Likewise, in the New Testament, Luke 1:41–44 recounts, “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb.… [And she exclaimed,] when the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby leaped in my womb for joy.”
But one need not be a person of faith to be pro-life. Indeed, there are compelling personal, legal, constitutional, and philosophical reasons to support protecting the most vulnerable and defenseless among us. Every parent will remember that first magical moment when you looked at your child’s sonogram. When you saw your daughter or son move or kick or suck their thumb. The pride, the love, the pure amazement of hearing that heartbeat and seeing that incredible, living, tiny child. We talk to our children before they are born, we play music for our children before they are born, we are deeply connected to our children long before birth.
That’s one of the reasons why, tragically, among abortion’s millions of victims, are so many mothers who experience grief, pain, regret, guilt, and depression for decades afterwards. In 2019, the movie Unplanned told the powerful true story of Abby Johnson, who spent eight years working for Planned Parenthood until the horror of what she saw and experienced drove her to leave and become a leading pro-life activist. The movie is brutally real and can be difficult to watch, but it is also personal, beautiful, and deeply moving. Abby, in making the movie, said she wanted it to be “a love letter to those working in the abortion industry,” and to help provide them and so many grieving mothers a pathway out.
Turning to the legal and constitutional basis for protecting life, consider Thomas Jefferson’s language from the Declaration of Independence, which committed our young nation to the proposition that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The reader will note that “Life” is the very first “unalienable Right” listed. It is the first natural right—the very securing of which, Jefferson goes on to tell us, is why “[g]overnments are instituted among Men.” Securing the right to life was the preeminent reason that America rebelled against the British Crown and that America came into existence.
When our Constitution was adopted, and for over a century thereafter, abortion was uniformly defined as a crime, and the lives of unborn children were protected by law. For the same reason, the Hippocratic oath, taken by doctors for over 2000 years—which traces back to the Greek Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine”—provided expressly, “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.”
Protecting human life is the central responsibility of the law, and yet those who are most vulnerable—the unborn—are completely unable to speak out for themselves. As Ronald Reagan once quipped, “I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
In the Senate, I have been proud to stand for life throughout my career. One notable instance came early in my Senate tenure, following the horrifying details that emerged surrounding late-term abortionist and now convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell. The facts of the case were gruesome. Even The Atlantic (hardly a conservative publication) wrote about it in 2013 and is worth quoting at length:
The grand jury report in the case of Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I’ve read. “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy—and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors,” it states. “The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels—and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.…
One former employee described hearing a baby screaming after it was delivered during an abortion procedure. “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” she testified. Said the Philadelphia Inquirer in its coverage, “Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell’s idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania.”
At trial in Pennsylvania state court, the jury convicted Gosnell of three counts of homicide of three infants who were born alive during attempted abortion procedures and also of involuntary manslaughter of one woman during an abortion procedure. He was sentenced to life, plus thirty years.
In the wake of Gosnell’s conviction, I joined my friend Senator Mike Lee in fighting to try to find out how many other Kermit Gosnells there might be across our nation. Together, we introduced a Senate resolution calling on Congress and state governments to both investigate and prevent abusive, unsanitary, dangerous, and illegal late-term abortion practices across America. Speaking on the Senate floor, I urged,
Everyone in this body should be supporting an investigation to make sure there are not other Kermit Gosnells across this country. Everyone who proclaims to be a champion for women and children should enthusiastically support this resolution. Anyone who proclaims himself a champion dedicated to helping the most vulnerable should be supporting this resolution.
Sadly, the Democrats objected on the floor and blocked any congressional investigation.
But the Gosnell horror show, as utterly tragic as it was, represents one specific instance of abortion policy. From a broader legal perspective, the question facing any society is whether the rule of law should presume in favor of life.
History is filled with sad and sorry examples of legal rules presuming against life, from the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that barbarically justified treating African-American slaves as “property” and not as humans, to the
