Fetal Life and Abortion:  Human Personhood at Conception
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Notable Quotations

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                           Hippocratic Oath                                        Jerome Lejeune                                        John Hart Ely                                        
                                   Mother Teresa of Calcutta                       Partial-Birth Abortion                            Revelation 6:9,10
                                   Roe v. Wade: Opinion of the Court         President Ronald Regan                         The Foolish Clockmaker
                                   Alexander Frazier Tytler                         "When Nations Die"   
                                   Abortion and the Supreme Court:  Death Becomes a Way of Life                        Justice White's dissent

                          Dr. Nathanson on Roe v. Wade                ARE 50 STATE CONSTITUTIONS WRONG?

Timely Quote:  "That right to life belongs equally to babies in the womb, babies born handicapped, and the elderly or infirm."

 

ARE 50 STATE CONSTITUTIONS WRONG?

Somewhere along the way, the Federal Courts and the Supreme Court have
misinterpreted the U. S. Constitution. How could 50 States be wrong?

THIS IS VERY INTERESTING! Be sure to read the last two paragraphs.
America's founders did not intend for there to be a separation of God and state, as
shown by the fact that
all 50 states acknowledge God in their state
constitutions:

Alabama 1901, Preamble. We the people of the State of Alabama,
invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and
establish the following Constitution ...

Alaska 1956, Preamble. We, the people of Alaska,_grateful to God and
to those who founded our nation and pioneered this great land ..

Arizona 1911, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Arizona,
grateful to Almighty God for our liberties, do ordain this Constitution...

Arkansas 1874, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Arkansas,
grateful to Almighty God for the privilege of choosing our own form
of government...

California 1879, Preamble. We, the People of the State of California,
grateful to Almighty God for our freedom ..

Colorado 1876, Preamble. We, the people of Colorado, with profound
reverence for the Supreme Ruler of Universe.

Connecticut 1818, Preamble. The People of Connecticut, acknowledging
with gratitude the good Providence of God in permitting them to enjoy .

Delaware 1897, Preamble. Through Divine Goodness all men have, by
nature, the rights of worshipping and serving their Creator according to
the dictates of their consciences ..

Florida 1885, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Florida,
grateful to Almighty God for our constitutional liberty . establish this
Constitution...

Georgia 1777, Preamble. We, the people of Georgia, relying upon
protection and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish this
Constitution...

Hawaii 1959, Preamble. We, the people of Hawaii, Grateful for Divine
Guidance ... establish this Constitution.

Idaho 1889, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Idaho,
grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, to secure its blessings ..

Illinois 1870 and 1970 Preamble. We, the people of the State of Illinois,
grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious
liberty which He hath so long permitted us to enjoy and looking
to Him for a blessing on our endeavors.

Indiana 1851, Preamble. We, the People of the State of Indiana,
grateful to Almighty God for the free exercise of the right to chose
our form of government.

Iowa 1857, Preamble. We, the People of the State of Iowa, grateful to
the Supreme Being for the blessings hitherto enjoyed, and feeling our
dependence on Him for a continuation of these blessings . establish
this Constitution

Kansas 1859, Preamble. We, the people of Kansas, grateful to Almighty
God for our civil and religious privileges . establish this Constitution.

Kentucky 1891, Preamble. We, the people of the Commonwealth of
grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious liberties...

Louisiana 1921, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Louisiana,
grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious
liberties we enjoy.

Maine 1820, Preamble. We the People of Maine .. acknowledging with
grateful hearts the goodness of_the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe
in affording us an opportunity ... and imploring His aid and direction.

Maryland 1776, Preamble. We, the people of the state of Maryland,
grateful to Almighty God for our civil and religious liberty...

Massachusetts 1780, Preamble. We...the people of Massachusetts,
acknowledging with grateful hearts, the goodness of the Great
Legislator of the Universe ... in the course of His Providence, an
opportunity .and devoutly imploring His direction ..

Michigan 1908, Preamble. We, the people of the State of
Michigan, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of freedom ..
establish this Constitution

Minnesota, 1857, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Minnesota,
grateful to God for our civil and religious liberty, and desiring to
perpetuate its blessings

Mississippi 1890, Preamble We, the people of Mississippi in
convention assembled, grateful to Almighty God, and invoking
His blessing on our work.

Missouri 1845, Preamble. We, the people of Missouri, with profound
reverence for the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, and grateful for His
goodness ... establish this Constitution ...

