Texas Primaries and Personhood

The Texas Republican Primary election was held yesterday, and the results were disappointing. I took a bit of a break from the blog to go door to door for candidates for both the United States and Texas Houses of Representatives. I also actively supported candidates for Texas Governor and Tarrant County Judge. All four of these preferred candidates were running against incumbent Republicans in the respective offices, and all four of them lost.

One of the purposes of this blog is to educate the public on the personhood pro-life position and show them the moral and constitutional merits of personhood. Last night's election results demonstrate that we still have a long way to go.

My preferred candidate for governor was Debra Medina. Her position has always been that human life starts at conception, period. On the Texas Republican Primary ballot were five non-binding propostions that voters could approve or disapprove. One of these propositions called for the Texas Legislature to "enact legislation requiring a sonogram to be performed and shown to each mother about to undergo a medically unnecessary, elective abortion." The state senator who proposed this proposition, who was an ardent supporter of incumbent Governor Rick Perry, made a big deal about Debra Medina's non-support of this measure, saying that she wasn't really a pro-life candidate.

My question to all of our "pro-life" candidates and legislators is this: What is so great about yet another law that basically ends with "...and then you can kill the baby?" We have had 37 years of Roe v. Wade, and where has such legislation gotten us? Three thousand babies a day are still being slaughtered, while the murderers who commit such slaughter keep getting richer. One disgusting organization, Planned Parenthood, masquerades as a "non-profit" group and gets the benefit of our tax dollars on top of the profit they make from killing babies.

It is past time for our government to recognize and protect the right to life of all human beings, from conception through natural death. Roe v. Wade does not grant women the absolute "right" to murder their unborn children at will. Our politicians and lawmakers are giving the Supreme Court way too much power in their handling of the abortion issue. Rather than stand up to the Supreme Court's horrendous decision, they keep enacting laws which ultimately state conditions under which abortionists can kill babies.

Debra Medina has stated emphatically that the right to life of unborn children applied to ALL unborn children. Rick Perry has taken the position that abortion should be legal in cases of rape and incest. I argue that Perry's position gives the pro-abortion movement all the ammunition it needs to keep abortion laws in place. If any unborn child is to be considered a person with an unalienable right to life, then ALL unborn children MUST receive that same consideration. And if all unborn children are persons with the right to life, then the child conceived as the result of an act of rape or incest has as much claim to the right to life as any other.

The state senator who wrote this sonogram ballot propostion is generally considered one of the more "pro-life" people in the Texas Legislature. But if he is so pro-life, why doesn't he propose a bill that would eliminate Texas Penal Code §19.06? The Penal Code already defines a person to be "human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth." (Tex. Penal Code §1.07.26). Saying that neither the actions of the mother nor the actions of an abortionist acting with the consent of the mother constitute criminal homicide (which Tex. Penal Code §19.06 does indeed say) is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment rights of these unborn children. As a reminder, the 14th Amendment says that no State shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

And the Roe v. Wade court decision said that “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] Amendment." Texas law (the aforementioned Tex. Penal Code §1.07.26) now establishes this suggestion of personhood, so, according to the 14th Amendment AND Roe v. Wade, Texas MUST IMMEDIATELY guarantee the right to life of unborn children.

Instead of making laws describing conditions under which an abortion is permissible, why don't we create laws that really protect the unalienable right to life of all persons?