an
individual from doing certain things. Employment options were limited. Access
to transportation and buildings was not guaranteed.
This could similarly apply to diseases. Epilepsy was once
associated with demon possession and could land someone in an insane asylum,
even though it is far from the same thing. Some diseases have been the American
equivalents of leprosy, with people quarantined from society, many of which
were not necessary; for example, Mary Mallon (“Typhoid Mary”) was quarantined
for a total of 26 years for having the ability to infect others with typhoid
fever, though immune herself, rather than simply being educated about germs and
how to avoid spreading them. People diagnosed with HIV were often discriminated
against for employment, housing, and social services even though the disease
can only be spread through contact with body fluids, which proper precautions
can easily avoid.
A similar movement to the racial civil rights movement
occurred in the 1970s and 80s. Disabled individuals staged sit-ins in
government buildings and blocked buses that were not fitted to carry the
physically disabled. Later, people began keeping “discrimination diaries” to
log instances of discrimination for testimonials and awareness. In 1973,
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of
disability in federal funding. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act
banned discrimination on the basis of disability and upped the codes for
buildings and transportation to accommodate the disabled. The Americans with
Disabilities Act Amendments Act in 2008 expanded ADA to include those
individuals whose diseases and conditions are controlled by medication,
allowing people with conditions such as epilepsy to receive protection even if
their condition is controlled by medication.
Japanese Americans
In the months following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor,
Executive Order 9066’s broad language set the stage for the internment of about
130,000 Japanese Americans during the Second World War. This was barely applied
in Hawaii, where a third of citizens were of Japanese ancestry, but was on the
West Coast. The reasoning was that these Japanese Americans could pose security
risks if they were to communicate with Japan or would help Japan should they
invade the West Coast. However, 80,000 were second- or third-generation
Americans. Sixty-two percent were American citizens.
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| Map of Japanese American West Coast exclusion zone and internment camps |
The accusations stemmed from prejudice rather than legitimate threat. Certainly the outrage at the Japanese Empire was well-deserved, but it was aimed at the easiest targets – those that were loyal to the nation they resided in, the United States. One military leader testified before Congress: “It doesn’t matter if they’re American citizens. They’re still Japanese.”
The vast majority of Japanese Americans relocated were done
so forcibly to internment camps in the interior of the United States.
Conditions at camps varied depending on who ran them; the War Relocation
Authority tended to have the worst conditions, where it was not uncommon for 25
people to live in facilities appropriate for four. Education for children was
underfunded and medical care, while in existence, was limited. The camps were
surrounded by armed guards who would shoot those attempting to leave. One such
camp was surrounded by barbed wired; facilities included unpartitioned toilets
and cots for beds, with limited food.
Material losses for these Americans were widespread, as they
were only allowed to bring what they could carry. Many lost houses, businesses,
and possessions, and those that weren’t entrepreneurs were often fired from
their jobs. Hostility continued after returning home and was usually unpunished
by law. In WRA camps alone, nearly 2,000 died from disease, with 10 being shot
by guards.
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| Japanese Americans held in an internment camp |
Once again, the Supreme Court supported the injustice. Korematsu v. United States, handed down
in 1944, upheld the removal of Japanese Americans from “exclusion zones”.
Another ruling, however, simultaneously stated the loyal citizens cannot be
detained without cause. This eventually paved the way for the shutting down of
the camps by March of 1946, six months after the war ended.
The initial attempt to repay Japanese Americans was
half-hearted at best, when in 1948 Congress passed an act allowing reparations.
The IRS by then had destroyed most of the tax records, making it very difficult
to be repaid.
It wasn’t until the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and
subsequent Amendments in 1992 that a redress of grievances was granted of
$20,000, but only to each remaining
internee, and a formal apology made.
So what is the purpose of recounting these moral failures of
America’s past?
There has never been a time in U.S. history that injustice
was not taking place. Somewhere, against someone, there has always been
inequality, despite the fact that the Declaration proclaims that “all men are
created equal”. What is ideologically true has never properly been implemented.
There has always been at least one group whose Life or Liberty has been
deprived.
As the curtain closed on centuries of government-mandated
discrimination against blacks, as women began to break through the glass
ceiling, a new form of injustice, worse in number than any other, took root.
Preborn
Up until 1973, abortion laws were left up to the states.
Twenty states by that time had legalized abortion for some circumstances or up
until a certain gestational period. This all changed when the Supreme Court –
astonishing, I know – once again sided with injustice. It was unique in this
case in that the Court was not merely upholding an unjust law – it created one.
Overstepping its bounds, the Court in 1973 overrode state laws by legalizing
abortion for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy with its sister
rulings of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.
The results were astonishing. In 1973, there were less than
200,000 abortions, still an incomprehensible number. In the first year of the Roe and Doe decisions, the Center for Disease Control reported over 600,000
abortions. (This is what make the pro-abortion claim that there were over a
million abortions a year before 1973 so laughable. Abortions dropped when the
opportunity was drastically expanded?) Just four years later, the number
eclipsed 1,000,000. The exact numbers are not entirely clear, as the CDC does
not aggressively pursue the number of abortions. The Guttmacher Institute, the
statistical affiliate of Planned Parenthood, keeps better records. The number
of abortions per year in the United States peaked in 1990 when 1.6 million took
place. Since then, it has been on a gradual decline; the Guttmacher Institute
reports that 1.06 million abortions were performed in 2011.
