SCOTUS v. Roe v. Wade

1-The pro-birth movement (for they are not pro-life; that’s absurd) is driven by the talking points of evangelical Christian leaders, and white men basically, who want power over women. Their goal is not to preserve life; their goal is the subjugation of women whose freedom they find abhorrent. Put another way, (primarily Evangelical) men find it repugnant that a woman might have sex for pleasure; they think women should only have sex for the man’s pleasure. Men have long gotten a free ride in this respect but it is the woman who they want to force into paying the price. Obviously, if ‘pro-lifers’ actually cared about life, they wouldn’t ignore a child the moment it is born. If ‘pro-lifers’ actually cared about life, they would hold men accountable for their roles in pregnancies and make sure a child has both a married father and mother, per their traditional family doctrine. I could point out hypocrisy all day but as a friend said, “Technically you can’t be a hypocrite if you have no morals to begin with.” Striking Roe down is about a power struggle, a desire to revisit the times one could punish women for doing anything a man doesn’t like, thus reducing women to property once again. This isn’t about life for as everyone knows, if men could get pregnant they’re be an abortion clinic on every corner.   

2-Evangelical followers are led to believe the Bible makes a case for protected fetuses because of verses in Jeremiah and Isaiah that discuss the sanctity of these two prophets’ lives before they were born. Somehow, evangelical leaders extrapolated upon this to convince their flocks that all fetuses are in need of defense, even in cases where that fetus was conceived out of evil (incest and rape). Interestingly, Jews – using the same scriptures – do not interpret these scriptures the same way, seemingly not convinced this prohibits abortions. Enacting abortion restriction for religious reasons establishes state-sponsored religion, which the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids. The Constitution prohibits the establishment of any religion in the governance of its citizens. (Sorry, but I have to keep saying it for Republicans seemingly know the Constitution about as well as they know the Bible.) We have to assume those who serve on the SCOTUS are not stupid and know that the attack on ‘established law’ (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett even said Roe was in their confirmation hearings) is ideologically driven. For any member of the SCOTUS to vote against Roe now would be intellectually dishonest and completely destroy any trust in this government institution, as if it hasn’t been destroyed already.

3-I cannot harp on it enough: Abortion restrictions are religious in nature as there is no agreement on when life begins. Evangelicals tend to tow the line that life begins at conception, but not only is this ambiguous at best in the Bible, it is an arbitrary distinction at well. What’s special about cells dividing? Is someone no longer a person when their cells stop dividing? Moreover, why not go further back than conception to the sperm and egg? Those are living cells, too. Why not go back to the lives of potential parents? The argument gets teleologically silly quite quickly. In fact, there is no complete agreement/scientific consensus on what life is. There is no complete agreement on what a person is. (Legally, corporations are people, but to whom among us does that make sense to?) It seems like these arguments should be settled before affecting half the populations’ lives. I realize there has to be some starting point to that conversation but religion cannot answer the question of life or personhood effectively and therefore should not be an element of the debate.

4-As an aside, if it’s an aside, how much does the healthcare industry stand to benefit from in increase in pregnancies? A woman who is uninsured (a likely scenario thanks to Republicans rolling back the Affordable Care Act) is going to pay on average anywhere from $30K-$50K depending on vaginal vs. C-section birth. Then there is the cost of raising the child, the likelihood of needing childcare (because where is the father?) which isn’t covered by any insurance, and paying for higher education (though to be fair Republicans are fine with people not attending college). Many industries, if not capitalism in general, stand to benefit from an increased birth rate which has otherwise been declining for years. Knowing how Republicans feel about unregulated, unfettered capitalism (unless you speak out against them, Disney) we shouldn’t be surprised if we find out just how much the industries that benefit from the situation are donating to Republican candidates.

5-Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who – like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said Roe v. Wade was settled law, wrote in the leaked documents that the U.S. needs a domestic supply of infants, no doubt referring to white babies. Not only is population growth nowhere in the Constitution*, which is the job of SCOTUS to interpret, population growth has nothing to do with rights or privacy which the Constitution does address. As far as population ‘growth’ is concerned, all the Constitution says is that Congress may conduct censuses if they wish, so it should be unfathomable that Barrett’s personal opinion would shape her vote on abortion, especially after she explicitly said her personal opinion would not during her confirmation hearing. Her ‘new’ position is only slightly worse than Justice Alito’s justification for overturning Roe who thinks the 14^th Amendment used in Roe that made the case for a woman’s liberty was too vague and not rooted in the text of the Constitution. Unsurprisingly, also not rooted in the text of the Constitution are civil rights for minorities and an individual’s right to bear arms when they are not part of a militia. Alito also references a 13^th century document that posits abortion as murder as part of his justification for overturning Roe. Not only does Alito want to interpret the Constitution as written by white men in the 18^th century, he also wants to interpret it through the lens of documents that have nothing to do with the Constitution. One might suppose prohibitions against murder never change yet we don’t see Alito trying to overturn the death penalty knowing there will be wrongful deaths because of wrongful convictions. SCOTUS has acted in bad faith. Now they want to cry foul when protesters show up outside their houses. It seems like someone doesn’t like having their privacy disturbed.

