Mrs. Clinton: You are a Human, You Have a Right to Life, and the Constitution Has Nothing to Do With It

Secretary Clinton is (sort of) right when she says the “unborn child does not have rights” under the Constitution of 1789. In fact, all children have important limitations placed on their Constitutional rights. Children have no “right to vote” until they are eighteen. They have limited freedom of speech until they are no longer children. Parents can “force” their children to attend church or refuse them permission to go to religious services. Unborn persons share in those limits.

For some reason, Secretary Clinton thinks this distinction means that abortion right to the second trimester should remain a legal option because the unborn person has no Constitutional rights. Fortunately, even those here illegally as “aliens” (in the Biblical sense) have a right to life. They may not be citizens, but as persons they have certain essential human rights. 

In fact, there are many rights nobody gets from the Constitution. We call those human rights and one of the them is the right to life. In fact, Americans have long believed that there are certain rights that cannot be taken away from a person including liberty and the right to happiness (including ownership of private property). The Constitution tolerated slavery at one point, but abolitionists rightly argued that the Constitution could not take away rights it had no power to “alienate.”

Persons get their right to life from the Creator and not the state.

We could condemn even lower level Nazis in war crime trials because destroying human life was legal in Nazi Germany, but it remained immoral. While most Christians and people in the West have believed that the state could take the life of a human to defend the state, this had to be done with care. Here in Texas I can defend my family, but if I use lethal force to do so, I will have to carefully justify this action. This is true of citizens and non-citizens because the humanity and not the Constitutional status of a person grants them “the right to life.”

Every person does have a right to their own body. This right must also be protected and the Constitution failed to do this in the case of generations of African-American slaves. Women have also been mistreated historically and treated like second-class citizens. However, the case of the unborn person, as Secretary Clinton rightly calls it, is an unusual case. The unborn person has no choice, but to live within the body of her mother. From conception until well into pregnancy, the unborn person cannot live without this support. Her body is not her mother’s body. She has a right to her own bodily integrity for the duration of the pregnancy.

Secretary Clinton’s extreme views defy morality. The Constitution does not explicitly give a child born one minute ago a “right to life” that the child lacked two minutes before birth. The God-given “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is not subject to a clock or luck and it is not subject to Secretary Clinton’s political ambitions.

This is self-evident.