The First Right is the Right to Life. It is Time to End Legal Abortion on Demand

No one with integrity any longer argues that the little girl or little boy killed through procured abortion is not a human being. When the abortion occurs through miscarriage we properly enter into the mourning of the mother over the loss of the one we call - her baby. However, when the mother is deceived into having a voluntary abortion, we use a different vocabulary. Most honest people now acknowledge that these children killed by abortion are human persons. A few hold on to the dangerous notion that dependency upon others makes someone less of a person. However, medical science has confirmed what our consciences and the Natural Law told us all along, these victims of the first preemptive war called intentional abortion are human beings just like us.

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CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) - On January 22, 2015, thousands will gather in Washington, D.C. to give their voice to our neighbors in the first home of the whole human race. Our youngest neighbors need our voice because theirs is muffled behind the wall of their mother's womb.

There, in their first experience of the interdependency which reveals the truth about our humanity, where they are supposed to be embraced by the warmth of love, they are vulnerable to the worst kind of domestic violence. At any moment the weapons of this pre-emptive war, voluntary abortion, may be wielded against them for any reason.

Make no mistake; these are weapons of death and destruction - chemical, surgical or suction. They are intentionally being used to kill these children deliberately, for any or no reason. The cold, hard truth about every procured abortion is that it takes an innocent human life.

No one with integrity any longer argues that the little girl or little boy killed through procured abortion is not a human being. When the abortion occurs through miscarriage we properly enter into the mourning of the mother over the loss of the one we call "her baby". However, when the mother is deceived into having a voluntary abortion, we use a different vocabulary.

Most honest people now acknowledge that these children killed by abortion are human persons. A few hold on to the dangerous notion that dependency upon others makes someone less of a person. However, medical science has confirmed what our consciences and the Natural Law told us all along, these victims of the first preemptive war called intentional abortion are human beings just like us.

We frame baby's first pictures in their 3D or 4D image through sonogram technology. We use intrauterine surgery to intervene to save them or correct anything which they may need before they are born.

We prosecute an offender who, in the act of harming their mother, causes their death as well. It is all so very clear what we are doing in every procured abortion. We lie to ourselves with all of the toxic rhetoric hiding the utter infamy of procured abortion on demand..

The argument which is now more commonly used, in a futile attempt to somehow justify this preemptive war on little girls and boys, is that the choice to kill them should be left to the mother in consultation with her own Doctor and/or other counselors. This profane argument is couched in a language of freedom and even clothed with a counterfeit compassion.

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What other group of human persons can be killed because someone else determines they do not want them to live? There is no moral difference between the killing of a child after birth and the killing of a child before birth.

We legally excuse this fetal homicide when it is committed by a misguided mother through the agency of a deceived or corrupted Doctor who once pledged to do no harm in his or her professional oath. We routinely refer to this intentional taking of innocent human life as healthcare.

We try to claim that the decision to take their life is somehow a reproductive choice. Procured abortion is not health care; it is the execution of a child. There is absolutely NOTHING reproductive about taking the life of that little boy or girl.

These heroic and dedicated men, women and children will come from all over the Nation to stand in solidarity with the children killed by the brutality of procured abortion. They will also stand with the mothers and fathers who were victimized by the lie perpetuated by those who support this horror and profit off of it.

Since those twin poles of judicial infamy and sheer brutality, Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton, over 57 million of our neighbors are dead. You can actually keep track of the infamy at this abortion counter site. We have no idea who they were and how they might have participated in our National life together. We are deprived of their contribution to the common good. We did not give them a chance to be born.

The great human rights movement of our age is the struggle to restore to the Civil and positive law the legal recognition of the fundamental Human Right to Life. It is already a fundamental human right, and one which can never be taken away.

This Right to Life is the foundation of all other rights. It is the first solidarity issue. The child in the womb is our innocent neighbor. It is wrong to kill any innocent neighbor. We know this and we have perpetuated the lie for too long.

We have failed to hear the cry of our youngest neighbors in the first home of the whole human race. As long as we continue to sanction their killing for any reason and by any means - and call it a right - we profane the word. We also place our future survival as a Nation at risk. 

It is criminal to intentionally take the life of an innocent child in the womb by lethal injection, chemical warfare or dissection and suction. No positive or civil law can change that fact. When they do - they are unjust laws which are not laws at all.

The great civil rights movements of the past two centuries have depended upon the recognition of an objective truth; every human being, at every age and stage, has human dignity and a right to life. 

Civil Rights are those human rights which are first recognized - and then properly protected by - civil government. The American founders stood in the long trajectory of Western civilization in their insistence that human rights are not given or bestowed by government but by the God in whose Image we have all been created. Truly just governments are instituted precisely to secure these human rights. The first among them is the Right to Life.