 

What to do? Vote, of course, but this seems to vague. Vote for Democrats and not throw away votes on third party candidates because you don’t agree with every single element of their platform? Enact federal protections for women’s privacy? Expand the court so that conservative judges cannot perjure themselves and get away with it? (Ah, so this is the ‘judicial activism’ Bill O’Reilly warned us about years ago.) Civil war?

 

I recall being an Army veteran and having signed up to fight for the rights of every man – and woman. No one told me shit was going to turn out like this. The country I fought for, that ideal, was an illusion from the get go it seems. There does not seem a way back from any of this.

The Case Against Unalianable Human Rights

Pro-life advocates, death penalty opponents, and opponents of euthanasia typically share a moral absolutist position in common; namely, that human beings are endowed with unalienable, intrinsic human rights. However, a critical analysis reveals that the concept of such human rights is flawed and hence, neither unalienable nor intrinsic. In order to demonstrate this, we will first address a definitional issue. Second, we will look at the history of human rights to see whether or not there is any indication that human rights are unalienable or inherent. Then, we will address some counter arguments to the thesis presented herein. Upon this examination, it will be shown that the concept of unalienable human rights has no legitimacy

            First we must ask, what are human rights? The United Nations attempted to answer this question in 1948, declaring, “All human beings are born free and equal” (“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”). Adding to this declaration, the United Nations listed twenty-nine articles in defense of negative rights—liberties not to be interfered with—such as the right to privacy, to associate with whom one chooses, and to change one’s beliefs, without obstruction or retribution by another person or institution. To clarify human rights even further, The Boston Review’s Jeremy Waldron wrote of these rights as unalienable; “It means rights that may not be given away by those who have them, and therefore…reasonable people would [not] have found it prudent, in certain circumstances, to alienate these rights” (Waldron). Thus, it is reasonable to conclude from these definitions that human rights are simultaneously intrinsic; they are not meant to be dependent upon instituted legalities or cultural relativism. Human rights are also typically regarded as applying to individuals and are practiced within the confines of an individual’s right to choose their own actions.

            Semantics are, unsurprisingly, a challenge to any declaration of human rights. What is meant by “human being”? The definition of “human being” is as notoriously missing from the United Nation’s declaration of rights as the definition of “men” was from the Declaration of Independence. [That is to say, non-white Anglo-Saxon men were not regarded as men in 1776.] Is a human being an autonomous being capable of choice? Is it a mass of living human cells? The fact is, many animals are capable of making choices and can operate as independently as any human. Does that make such animals human? Nor can we regard living cells as human beings. If that were the case—as far as being human relates to having rights—stem cell research, organ removal, and male masturbation would all have to be criminalized. Nothing in any definition of “human being” offered here or otherwise, suggests that human rights are unalienable or intrinsic. If the definition of “human being” presumed human rights, then there would be little need for the phrase, “human rights.” It shall be noted, though, that a failure to define what a human being is does not necessarily preclude rights. However, this does send us looking for another way to validate unalienable human rights.

            At this juncture, we might ask where human rights come from. Human rights are generally assumed by its advocates to be inherent in one’s being human and, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, self-evident. As we’ve already seen, any appeal for rights upon the definition of “human being” is superfluous. We might also wonder, if human rights are self-evident, why human rights as a concept didn’t appear in the Western world in writing until the 17^th and 18^th century. While the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declarations of the Rights of Man (1789) served as the basis for many modern human rights documents, one might be reminded that the rights declared in these documents, “When originally translated into policy, excluded women, people of color, and members of certain social, religious, economic, and political groups” (Shiman 6). If human rights are indeed self-evident, why were so many people excluded from exercising them? If human rights are self-evident, why was the French Revolution of 1789-1799 followed by the Reign of Terror in which 20,000 “enemies of the Revolution” were executed via the guillotine? Certainly we risk an oversimplification of each of these situations, but situations like these do nothing to advance the concept of human rights.