Abortion is also unique in what is specifically legalized.
At no other time in American history has the death of innocent humans been permissible
by law. The law sometimes turned its head to allow lynchings, but those were
still illegal. Until 1973, there was never a law that allowed for the killing
of innocent people.
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| The "Cemetery of the Innocent" offers a powerful visual of how many tiny humans are killed in abortions every day. This number now stands at 2900. |
And abortion is unique in its numbers. When it comes to
lynchings or Native American massacres, we’re talking thousands. Still big
numbers. But when we talk abortion, we talk millions. The number of legal
abortions that have taken place in the U.S., the vast majority after 1973, is
over 60 million. Unfathomable statistics. Yet each one of these represents at
least one life that was taken, allowed by law and celebrated by Progressives.
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| Suction and Curettage Abortion |
When we read of the brutality of Emmitt Till’s death, it is
sickening. That was one life, one valuable human life that was handled in a
most inhuman way. Allow me to introduce you to abortion, where every single
death is as brutal.
The most common abortion procedure is suction and curettage,
in which a powerful vacuum is inserted into the birth canal. Still early enough
for the flesh of the developing human to be soft, this vacuum rips the tiny
human apart and collects her remains in a jar.
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| Dilation and Evacuation Abortion |
Later on is the dilation and evacuation, in which serrated
forceps are used to grab a human fetus’ leg. The abortionist twists for a clean
break of the bone and pulls the leg off. The procedure is then repeated for the
other leg, then the arms, then the torso. Finally, the head is crushed and
pulled out, and the uterus is vacuumed to remove any remnants of the fetus. The
developing human feels the pain of the dismemberment until her death.
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| Saline Abortion |
Or as an alternative, take the saline abortion, where a
fetus has a saline solution injected into her amniotic sac and is effectively
burned alive.
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| Dilation and Extraction Abortion |
Or there are the two procedures that were outlawed in the
early 2000s. There was the dilation and extraction, commonly know as partial birth abortion, which saw a fully gestated
baby’s neck be cut and brain matter vacuumed out. And there was the induced
labor abortion, where a baby was delivered, then left to suffer until she died.
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| Induced Labor Abortion |
America has never seen such barbaric injustice. As bad as
the others were, there was no murder on a massive, genocidal scale. But in
similar fashion to these other injustices, the government dehumanized a group
of humans and left them to suffer for the decision.
Laws and court decisions spiraled further out of control
until 1989, when Webster v. Reproductive
Health Services nearly overturned the 1973 decisions, when a Missouri law
defining life at conception was upheld. But Sandra Day O’Conner refused to
endorse the portion that would have thrown out the blight. Abortion continued. Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992
redefined abortion laws but did not change the legality.
Meanwhile, a movement developed to confront abortion. Like
all the other movements against other injustices in U.S. history, it did and continues
to face vehement opposition to protect the interests of those perpetrating the
injustice. Today we look at slave owners and segregationists as protecting and
furthering great evils, but at the time there was wide support. Likewise,
pro-abortionists protect and further a great evil, yet are considered
reasonable and even laudible by a large part of society.
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| The "Summer of Mercy": pro-life individuals block access to an abortion mill |
For several years, anti-abortion activism was organized
around Operation Rescue. Beginning in 1986, leaders such as Randall Terry, Joe
Scheidler, and Monica Miller advocated a simple philosophy: if pro-life
individuals believe the preborn are human, they should act like it. Thousands
of people began creatively shutting down abortion mills for a day through
blocking doors, chaining themselves to machinery, and laying in front of
abortionists’ tires. Many faced arrest and jail sentences. A bill passed by
Congress and signed by President Clinton brought a stop to this by making a
felony what in front of any other building is merely a civil defense with the
Federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1993.
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| The author discussing abortion on my university's campus |
Operation Rescue continued on with legal ways to shut down
abortion mills, which along with the Pro-Life Action League, Americans United
for Life, and regional right to life organizations has succeeded in doing
hundreds of times. The pregnancy resource center movement has placed thousands
of centers across the United States that offer free supplies and resources to
women in crisis pregnancies, as well as counseling and adoption services.
Thousands of other adults and students alike have taken to the streets with
organizations like the Center for Bioethical Reform, Created Equal, and Survivors
of the Abortion Holocaust to engage the public about abortion.
Unlike the other injustices outlined here, abortion is still
widespread, systematic, and legal. Setbacks continue, as was the case earlier
this week with Whole Woman's Wealth v. Hellerstedt,
in which even basic regulations of the abortion industry were thrown out by, as
you might imagine, the Supreme Court. However, progress against injustice can
take decades or even centuries. There is a long way to go and, frankly, there
is no end in sight. Individuals that are consistent in human equality, and
therefore against abortion, look forward to the day when this nation lives out
the true meaning of its creed penned 240 years ago – where the natural right to
Life, granted by God, is protected by the American government. It must be remembered,
though, that injustice deserves to be fought regardless of the prospects of
success, and as long as the United States continues to trade one form of
bigotry and injustice for another, fought it will be.
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