Montana 1889, Preamble. We, the people of Montana, grateful to
Almighty God for the blessings of liberty. establish this Constitution
...

Nebraska 1875, Preamble. We, the people, grateful to Almighty God
for our freedom .. establish this Constitution .

Nevada 1864, Preamble. We the people of the State of Nevada, grateful
to Almighty God for our freedom establish this Constitution
...

New Hampshire 1792, Part I. Art. I. Sec. V. Every individual has a
natural and unalienable right to worship God according to the dictates
of his own conscience.

New Jersey 1844, Preamble. We, the people of the State of New Jersey,
grateful to Almighty God for civil and religious liberty which He
hath so long permitted us to enjoy, and looking to Him for a blessing on our
endeavors .

New Mexico 1911, Preamble. We, the People of New Mexico, grateful to
Almighty God for the blessings of liberty ..

New York 1846, Preamble. We, the people of the State of New York,
grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, in order to secure its blessings.

North Carolina 1868, Preamble. We the people of the State of North
Carolina, grateful to Almighty God, the Sovereign Ruler of Nations,
for our civil, political, and religious liberties, and acknowledging our
dependence upon Him for the continuance of those ..

North Dakota 1889, Preamble. We, the people of North Dakota, grateful
to Almighty God for the blessings of civil and religious liberty, do
ordain...

Ohio 1852, Preamble. We the people of the state of Ohio, grateful to
Almighty God for our freedom, to secure its blessings and to promote
our common ..

Oklahoma 1907, Preamble. Invoking the guidance of Almighty God, in
order to secure and perpetuate the blessings of liberty ... establish this
..

Oregon 1857, Bill of Rights, Article I. Section 2. All men shall be secure
in the Natural right, to worship Almighty God according to the dictates
of their consciences..

Pennsylvania 1776, Preamble. We, the people of Pennsylvania, grateful
to Almighty God for the blessings of civil and religious liberty, and
humbly invoking His guidance

Rhode Island 1842, Preamble. We the People of the State of Rhode
Island grateful to Almighty God for the civil and religious liberty
which He hath so long permitted us to enjoy, and looking to Him
for a blessing

South Carolina, 1778, Preamble. We, the people of he State of
South Carolina. grateful to God for our liberties, do ordain and
establish this Constitution.

South Dakota 1889, Preamble. We, the people of South Dakota, grateful
to Almighty God for our civil and religious liberties ... establish
this

Tennessee 1796, Art. XI.III. That all men have a natural and indefeasible
right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their conscience...

Texas 1845, Preamble. We the People of the Republic of Texas,
acknowledging, with gratitude, the grace and beneficence of God.

Utah 1896, Preamble. Grateful to Almighty God for life and liberty,
we establish this Constitution ..

Vermont 1777, Preamble. Whereas all government ought to ... enable
the individuals who compose it to enjoy their natural rights, and other
blessings which the Author of Existence has bestowed on man
..

Virginia 1776, Bill of Rights, XVI ... Religion, or the Duty which we
owe our Creator .. can be directed only by Reason ... and that it is the
mutual duty of all to practice Christian Forbearance, Love and
Charity towards each other ...

Washington 1889, Preamble. We the People of the State of Washington,
grateful to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe for our liberties, do ordain
this Constitution ...

West Virginia 1872, Preamble. Since through Divine Providence we
enjoy the blessings of civil, political and religious liberty, we, the
people of West Virginia . reaffirm our faith in and constant reliance upon
God ...

Wisconsin 1848, Preamble. We, the people of Wisconsin, grateful to
Almighty God for our freedom, domestic tranquility ..

Wyoming 1890, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Wyoming,
grateful to God for our civil, political, and religious liberties .. establish
this Constitution ...

After reviewing acknowledgments of God from all 50 state
constitutions, one is faced with the prospect that maybe, just maybe, the
ACLU and the out-of-control federal courts are wrong!

"Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants."
- William Penn

GOD BLESS AMERICA!
 

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A thoughtful observation trom ‘Aborting America,” by Bernard Nathanson, M.D. with Richard Ostling, Life Cycle Books, 1979, page 252:

 A remarkable prescient 1970 editorial in “California Medicine”, a publication of the California Medical Association, stated that abortion, an act of consciously “taking a human life,” was part of the erosion of the traditional western medical and religious heritage which taught “the intrinsic worth and equal value of human life, regardless of its stage or condition.” The New Ethic seeks improved “quality of life,” which means that particular lives no longer have absolute value.

