Texas Alliance for Life

I posted a link to the May 24th entry of this blog on the Texas Alliance for Life Facebook page, and they responded via a comment to that post:

We are proud that Texas has one of the strongest "personhood" laws in the nation, the Prenatal Protection Act. Our personhood law recognizes the unborn child as a person "at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth."

The law protects unborn babies from homicide, assault, and intoxication manslaughter. Because of our law, killing an unborn child in Texas is capital murder because the person murdered (the unborn child) is less than six years of age. Numerous criminals have been convicted in Texas under the Prenatal Protection Act, and several are servicing life sentences.

In addition to protecting unborn children and their mothers, this law reinforces the principle that unborn children are babies. It is a significant foothold in scaling the wall to someday overturn Roe v. Wade. And when that wonderful day comes, the Texas Prenatal Protection Act may well protect unborn babies from abortion as well.

I posted the following comment in response this morning:

But what is the plan for overturning Roe v. Wade? It has been around for 37 years, and it is no more closer to being overturned than it was in 1973. Meanwhile, fifty million babies have been murdered. Just to help illustrate how many that is, I will spell it out: 50,000,000. How many more will die while we are waiting to start "scaling the wall to someday overturn Roe v. Wade?" We need to start scaling now. We cannot and should not worry about the makeup of the Supreme Court since it usually takes years to get a case that high anyway.

The law that Roe v. Wade overturned was a Texas law that made procuring an abortion a crime. That law said nothing about any rights that preborn children might or might not have. The Roe v. Wade court opinion even stated 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." It went on to say that, "no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment." The Prenatal Protection Act established this personhood of the unborn child, so, according to the both the Fourteenth Amendment AND Roe v. Wade, Texas MUST protect the right to life of preborn children. The combination of Tex. Penal Code §19.06 (which unfortunately was created by the Prenatal Protection Act) and the regulations on abortion in the Heath & Safety and Family Codes serve to keep abortion legal when doing so is clearly unconstitutional when the Penal Code definition of individual is taken into account.

Take a moment to really think about the current state of Texas law: The Texas Penal Code has a specific definition for an individual. If the State can exclude a certain group that clearly falls under that definition from the protection against certain forms of homicide (the preborn and abortion), what is keeping the State from excluding other groups from the protection against any form of homicide?

This November, the voters of Colorado will vote on an amendment to their state constitution that would give full personhood status to preborn children. The voters of Mississippi will vote on a similar amendment to their constitution in 2011. It is my prayer that these referendums will be passed by the voters, but they face very well-funded opposition by pro-abortion activists. Roe v. Wade was a case that originated in Texas. I think that the end of Roe v. Wade should also originate in Texas. But to do that, the pro-life movement cannot be passive. We cannot be paralyzed by fear. We must do what we know is right and what will really protect the right to life of all human beings, even if that means calling for the repeal of all of the so-called pro-life regulations that we have worked so hard for in the past. What these pro-life regulations do now is help keep abortion legal since they all end with some form of "...and then you can kill the baby."

Your Facebook comment of March 1 (specified in my blog at http://texaspersonhood.blogspot.com/2010/05/pro-life-and-personhood.html) indicated that you are operating out of the fear of what some future United States Supreme Court might rule in some future case regarding personhood. When I saw that post, I was reminded of the story of Biblical story Joshua and Caleb. Moses sent spies into the promised land. When the spies came back, all but Joshua and Caleb said that the land was occupied by giants and large, fortified cities and that the Israelites would not be able to defeat them. Joshua and Caleb reported that, with God, the Israelites could defeat whoever occupied the land. Texas Alliance for Life is acting like the other spies when you should be acting as Joshua and Caleb. In fact, the Bible is full of admonitions to "FEAR NOT." Let me just remind you that, in this fight for the right to life of preborn children, we are most definitely on God's side. And since we are on God's side, we should not operate under fear, but we should loudly and boldly proclaim that the God-given right to life applies to all human beings!

I am thankful that Texas Alliance for Life has responded and that a dialogue has begun.