Created Equal: How The Declaration of Independence Recognizes and Guarantees the Right to Life for the Unborn

Abstract

In spite of the sentiments expressed in the Declaration, and the reverence in which those sentiments are held by the people of this country, less than thirty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a woman has a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Since that decision, nearly forty million abortions have taken place in this country. It is the contention of this article that those forty million beings have been deprived of a fundamental and unalienable right guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence: life. 

Others have made similar arguments before. It seems however, that the debate up to this point has centered on questions that are, as one scholar has characterized them, "multiply ambiguous." These questions are: one, when does "life" begin?; and two, is a fetus a "person"? Each side of the debate merely assumes an answer and proceeds accordingly. "Pro-lifers" assume that life begins at conception, and that a fetus is a person; therefore, an abortion is murder. "Prochoicers" assert that life begins at viability, or birth, and a fetus is not a person, so the abortion of an unwanted fetus is a matter of "choice."

This article will propose a new focus to the same argument. When "life" begins is irrelevant. The key to the Declaration is not the word "life," but the word "created." By shifting the focus away from the word "life," and onto the word "created," the Declaration may provide a simple answer to the abortion controversy.