 Three years later, a strange passage in Justice Blackmun‘s decision in Roe v. Wade objected to the Hippocratic Oath, the ancient standard of medical morality, as forming an absolute standard on the argument that it was embraced by Christianity, but in the pagan world represented only a minority view. It appeared that favoritism toward Christian morality is wrong while Supreme Court favoritism toward the majority view in ancient paganism is right.

 Blackmun casually drops mention that Hippocrates’ colleagues and the Christians fought suicide as well as abortion. He might have added that Christians or Jews once fought infanticide, child sacrifice, temple prostitution, political torture, and combat to death in the Coliseum, or that the Roman father who could order the abortion of his offspring could also sell them into slavery to raise needed cash. In the New Abortion Ethic, the totalitarian power to destroy passes from the father of Rome to the mother of America.

 The conflict between the old Morality and the New Morality is a conflicts of rights. The Supreme Court relied on the “right of privacy,” following reasoning that stands up only if alpha (the unborn) is demonstrably not human life. To say that it is not human life is a statement of faith, one that flies in the face of biology, as statements of faith sometimes do. The competing right is the so-called “right to life,” which in my view is not a natural right existing in a political vacuum, but is rather a reflection of the inherent moral health of a particular society.

 The right of women to abort derives from a political locus; alpha’s right to exist derives from the very bone of a culture’s morality. The “right” to abort is not a right as that term is commonly understood, but only a “claim,” a means of promoting change or of moving people to action. It asserts no timeless truth.

 If abortion is not justified as a “right,” then it must be justified on pragmatic grounds, very often variations on the “unwanted child” theme. This deserves the most careful consideration, for as “California Medicine” sensed, it is a  seismic shift in the philosophy of our civilization. The value of life is subjective. Life or death is a matter of whether "I" want “you” or whether "we" want “them” to live. Life in and of itself is no longer treated as having intrinsic worth. This wholesale retreat from the Hippocratic Oath should be and has been particularly difficult for physician to stomach.

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Quoted from Justice White's dissent in Roe v. Wade

At the heart of the controversy in these cases are those recurring pregnancies that pose no danger whatsoever to the life or health of the mother but are, nevertheless, unwanted for any one or more of a variety of reasons -- convenience, family planning, economics, dislike of children, the embarrassment of illegitimacy, etc. The common claim before us is that, for any one of such reasons, or for no reason at all, and without asserting or claiming any threat to life or health, any woman is entitled to an abortion at her request if she is able to find a medical advisor willing to undertake the procedure.

The Court, for the most part, sustains this position: during the period prior to the time the fetus becomes viable, the Constitution of the United States values the convenience, whim, or caprice of the putative mother more than the life or potential life of the fetus; the Constitution, therefore, guarantees the right to an abortion as against any state law or policy seeking to protect the fetus from an abortion not prompted by more compelling reasons of the mother.

With all due respect, I dissent. I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers [p*222] and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.

The Court apparently values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life that she carries. Whether or not I might agree with that marshaling of values, I can in no event join the Court's judgment because I find no constitutional warrant for imposing such an order of priorities on the people and legislatures of the States. In a sensitive area such as this, involving as it does issues over which reasonable men may easily and heatedly differ, I cannot accept the Court's exercise of its clear power of choice by interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life and by investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it. This issue, for the most part, should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs.

It is my view, therefore, that the Texas statute is not constitutionally infirm because it denies abortions to those who seek to serve only their convenience, rather than to protect their life or health. Nor is this plaintiff, who claims no threat to her mental or physical health, entitled to assert the possible rights of those women [p*223] whose pregnancy assertedly implicates their health. This, together with United States v. Vuitch, 402 U.S. 62 (1971), dictates reversal of the judgment of the District Court.

Likewise, because Georgia may constitutionally forbid abortions to putative mothers who, like the plaintiff in this case, do not fall within the reach of § 26-1202(a) of its criminal code, I have no occasion, and the District Court had none, to consider the constitutionality of the procedural requirements of the Georgia statute as applied to those pregnancies posing substantial hazards to either life or health. I would reverse the judgment of the District Court in the Georgia case.