The Right to Life movement is the great freedom movement of our day. Without the freedom to be born, there are no other freedoms. Forty two years ago, with the stroke of a judicial pen, seven Justices of the United States Supreme Court consigned an entire class of persons, children in the first home of the whole human race (their mother's womb), to the status of property.

We cannot, we will not, stop in our efforts to end this evil. The First Right is the Right to Life. It is Time to End Legal Abortion on Demand

When we allow the innocent blood of children to be shed - and then protect the evil act with the Police Power of the State - we undermine our claim to being a just Nation. When we deny them the Freedom to be born, we undermine the notion of ordered liberty upon which our Nation was founded.

Those engaged in the Pro-Life movement assert with the American founders that there are truths that are self-evident - such as our equal dignity before God - and rights which are inalienable - such as the Right to Life.

Such a claim, that there exists an inalienable Right to Life for these children, is not simply a religious position. Rather, it is a truth revealed which is by the Natural Moral Law which can be known through the exercise of reason.

This Natural Law is binding upon all men and women. Those who attempt to relegate the Pro-Life position to a religious position want to privatize it and then dismiss it. We must resist this marginalization of the greatest moral issue of our age.

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Without recognizing this first Right to Life there can be no recognition of any other derivative human rights. In fact, the entire infrastructure of human rights is placed at risk. All true Human Rights are goods of human persons. When there is no human person there can be no rights endowed upon them or exercised by them. All the other rights talk in the world will not change that.

Every procured abortion is intrinsically immoral. It takes an innocent human life. Our position concerning the objective truth that every procured abortion is intrinsically immoral requires a public action. It is not simply a matter of personal opinion. Children are dying. Not opposing that horror and seeking to bring it to an end never serves the common good.

In the 42 years since the Supreme Court opinions in Roe and Doe were issued some unexpected good has come to Christians. In our standing together, insisting that the positive or civil law recognize what the Natural Moral Law demands - that these children have a right to life - Christians separated from one another by divisions in the Body of Christ have found one another as brothers and sisters. This is why I have long referred to this cause as a silver lining in the dark cloud of the culture of death.

It is not accidental that the March for Life always falls during the National Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Our human rights struggle has been one of the most fruitful and authentic forms of ecumenism the world has ever witnessed. We found one another in this common concern for the poorest of the poor, our littlest neighbors who have no voice but our own. 

The Prayer of Jesus echoes in this new missionary age:

"I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me." (John 17:20-23)

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There is a reciprocal relationship revealed in those words of the Savior of the whole world. The world will believe our gospel when we demonstrate our own unity of love with one another. Make no mistake, the prayer of the Son of God will be answered by the Father.

It is only a question is how soon it will happen. We hasten that day when we choose to pray together and work with one another. One of the greatest examples is this great human rights struggle.

Saint John Paul called all of the faithful to carry forward the task of ecumenism with a practical and spiritual urgency in his letter entitled May They Be One (Ut Unum Sint in Latin):

"Relations between Christians are not aimed merely at mutual knowledge, common prayer and dialogue. They presuppose and from now on call for every possible form of practical cooperation at all levels: pastoral, cultural and social, as well as that of witnessing to the Gospel message.

Moreover, ecumenical cooperation is a true school of ecumenism, a dynamic road to unity. Unity of action leads to the full unity of faith. Through such cooperation, all believers in Christ are able to learn easily how they can understand each other better and esteem each other more, and how the road to the unity of Christians may be made smooth. In the eyes of the world, cooperation among Christians becomes a form of common Christian witness and a means of evangelization which benefits all involved".

Throughout the world, classical, faithful Christians - Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic, are enrolled in such a true school of ecumenism - as we make common cause to end the killing of our youngest neighbors.

We have been thrown together in a common defense of life in a western culture which has lost its moral compass and is losing its very soul. Our Marching together for Life is becoming a road to our unity and a prophetic sign of our growing communion.

When we are victorious in this monumental struggle - and we will be victorious - there will be many heroes whose sacrifice and courage will be recounted in our history books. They will be celebrated by our children and grandchildren as the Champions of Life. 

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When recognition of the fundamental Human Right to life is restored to the Civil and Positive law of the Nation, these men, women and children who brave the elements every year to March on Washington will be remembered, honored and esteemed, as heroes of a freedom and human rights movement. The mother of all true freedom and human rights movements.

The First Right is the Right to Life. It is Time to End Legal Abortion on Demand
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Deacon Keith A. Fournier is Founder and Chairman of Common Good Foundation and Common Good Alliance. A married Roman Catholic Deacon of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, he and his wife Laurine have five grown children and six grandchildren, He serves as the Director of Adult Faith Formation at St. Stephen, Martyr Parish in Chesapeake, VA. He is also a human rights lawyer and public policy advocate who served as the first and founding Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice in the nineteen nineties. He has long been active at the intersection of faith and culture and currently serves as Special Counsel to Liberty Counsel. He is also the Editor in Chief of Catholic Online.

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