It's Not Complicated: Abortion Is Murder

For most of the history of the United States, abortion of a viable fetus was illegal.

The principle was that a baby in the mother’s womb was a totally innocent human being and that to kill it without any process of law was murder.

This made convincing sense for more than 100 years and seemed liable to make sense indefinitely. But a group of lawyers at my alma mater, Yale Law School, in the 1920s and 1930s revolutionized this thinking.

They observed that law was not "a brooding omnipresence in the sky," permanent and immovable. Instead, it was the manifestation of highly changeable political and social currents in society.

This made so much sense that it was picked up at other major law schools, although some resist it and insist that law is indeed something like a "brooding omnipresence in the sky."

Then along came the so-called women’s rights movement, sponsored by, among other groups, Planned Parenthood. One goal of the women’s rights movement was for women to be able to have sex, and to have as much pleasure as possible in sex, without having to worry about the burdens of motherhood and the pain of childbirth — perfectly reasonable wishes.

This powerful movement reached a high point in the Connecticut case Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).

For many generations the state of Connecticut had laws barring the sale of condoms and other contraceptives in drugstores.

In 1965, plaintiff s sued, alleging, among many other things, that Connecticut’s citizens had a right to privacy that overwhelmed and overpowered the no-contraceptives laws of the Nutmeg State.

The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The high court ruled that although there was no mention at all, absolutely none, of privacy in the Constitution, there were hints and "penumbras" and "emanations" in the document that said there was indeed a right to privacy in the supreme law of the land.

This supposed right would be infringed upon if customers had to argue with a pharmacist in front of other customers about getting a condom or other forms of contraception.

Thus, out of penumbras and emanations that no one had ever seen before, the Supreme Court created a gigantic new right under the Constitution, the "right to privacy."

Only a few years later, a group of lawyers and "women’s rights" activists sought to gigantically enlarge that "right to privacy."

For all time, abortion had been illegal in the United States for the reason mentioned earlier. But the aggressive lawyers of the women’s rights movement pleaded that if there were indeed a "right to privacy" in the Constitution, it applied to abortion as well. This was in 1973.

After all, having sex is an intimate and private act.

The government, said the plaintiff s, should not be interfering in any way and at any stage with humans having sex. Thus, the government should not and could not ban abortion. However, the justices realized that a baby did have feelings, eyes, ears, dimensions, and senses, to broadly quote the Bard.

So they imposed certain time limits during the maturation of a baby and said that only within those time limits could there be an abortion. And a huge battle began between the "right-to-lifers" and the "pro-choicers."

The first stage of the battle had to do with what a fetus was. The pro-aborts said it was just a mass of Jell-O and felt nothing. Meanwhile, the "legal realists" won ever more ground as evidence accumulated that in politically leftist states no right to life was recognized, just as in conservative states a right to life was recognized.

Many states passed legislation that made abortion extremely difficult. Other states practically begged women to kill their babies. Some even "legitimized" the "right" to kill a baby after it was born as a viable human. You can tell right away which side I’m on.

Abortion is murder. It’s not complicated.

But why it should be a cheering point for the Democratic Party is a mystery to me.

Life is a miracle gift from God.

Why it should be taken away without a compelling reason is an evil mystery. 

Ben Stein is a writer, an actor, and a lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes hired him as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.

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