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"Individual human life begins at conception and is a progressive, ongoing continuum until natural death.  This is a fact so well established that no intellectually honest physician in full command of modern medical knowledge would dare to deny it.  There is no authority in medicine or biology who can be cited to refute this concept.  It is not a "theory," as Justice Blackmun wished to easily pass it off." - D.J. Moran, M.D., J.D. Gorby, M.D., and T.W. Hilgers, M.E., "Abortion in the Supreme Court:  Death Becomes a Way of Life.", Sheed and Ward, 1974

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The Foolish Clockmaker

A toy is given the gifted child,
An old-fashioned, wind-up clock.
Soon its parts are neatly piled
Like goods on the auction block.

Then one day the pile's no more;
The old-fashioned clock is back,
Looking much as it had before,
Except that its hands don't track.* 

Time passes; the child is older;
His tinkering led him to cloning.
Sheep for him? Something bolder!
He will produce a man by cloning.

Forgotten is the clock of fools?
Must his learning be done again:
That even machines have rules?
...Let the funeral for man begin!

*They no longer turn in the same direction.

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Jerome Lejeune (Nobel Prize, genetics) testified in Davis v. Davis, Circuit Court, State of Tennessee, 1989:  ...each of us has a unique beginning, the moment of conception...As soon as the twenty-three chromosomes carried by the sperm encounter the twenty-three chromosomes carried by the ovum, the whole information necessary and sufficient to spell out all the characteristics of the new being is gathered...(W)hen this information carried by the sperm and by the ovum has encountered each other, then a new human being is defined which has never occurred before and will never occur again...[the zygote, and the cells produced in the succeeding divisions] is not just simply a non-descript cell, or a "population" or loose "collection" of cells, but a very specialized individual, i.e., someone who will build himself according to his own rule.  (As quoted in Linacre Quarterly, February, 1993 - emphasis added by Dianne Nutwell Irving, PhD.) 

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In his book "When Nations Die," Jim  Nelson Black reviews history, analyzing the death of nations, and comparing America to them.  He discusses ten warning signs of a nation in crisis: (1) Lawlessness, (2) Loss of Economic Discipline, (3) Rising Bureaucracy, (4) Decline of Education, (5) Weakening of Cultural Foundations, (6) Loss of Respect for Tradition, (7) Increase in Materialism, (8) Rise in Immorality, (9) Decay of Religious Belief and (10) Devaluing of Human Life.

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The historian, Alexander Frasier Tytler (1748 - 1813) wrote about the decline and fall of the Athenian Republic. After saying that the average existence of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years,  he summarizes the course of such a nation, with the following sequence:  From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependency; From dependency back to bondage." 

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On February 3, 1994, Mother Teresa of Calcutta spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. to a distinguished crowd of civic, political and religious leaders.  Among other things, Mother Teresa said: "I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.  And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"

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Roe v. Wade - Opinion of the Court:  "Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception.  We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.  When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer. " 

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The Hippocratic Oath, which served as an ethical guide for the medical profession since the 3rd Century, B.C. - "I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly, I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy."  

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Partial-Birth Abortion

By the fiction of a court's decision,
His painful thrust may make incision
Into the tender, unsuspecting child,
Just to kill, as savage in the wild.

Yet, savage does not kill his young.
Whence this crueler savage sprung?
Or how came he, his scissors wield?
Oh, God our broken race be healed!  E.R.

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You were once living in a mother's womb.
What's so bad about that!

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Law professor, John Hart Ely, at that time a proponent of abortion, wrote in 1973: "Roe is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather that is NOT constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.....     At times [in other cases] the inferences the court has drawn from the values of the Constitution marks out for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking."  Ely, The Wages of Crying Wolf, 82 Yale L.J. 920,936-37, 947 (1973)

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In his Personhood Proclamation of January 14, 1988, former President Ronald Reagan declared:  "That right to life belongs equally to babies in the womb, babies born handicapped, and the elderly or infirm.  That we have killed the unborn for 15 years does not nullify this right, nor could any number of killings ever do so.  The unalienable right to life is found not only in the Declaration of Independence but also in the Constitution that every President is sworn to preserve, protect and defend.  Both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law."  

"Proclamation 5761 of January 14, 1988: NATIONAL SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE DAY, 1988," Federal Register, Vol. 53, No. 11, Tuesday, January 19, 1988 

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"When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain....They called out in a loud voice, 'How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?' "

                                                                                          Revelation 6:9,10 

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