Joseph: Biden Tried Citing the 9th Amendment but Made a Massive Mistake - He Has No Idea What That Amendment Means
In a pro-abortion speech leading up to the midterms, President Joe Biden pledged to “restore the right to choose for every woman in every state in America.”
Glib prattle about a woman’s “right to choose” sounds good.
But the right to choose what? The right to make a private decision to have her unborn child killed?
The president argued, “There’s a thing called the Ninth Amendment. It says there’s a right to privacy. That’s how it was interpreted back then. Well, guess what, folks? That’s because Roe recognized the fundamental right to privacy.”
Well, Roe was wrong about that, and Biden is wrong about that, too.
It’s clear now that the routine extermination of these tiny daughters and sons, albeit in a medical setting, cannot remain hidden behind Biden’s fig leaf of “privacy.” There is no right to privacy that allows the cover-up of the killing of another human being.
When privacy rights deny the rights of the unborn
The Ninth Amendment still provides that the enumeration of specific rights should not be “construed to deny or disparage” other rights.
Back in 1833, Justice Joseph Story recognized that the Ninth Amendment “was manifestly introduced to prevent any perverse or ingenious misapplication of the well-known maxim, that an affirmation in particular cases implies a negation in all others.”
So, what does that mean for today’s “abortion rights” controversy? It means that the Ninth Amendment must guard against any affirmation of “privacy rights” for women that implies a negation of life and liberty rights for “our posterity.”
In the Constitution, we the people are entrusted with the duty to secure the “blessings of liberty,” not just for ourselves but for our posterity, which includes these daughters and sons in their mothers’ wombs.
In Roe, Justice Harry Blackmun attempted to negate that duty. He thought he had found an ingenious take on the right to privacy through which the right to life of these smallest children could be negated.
He was wrong.
States do have authority to regulate abortions.
Roe falsely claimed that abortion is a private act. Behind the closed doors of a pregnant mother’s privacy rights, the states were denied any authority to stop violent acts perpetrated therein. But this injustice was overturned last June in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
The real significance of the Dobbs decision lies in the Supreme Court’s reaffirmation that the states do indeed have the authority to “regulate or prohibit pre-viability abortions.”
Yet pro-abortion states still continue to pretend to find an immutable 14th Amendment liberty interest that supposedly endorses a woman’s right to have her unborn child killed privately.
It is a grotesque form of privacy, this recently fabricated right for a pregnant woman to choose to commission the deliberate killing of her unborn child. Professor Barbara Bennett Woodhouse has summed up the uneven nature of this injustice succinctly: “Stamped on the reverse side of the coinage of family privacy and parental rights are the child’s voicelessness, objectification, and isolation from the community.”
Honesty and rational thought must bring us to recognize that the states, in protecting the rights of pregnant mothers, must also protect the rights of the vulnerable children in their wombs.
Part of the states’ legal obligation is to educate pregnant mothers on their duties as well as their rights. Indeed, parental rights are coupled with what Justice James McReynolds, in a unanimous 1925 opinion, called their “high duty” to protect and prepare their children.
Pregnant women nurturing in their wombs their little sons or daughters have serious duties to protect them from harm. There is no right to choose to instigate that harm.
State laws must guide women back to that truth.
Abortion is not choice — it’s abuse.
Regrettably, back in the ’60s, “abortion rights” raised their ugly head and claimed for us women the despicable old patriarchal fallacy of absolute ownership rights over our children. In some states today, these alleged rights still allow pregnant mothers to treat their unborn daughters and sons as privately owned, moveable chattels to be kept or ejected and destroyed at will.
Choosing whether to have children logically precedes the conception of these children. Sexual intercourse should always be a private choice — but never the extermination of a new live human being during pregnancy, no matter how small or unwanted. That’s not choice — that’s abuse.
Once children are conceived, they are already here. The decision to have children is not the same as the decision to kill children who are already conceived and growing in the womb.
Once we know that a new little daughter or son is conceived, human rights protection of this newest little human being must be assured. These little ones whose lives have just begun have the same right as us to go on living until natural death.
Hence, abortion constitutes a lethal human rights abuse of these newest members of our posterity who, although unborn, are already here with us, physically present in their mothers’ wombs.
Begetting does not produce ownership.
No genuine right to privacy can ever be used to cover up the abusive ownership of human beings. Nor can any right to privacy legitimate the “choice” by their alleged “owners” to have them killed.
From the darker side of human history, property rights over other human beings were protected for many centuries under privacy rights. Slave owners exploited these alleged privacy rights.
Since the abolition of slavery, many state courts have reaffirmed that the welfare of children is paramount, that a child is “not a chattel like pigs, chickens or furniture.”
Is there any more egregious case of child abuse than when a mother uses her property interest in her unborn child and commissions her utterly defenseless child to be aborted?
John Locke, who was well-respected by the Founders, taught that begetting does not produce “a supreme power like that of absolute monarchs over their slaves,” or an “absolute power of life and death” over our children. He asserted that it is the Creator who gives life and commands parents to care for them.
Licentiousness, not liberty — women’s rights gone too far
We women must lead the states back to this truth. There are no privacy rights that can authorize us, as pregnant mothers, to commission the death and removal of another human being in our power and under our care. These smallest human beings are utterly innocent of any crime.
The imposition of lethal assault on an unborn child is a crude exercise of license, not liberty.
As pregnant mothers, asserting our own right to liberty cannot vindicate the commissioning of the medicalized or surgical killing of our own little daughters or sons while in our wombs. We may not misuse our liberty to curtail their liberty. We must respect their liberty, their right to just go on being, to go on exercising their natural right to live.
For 50 years now, we have grossly inflated our own rights in order to blot out our duties to the utterly dependent unborn children in our wombs. Quite foolishly, we have misinterpreted their natural dependency as conferring ownership and killing rights on us, their mothers. We have exaggerated our liberty rights to hide the abuse of our unborn children’s rights.
To concentrate on our own rights exclusively while ignoring our duties to others is always morally indefensible.
Abuse of unborn children must stop.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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