            Again, the absence of an idea doesn’t necessarily preclude its existence. In the case of human rights though, it is reasonable to assume (given its timeline in Western philosophy) that human rights as a concept evolved in response to the social, economic, and political inequities that arrived with or were exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution. Egalitarian societies have no concept of human rights because such inequities do not exist. Asian cultures that place the welfare of the community before the welfare of individuals likewise have no developed sense of human rights. Jack Donnelly, professor of International Studies at Denver, wrote in response to this observation, “Human rights ultimately rest on a social decision to act as though such ‘things’ existed…Like all social practices, human rights come with justifications” (Donnelly 20-21). There appears a strong indication that human rights are culturally relative. Human rights, it seems, is the advent of cultures that prize individuality and one’s freedom of expression.

            There are any number of objections a human rights proponent may now make, but for the sake of brevity, we will assess a few of the most commonly raised defenses.

            Proponents of human rights sometimes claim that human needs dictate human rights. The obvious question arises then as to what constitutes a need. Postulated by renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow, there exists a hierarchy of needs. Fundamentally, humans need physiological needs met first in order to survive, with safety needs and social needs met in that descending order of importance. With respect to human rights, based upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the best we can say is that human beings may have a right to air, water, food, and shelter. According to Maslow, “If these fundamental needs are not satisfied then one will surely be motivated to satisfy them. Higher needs such as social needs and esteem are not recognized until one satisfies the needs basic to existence” (Maslow). If this view is correct, any rights beyond physiological needs require justification. This is perhaps why The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in several of its articles that rights shall not be arbitrarily suspended. In other words, there may be conditions in which human rights are suspended and if that is so, human rights are not unalienable.

            Another common defense of human rights is for its proponents to claim that those opposed to human rights have other interests at heart. Interestingly, the countries that abstained from voting on the United Nations’ universal declaration in 1948 were among the greatest human rights abusers during that era. [Those countries included the Soviet Union, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.] It would be outlandish to deny that governments would sometimes obstruct the rights of its citizens, whatever those rights may be. But this is not wholeheartedly the case. If we may appeal to cultural relativism again, it may be that certain cultures have no knowledge of human rights because they have no need for such a concept. In order for the idea of unalienable human rights to hold, it must be shown that participants within a culture are incorrect to place their community’s needs ahead of the needs of individuals; it must be shown that the needs of one outweigh the needs of many. The idea that individual rights trump collective rights is hardly unassailable: it arguably leads to selfishness, greed, and crime.

Thus, individual rights can create as many problems as it helps solve. If we quantify how much good proclaiming human rights does, we are consequentialists. If we are consequentialists, the needs of the many can at least sometimes outweigh the needs of the few. Thus, human rights once again cannot be unalienable, not as they apply to individuals. [Of course, we should be wary of any possible tyrannical effect mob rule could have. It seems reasonable that there should be some formulation of human rights in any system of democratic government.]

            Third, even though human rights as they are currently conceived is a secular concept, it is not uncommon to hear the argument that human beings are imbued with rights by a divine creator. Naturally, this begs the question, which god? In order to conclude that some divine authority has imparted rights upon human beings, it would need to be shown that a god or gods existed. If history is any indication, arguing for the existence of God has been fraught with difficulty. Trying to establish God’s relationship to human beings has been even more difficult than that.

            The concept of human rights most of all suffers from the is-ought problem. That human beings have unalienable rights is not the case. Even so, we should think a case can be made for what ought to be regarding human rights if we are all concerned about bringing value to individual lives. However, the definitions of “human beings” and “rights” need to be resolved first, or they’ll forever be contentious. We would also need to formulate human rights that do not interfere with cultural practices if we are at all of the opinion that every culture has inherent worth. [We should venture to say that this is usually the way Westerners think even though such thinking does not coincide with the current concept of human rights.] Circumstances permitting, it seems permissible (sometimes even necessary) to conceptualize human rights. There is no need to postulate that such rights are unalienable, though. The desire for rights alone should be sufficient.

REFERENCES

Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. 2^nd. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Maslow, Abraham. “Maslow Hierarchy of Needs.” Abraham Maslow: Father of Modern Management. 2005 Abraham-Maslow.com 15 February, 2009

Shiman, David. Teaching Human Rights. 2nd. Denver: University of Denver, 1999.

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2008. The United Nations. 10 Feb 2009 .

Waldron , Jeremy. "Inalienable Rights." Boston Review. May 1999. 15 Feb 2009 .

Theory Parker (c) 2009