An Inflection Point

An Inflection Point
Clouds are seen above The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington on May 17, 2021. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Trent Franks
Updated:
Commentary
“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We ... will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the [last] generation.” — Abraham Lincoln
Throughout the course of human history, there have been those identifiable inflection points within the human family that recalibrated the trajectory of the entire world. Certainly, America’s Declaration of Independence was one of those clarion inflection points. Thomas Jefferson articulated the purpose of it all when he said, “The care of human life and its happiness, and not its destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

In the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court made the often overlooked statement in which it refused to recognize the self-evident humanity of the preborn human child: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. ... The judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”

The court cowered to address the very central and quintessential question that America must now face. Does abortion take an innocent human life? If no human life is taken, then pro-abortion advocates are right; abortion is nothing more than a routine surgery with no moral implications whatsoever. If abortion does take the life of a human child, then America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, finds her very foundations awash in the tortured blood of more than 60 million of her own innocent and forever unborn children.

If, indeed, the Roe Court was correct in shamelessly pronouncing that the U.S. Constitution is silent concerning the rights of the unborn, its only remaining constitutional guidance as to who would still clearly be empowered to define the rights of unborn human beings is the 10th Amendment, which definitively empowers states to act where the Constitution is “silent.”

Since the Roe opinion, the entire human genome has been mapped, and the presence of fully articulated human DNA and the entire human chromosomal structure has been confirmed in the very youngest of preborn children. Using MRI machines and powerful computers, we can now monitor and build 3D-model, real-time images of the preborn child’s beating heart.

We currently do complex surgeries upon the preborn child still in utero, and we use anesthesia during those surgeries because of established knowledge indicating the child has developed the capacity to feel pain no later than halfway through normal gestation.

Boutique clinics with names such as “Meet Your Baby” or “Baby’s Debut” are now appearing in commercial shopping malls utilizing 3D and 4D ultrasound to offer high-resolution DVDs for parents to take home showing the detail of expression on their child’s face and the perfectly formed tiny hands and body. This same technology has also captured the images of preborn children desperately trying in vain to evade surgical instruments in the process of being aborted.

The cruel and unusual punishment of drawing and quartering, for even the most evil of all criminals, was outlawed in this country only two years after America became a nation. Yet in 2021, it’s an immutable fact that helpless late-term, pain-capable, preborn children in America are legally and brutally dismembered alive without anesthesia every day using the common method of abortion called “dilation and extraction.” It happened again today.

Some of them cried and screamed as they died, but because it was amniotic fluid passing over their vocal cords instead of air, we couldn’t hear them.

The suffering of these children is very intimate and very personal. Our knowledge has developed much in the years since Roe v. Wade. We can no longer avoid the humanity of preborn children and the inhumanity of what is being done to them.

Allowing abortion clinics to dismember their little sons and daughters alive doesn’t liberate mothers, it only abandons them to ultimately discover a horrifying truth and an inexpressible loss.

It’s time for another inflection point in America.

President Abraham Lincoln said, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under a just God, cannot long retain it.”
The Dred Scott Supreme Court decision and the similarities between slavery and abortion on demand are cited so often that it’s easy for all of us to forget just how profoundly similar the dynamics of these two issues truly are. Glaringly, like Roe, Dred Scott blatantly ignored the humanity of its innocent victims in the name of freedom. It almost destroyed the Supreme Court, and its vestiges remain embedded in Roe v. Wade today.
Black babies are three times more likely to be aborted than white babies, and more than 20 million black children have been killed by abortion since 1973 alone. Alveda King, the niece of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., has written, “No racial group in America, historically and currently, has ... suffered more deliberate discrimination, dehumanization, torture, agonizing dismemberment and death legally imposed upon them than black children.”
Lincoln called upon all of us to remember America’s Founding Fathers and “their enlightened belief [that] nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.” He reminded “posterity” (Ladies and Gentlemen, that’s each one of us today) that “when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest should set up a doctrine that [some] were not entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began.”

For the sake of all of those who founded this nation and dreamed of what America could someday be, and for the sake of all those since then, who have died in darkness so Americans could walk in the light of freedom with that dream still in their hearts: I adjure the U.S. Supreme Court to “take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began,” to deeply consider these little human victims being “trodden on ... degraded and imbruted” by their “fellows”; and to rise above the politically correct and invincible ignorance of the day, to search the Constitution, human history, and their own souls to rediscover the timeless and unspeakably important truth that we all, even the very smallest and most helpless of us all, are still created equal.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Trent Franks
Trent Franks
Author
Congressman Trent Franks served 15 years in U.S. Congress and was co-chairman of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus.
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