Those who promote abortion say that Senate Bill 8, the new Texas law that protects life from the first heartbeat, is terrifying. Not if you are a child with a heartbeat.
Of course, those who are raging against the new law and charging that it is unconstitutional will continue to dismiss both the science and the constitutional rights of pre-born children. However, for the present time, the Supreme Court has ruled not to give their complaint a hearing.
The Constitution does not bestow human rights. It protects them. Human rights are intrinsic. So, even though current Supreme Court precedent does not protect the human rights of pre-born children, they still possess those rights, which are the right to life and the right to physical privacy, both of which begin at a child’s conception.
The 1973 Roe v. Wade court decision denied this essential human truth by excluding the well-known biological science of the day, which has advanced significantly in the past 50 years. The first single cell formed by the fusion of a human sperm with a human egg is a living human being. Certainly, in the present controversy, no one can credibly argue that a six-week-old pre-born child is not a living human being.
Even the court’s allowance of abortions much later than six weeks but before “fetal viability” deploys a biological misnomer that misleads people to think that there is some time earlier when a child is not already alive. Accurately named, the court’s allowance is for abortions before a pre-born child can survive without medical intervention, fetal survivability.
Abortion policy based on modern science and a commonsense view of human rights should not be the purview of unelected judges but rather is rightly determined by legislators acting on the will of the people.
The Texas Legislature is not alone in its work to align U.S. laws with moral principles and practice that are informed by modern knowledge of human biology. Texas’s present progress gives encouragement to similar efforts in other states to craft and establish laws that bit by bit reduce the modern tragedy caused by legalized elective abortion. In 2017, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 55,440 abortions were carried out in the state of Texas. With an estimated 85% to 90% of those abortions occurring after the sixth week of pregnancy, Senate Bill 8 could save the lives of nearly 50,000 children in its first year of enactment.
Political leaders who are berating the Texas Legislature, such as the ones in my home state of Massachusetts, continue the same specious tactic of the Roe v. Wade court. They emphasize the physical privacy rights of mothers, but they never mention the valid privacy rights of their pre-born children. There are many religious and secular organizations that daily model the solution for a society that recognizes and protects the privacy of both. They provide homes, resources, and caring to support mothers in need and their children, born and pre-born. And when, for whatever cause, a mother does not wish to nourish her child, a just and moral society works to ensure solutions to nurture her child in her stead.
Some may ask, “Why recognize and honor the privacy of pre-born children?” The answer is that, beyond meeting the fundamental moral imperative, we will become a better society for all when we do. Many are not aware of the license that legalized abortion is granting to alarming human experimentation.
Because of the license of abortion, this year, organizations such as the International Society for Stem Cell Research began to promote laboratory experiments with cloned embryonic human beings beyond the age at which their nervous system forms. Perhaps more concerning, although a current self-imposed moratorium exists, scientists leading federal agencies such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health hold open the idea of pursuing the future genetic engineering of embryonic human beings in the laboratory.
We face this disturbing prospect of a world with genetically modified clones because, when we stand by while legalized abortion strips six-week-old pre-born children of their right to life, it becomes even harder to require scientists to respect the privacy of children they have conceived in their experiments who are only days or weeks old. With its heartbeat law, the Texas Legislature may be saving us all from ourselves.
James L. Sherley, M.D., Ph.D., is an associate scholar at Charlotte Lozier Institute and an internationally recognized expert on stem cells and biomedicine. He is a recipient of a Pew Scholar Award in Biomedical Sciences and the National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award.
