The Right to Life and Liberty Begin at Conception

On March 21,1861, Alexander Stephens presented a speech defending the establishment of the Confederate States of America.  Twenty-two days later the war began with the Confederates’ shelling of Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.  

Note that Stephens claims scientific “facts” as justification for the deeply racist beliefs he presents. If one carefully reads his speech, keeping in mind recent speeches, announcements, and such regarding Covid, Mr. Stephens’ speech sounds rather “progressive,” though it is also quite racist in its attitude toward the black victims of the “peculiar institution" of chattel slavery.  Lest one think that Alexander Stephens was an eccentric individual, he was chosen as the Vice President of the Confederacy, largely on the strength of this speech and the ideas presented in it.  

The ”positive good” argument for slavery arose after the death of James Madison, the last living of the Founders of the United States.  People such as John C. Calhoun, and George Fitzhugh, among others, wrote and spoke in favor of slavery as being a positive good and even a necessity for the benefit of both blacks and whites.

Just as the pro-slavery advocates claimed economic need for slavery to continue, pro-murdering advocates of unborn babies claim that abortion is an economic necessity for ‘minority’ women. The black slaves were seen as less than fully human, and the ‘fetus,’ Latin for offspring, as not really human. The ‘fetus,’ is effectively claimed to be ‘life unworthy of life,’ to borrow a phrase from German controlled Europe of the 1930s through the end of the Second World War.

During a series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1868 when they were each campaigning for the U. S. Senate from Illinois, Stephens argued that the right to slavery was a matter of choice for an individual, a community, or a State. Lincoln responded that “You cannot have the right to do what is wrong!.”  Mr. Lincoln’s statement undoubtedly applies to the preservation of the absolutely innocent life of the unborn.

Don Belding, OBM