The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood have filed lawsuits in several states, including Nevada, to stop personhood initiatives. As the ACLU puts it in the Nevada complaint, personhood proposals are designed to “ban a range of reproductive health services.” The complaint is based on the long-held opinion of abortion proponents that there is no good reason to take an action that would interfere in a woman’s decision to abort her own child. Of course, the ACLU does not use those words, but rather states in its press release:
“Supporters of the so-called 'Personhood Initiative' intend this provision to eliminate a woman's right to make personal, private health care decisions," said Emmily Bristol, one of the plaintiffs. "We need to preserve a woman's right to make decisions about her reproductive health with her doctor and family without governmental interference."
The Initiative attempts to re-define the term "person" to include a fertilized egg and all subsequent stages of prenatal development. According to the Initiative's proponents, the newly defined "persons" would have full constitutional rights under the Nevada Constitution.
The Initiative seeks to ban all abortions and commonly used forms of birth control. It could also interfere with doctors' ability to treat life-threatening pregnancies, miscarriages, and infertility, as well as ban some stem cell research and other life-saving therapies and cures. In addition, the Initiative seeks to reach far beyond health care. As today's legal papers warn, the Initiative fails to explain to voters its intent and impact on Nevada law.
There is something quite revealing in some of the statements made in this November 12 press release. If we compare the rhetoric here with that of statements issued over time, we discover that the pro-aborts have been using the same arguments for nearly 40 years. They have gained some ground, with the help of the Supreme Court and lawmakers, and they have enshrined in the Constitution of this country, in their opinion, a so-called right to abortion.
The position of our opposition has always been that a woman is the only one who should have the right to decide whether she wishes to affirm her child’s life or pay to have it killed or even kill it herself. While they never use the word “child,” as that would be a clear admission of what the act of abortion actually accomplishes, they know all too well what abortion does and how much money they are raking in by denying the obvious.
Just ask Abby Johnson, the former Director of Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, who recently quit her job because she experienced “a profound change of heart” regarding abortion. Abby Johnson grew in her ability to discern the truth and abandoned the lie that kept her at Planned Parenthood for eight years. But she is unique, not typical of those who market killing.
Among such people there has never been a deviation from the core principle that every woman has a “constitutional right to privacy” which guarantees her the ability to end the life of her child, if that is what she desires.
This is why the ACLU and its compatriots consistently describe personhood efforts in the context of endowing “fertilized eggs” with characteristics that pro-aborts would choose to protect from anybody prior to birth. But as Dr. Dianne Irving and other honest people have taught for years, the use of the term “fertilized egg” to refer to the new single-cell human being/organism is formally rejected by the international nomenclature committee in human embryology. In other words, it is a bogus term specifically designed to dehumanize the person in his earliest state of existence.
Unsurprisingly, “fertilized egg” is a popular term among those who deny that a preborn child is actually even alive, let alone a human being. This is the specific reason why personhood efforts, not only in Nevada but Missouri, Alaska and elsewhere, are always met with strident, deceptive opposition. This is also why these proponents of prebirth execution will clamor about birth control, doctors who won’t be able to protect their patients’ lives and so on, ad nauseam. Any argument they can use—whether based in fact or fiction—that suits their bottomline is exactly what they will pursue. And sadly, far too many judges, lawmakers, reporters and talking heads seem to agree. It is as if the entire idea of a preborn human being as a person is so frightening to them, so foreign to their understanding, that they are appalled, shrinking from it in the way one might run from a monster!
While I find this distressing and feel sorrow for their lack of common sense, I also believe strongly that they are and have always been among the chief servants of the evil one. There is nothing they will not say in order to have their way with killing; there is nothing they will not do to convince the population that they are indeed looking out for the most vulnerable whom they consider to be their patient base. Such thinking is wicked to the core, but what’s new!
The most disingenuous of their statements, however, is the claim that abortion is health care; that contraception is health care; that any act that protects a man or a woman from that dreaded complication of a child for whom they would have to be responsible is health care. If you think I am joking then you have not paid close attention to the health care reform debate either. For right there, in front of everyone’s eyes, is proposal after proposal designed to enshrine sexual gratification at any cost as health care.
Even now as the U.S. Senate considers the Women’s Preventive Care Amendment, the brainchild of pro-abortion Senator Barbara Mikulski, there are those who warn that the amendment is really just a backdoor way of including abortion in health care reform. Those dedicated to abortion don’t find total honesty something that appeals to them, whether in the U. S. Senate or in the employ of the ACLU.
In the state of Alaska, where the ACLU has filed suit against the personhood initiative, the Anchorage Daily News took up the banner for the ACLU and opined “Whether life begins at conception is a question for individual conscience, not for the ballot box.”
Such a statement is ignorant of basic scientific fact. The writers appear to be lacking in the ability to think in a critical manner. Clearly, those who wrote this editorial have probably never considered the fact that, as individuals, they were created and should be grateful to their parents for welcoming them into the family rather than searching for a devious excuse to kill their own child! As a matter of fact I have never met an abortion advocate who was aborted … oxymoronic? Of course it is, but then again, so is the suggestion that the union of two cells that result in the creation of a new human being is a matter of conscience rather than a matter of simple biology!
The ACLU describes itself as the nation’s “guardian of liberty,” and yet the ACLU has been involved, since its founding, in defending the fallacious principle that the strong have the right to eliminate the weak if that is their choice. That is, after all, the principle that buttresses the argument that a mother has a right to kill her own child. The ACLU’s founder, Roger Baldwin, was a hero to many including Planned Parenthood’s founder herself, Margaret Sanger. She said of Baldwin: "The name Roger Baldwin and Civil Liberties are synonymous in the minds of all people in the United States. You have fought the good fight, Roger."
The ACLU has dedicated itself to denying the obvious with the convoluted argument that abortion and contraception are rights that must be guaranteed by the Constitution. One can only imagine how our founding fathers would view such blather, for it was none other than Thomas Jefferson who asked, “Can the liberties of a nation be sure when we remove their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that these liberties are a gift from God?”
Lest we forget, it is God Who commands, “Thou shalt not kill.” And it is God Who says in Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…”
The ACLU is not God, nor is the United States Congress or any other person or group that has assigned unto itself the mission of assuring that murder is a human right. It is not.
The quest for personhood for all people, born and preborn, is an effort seeking justice for all, equal rights for all, human rights for all. For these reasons, it will prevail. If it does not, the liberties of this nation will never for sure. Of that, there is no doubt.
