Who Gets to Say When Life Begins?

John F. Schmidt

1/10/04

Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark has taken the most extreme view of abortion in his search for his party’s nomination, stating that he supports allowing a mother to kill her baby up to the moment of birth. His position, as he was recently quoted as saying to the Manchester Union Leader, is that “life begins with the mother’s decision.”

Few, if any, of the presidential aspirants has dared to state their position so stridently on this vital issue. Yet former general Clark is due no kudos for his candor. His statement lays bare his lack of understanding of the spiritual roots of the authority he craves to possess as president. One would expect more from a Rhodes scholar.

If he is elected president he “will not appoint judges who are pro-life.” Any person he nominates is “not going to have an ideology to advance at the expense of the law.” The law, according to Mr. Clark, consists of “judicial and established precedent.” By erroneously inferring that there are some without ideology and others with ideology, he seeks to smear anyone whose decisions might be based on Biblical principles. He fails to inform his listeners that everybody has an internal set of principles – an “ideology.” Wesley’s judicial selections would actually assure that only practicing atheists sit on the bench. The real issue is whose convictions are going to rule, the atheists’ or the believers’.

The majority of Mr. Clark’s potential constituents certainly don’t want imperial judges who will create law from the bench. But the average person on the street does not want abortion jammed down his throat by the judicial system either. Polls constantly affirm that a large majority of the American people does not favor abortion as defined by the Supreme Court. But the will of the people is of no avail.

The “right” of abortion has its beginning in the Roe v Wade ruling. Ironically, there was no “judicial precedent” cited to support Roe itself; nor was the Constitution cited meaningfully. Subsequent rulings have studiously avoided favorable references prior to Roe, since there are none. Present-day abortion is supported by rulings made since then, but that practice amounts to circular reasoning. Court rulings must be founded on the Constitution, not simply prior court rulings.

Clark also said “I don’t believe people whose ideological agenda is to burn the law or remake it or reshape it should be appointed whether they are from either side.” By that standard he condemns the Roe v. Wade Court decision, for that is exactly how it came into being. If this inconsistency comes to light will General Clark repudiate his stand on abortion? I think not.

Mr. Clark’s prescription for appointing judges is not high-minded at all: it is a crass disguise to guarantee that the illegal rulings of the previous courts won’t be overturned, despite the fact that they were made without the very “judicial precedent” he claims is his basis for legitimacy.

We want our public officials who represent us – especially Supreme Court Justices – to be faithful in those areas we hold most dear. And we are overwhelmingly a God-fearing people who believe that no person is to be trusted who has no religious convictions. Such a person in a high position is capable of unlimited damage to our freedoms and our very lives. Clark’s prescriptions will take us ever further in the wrong direction.

Human government does not exist to let any person play God, as Mr. Clark’s judges try to do. Instead, its charter is to represent God and its main job is to defend the defenseless. A child in the uterus is one of the most defenseless of all beings. The mother has total authority over it so that she may exercise total protective care on behalf of it. No greater violation of such an authoritative trust exists than a mother choosing to kill her child. Lawyers and public officials of all kinds may go to jail for violating the official trust given to them by others people. Should a transgression of an even more sacred trust be ignored? Human Government, no matter how flawed, has a solemn responsibility to protect unborn children; not allow them to be treated worse than baby seals and snail darter fish. Those children are our “posterity.”

When a mother is tempted to harm her child, she must be held in check by the Divinely authorized hand of government, acting on behalf of the defenseless baby. It is the same thing it must do in protecting all life. Our American government, in particular, has from the beginning embodied a Biblical view of itself, and the restraints and protections that come with it. Hence it has protected the innocent and defenseless. That view is under assault, and “General” Clark is in the vanguard of the barbarians who seek to disestablish the Judeo-Christian government and replace it with rules made by men and men alone. But no government can abdicate its basic responsibility to protect the helpless without at the same time abdicating all claims to its own authority. As it does so, it disestablishes itself.

God alone has the right to say when life begins. And it is everyone’s job to protect the life of the little ones - even from the mother - because they are made in the Image of God and therefore precious. Clark has thrown his political career – and that of his oh-so-supportive Democratic party – into the trashcan of history, because he and they turned their backs on the defenseless ones they should have fought to protect.