The Eighth Amendment to Ireland’s constitution, repealed by voters last week, reads: “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”
This is a simple and eloquent statement reflecting the basic fact that the right to life is the mother of all rights. To talk of a right to privacy, or of a freedom of speech, or of a right to a trial, or any other right is meaningless if the right to life is not respected and upheld in law.
Governments are instituted among men, the Declaration of Independence explains, not to bring about utopia, but to secure the fundamental rights of individuals—the first of which is the right to life. So the most basic duty and responsibility of government is to protect its people from deadly violence. This duty is most acute when the targets are the innocent and defenseless. Nobody is more innocent and defenseless than a baby, born or as yet unborn.
Placing this basic right in the Constitution is fitting. It ought to be in the U.S. Bill of Rights. If justice prevailed, the right of the unborn would be ensconced in the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads, “No state shall … deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Perversely, the U.S. Supreme Court invented a constitutional right to abortion, supposedly infused in emanations from the penumbras of the document. The issue has become such a political battlefield that there is no way the U.S. could today pass an amendment to protect the right to life of the unborn.
A country that doesn’t respect the right to life of the unborn, that indeed makes an exception for lives whose humanity is hidden, whose presence may be inconvenient, and whose voice is inaudible, is a morally sclerotic country, where we can expect all sorts of evils to bubble up.
In a country such as Ireland from 1983 until now, where the right to life was enshrined and exalted, a culture of life develops. Pregnant women and their babies found better treatment in Ireland than almost anywhere in the world. Maternal deaths have been extremely low in Ireland, ranked by the United Nations as “one of the safest places in the world for a mother to have a baby.”
Ireland on Friday gave up its pro-woman and pro-life constitution, at least for now. The health minister grotesquely declared that Ireland would now be a more compassionate society. But this surely won’t be the end of the issue. Government protection of human life is not a religious issue or the tangential concern of a special interest. It has for millennia been enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath, and was restated as recently as the passage of the Geneva Conventions. But this most fundamental human right is now widely ignored or disparaged. History will not smile tomorrow on those who consider it expendable today.
