Given that today is the annual “March for Life” in
Washington, DC, and that the Just Third Way as applied in Capital Homesteading
can (at least in one sense) be described as a “Pro-Life economic agenda,” it
seems appropriate to post a few comments about what, from a natural law point
of view, must be regarded as a fundamental human right, that of life.
The Pro-Life movement has placed a great deal of emphasis on
overturning Roe v. Wade (410 U.S.
113, 1973). This has become something of
a mantra, in fact. Overturn this
profoundly unjust decision, a violation of the laws of God and man (so the
reasoning seems to go), and everything will be all right.
Unfortunately, given the current political climate and the
state of economic and social development for the past two centuries or so, the
sad fact is that overturning Roe v. Wade
would do absolutely nothing substantive.
Unless there is a profound and fundamental restructuring of the social
order affecting key institutions at the most basic level, nothing can change.
Don’t get me wrong.
Overturning Roe v. Wade is
essential on many levels and for many reasons.
It is not, however, the first step, much less a solution. It is, rather, something to be achieved after reaching certain critical goals
that must be attained before abortion becomes not merely illegal, but
unthinkable. Unless abortion first
becomes unthinkable, no law abolishing abortion on demand would be effective,
if it could even be passed.
The fact is that Roe
v. Wade is simply the logical outcome of a contradiction that has been
inherent in the United States from the beginning, and which caused the
bloodiest war in this nation’s history.
The contradiction developed out of the question as to what, exactly,
this thing called “man” is, and who or what has the right or duty to rule over
him.
Put another way, is man made for the State, or is the State
made for man? Is the human person
sovereign in human affairs, or is something outside the human person in
charge? More to the point, does every
child, woman, and man — every actual or potential human being — have rights by
nature, or are rights, “personality,” a grant or gift from some authority,
temporal or divine?
According to the Founding Fathers of the American Republic,
every human being, whether potential or actual (“potentiality” and “actuality” are
both stages of “being”), has rights by nature, that is, built into the
definition of what it means to be human.
This was believed to be “self-evident,” according to Thomas Jefferson.
There was just one slight problem, however. Slavery.
A “slave” is, by definition, a human being without rights. A slave is not a “person,” because “person”
means “that which has rights.”
The bottom line was that you had people demanding rights for
themselves, at the same time they insisted on denying the rights of
others. This inserted a certain degree
of schizophrenia into the structure and culture of the new country from the
very beginning.
True, there were slave owners who knew slavery was wrong,
and even tried to abolish it. George
Mason of Gunston Hall comes to mind. A
slave owner who hated slavery, he never missed an opportunity to condemn the
institution.
The problem was, slavery was such an integral institution
that halfway measures to abolish it partially or only in particular
circumstances would inevitably fail. As
Mason and a few others were fully aware, individual slave owners could not free
their slaves unless everyone freed his slaves.
If an individual slave owner freed his slaves, it would
actually be bad for both slaves and slave owners. Under the law that prohibited a freedman from
living near his former owner, a freed slave could easily be kidnapped and
re-enslaved with no one being the wiser, to say nothing of being subjected to
horrific treatment for being a “runaway.”
The former slave owner would face financial ruin as a result of not
being able to compete with producers who used slave labor instead of free labor.
Abolishing slavery in some areas but not in others merely
created a conflict that, unresolved, would eventually tear the nation apart —
as it did. As Abraham Lincoln put it, no
nation can long endure being half free and half slave. It would have to be one or the other.
The new country was thus in a state of conflict caused by an
inherent contradiction from the very beginning, the results of which have
lasted down to the present day.
This might not sound important, but having a system based on
contradiction, or that embodies a contradiction, is a recipe for disaster. The principle of contradiction (that nothing
can both “be” and “not be” at the same time under the same conditions) is the first
principle of reason. To abandon the
first principle of reason, as the late Fulton Sheen pointed out in his first book,
God and Intelligence (1925), is “mental
suicide.”
