The unborn are excluded from the abortion debate

More than a half-century after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, promulgated a “constitutional right to abortion,” and 2½ years after the current court overturned that ruling and returned the issue to the individual states, a profound and disturbing shift has occurred in our national discourse about abortion.

The unborn child has been almost completely removed from the discussion.

Questions involving pre-born life used to be central to our debates about abortion: When does life begin? Should the embryo or fetus developing in the womb enjoy the protection of our laws? Do unborn children have rights commensurate with those of their pregnant mothers?

Of course, it made perfect sense to have those discussions because they are at the very center of the pro-life argument. Eliminate the child in the womb from consideration, and there is no reason to oppose abortion.

It is like discussing criminal justice issues without considering the victims of violent crime. War and peace without mention of the devastation and human casualties of armed conflict. The death penalty without reference to the person being executed.

Historically, this tendency to exclude from discussion a central figure in a contentious moral issue awakens haunting echoes of the nation’s wrenching divisions over slavery. Then, supporters of that inhuman “institution” spoke in terms of “property rights,” while slavery neutralists reduced it to a question of “states’ rights.” Thankfully, abolitionists and the newly constituted Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, insisted on talking about the human rights involved, specifically the unalienable right to liberty “endowed by the Creator” to all, regardless of race, skin color, or which state one lived in.

Today, regarding abortion, Democrats speak with one voice about “reproductive rights,” while Republicans, with some notable exceptions, default to “states’ rights.”

Few voices are talking about the natural right to life, or discussing whether and how that first of “unalienable rights” cited in the Declaration of Independence should apply to the child in the womb.

This seems particularly disingenuous at a time when modern science and medicine have given us the “window to the womb” envisioned some 50 years ago by the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a leading abortionist turned pro-life advocate. Indeed, through ultrasound technology, children in the womb today bear personal, visible witness to their own living humanity.

But perhaps that is why it has become so urgent to expunge the pre-born child from discussions of abortion. The existence of life in the womb is no longer debatable; it is there for all to see. So, if abortion is to remain legal, the child’s living humanity cannot matter, and must not even be acknowledged.

In making this happen, the abortion lobby and its vast network of political, media, and cultural supporters owe a debt of gratitude to ostensibly pro-life Republicans who, in invoking “states’ rights,” decline to utter even a word about the living child in the womb.

Would that all Americans, be they “pro-choice,” “pro-life,” or somewhere in-between, heed a phrase that’s currently all the rage and “follow the science” on abortion to its irrefutable conclusion: that the child in the womb is a living human being, whose existence is central to, and cannot be excluded from, our ongoing national debate over abortion.

This guest essay reflects the views of Rick Hinshaw, former editor of The Long Island Catholic newspaper.