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Dear John,
Have you heard the latest from Mayor Pete Buttigieg? Mayor Pete now says that protecting unborn children is a "cosmic question"—and even references the Bible in a lame attempt to justify his pro-abortion views.
Clarke Forsythe, Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life, responds:
Mr. Buttigieg’s religious musings obscure that America’s legal tradition—going back to the English common law—has long protected unborn children to the greatest extent possible given existing medical understanding. As Justice James Wilson noted in the 1790s, “With consistency, beautiful and undeviating, human life, from its commencement to its close, is protected by the common law. In the contemplation of law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. By the law, life is protected not only from immediate destruction but from every degree of actual violence, and, in some cases, from every degree of danger."
Rulings from as long ago as the 17th century show that English common law prohibited abortion at the earliest point that medicine could detect that a developing human was alive (the stethoscope wasn’t invented until 1816). English and American law subsequently prohibited abortion at earlier points during pregnancy, as medical understanding and technology allowed...
Today, several states protect unborn children in laws regarding legal guardianship and inheritance of property. Thirty-seven of them have criminal statutes that treat the killing of an unborn child as a homicide when done by means other than abortion. California’s statute protects unborn children after as few as eight weeks of gestation. Thirty states do so from conception.
Why speculate about “when life begins” when state law is so much more revealing about where the American people and their elected representatives stand in 2019?"
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