On America’s 250th birthday this week, two pro-life leaders are calling the nation back to its founding promise — and exposing the one right we still refuse to recognize.
The preborn child remains the only class of Americans denied due process under the 14th Amendment.
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, and John Mize, CEO of Americans United for Life, argue that abortion systematically denies preborn children the very rights the Founders declared self-evident in 1776: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
According to Quinnipiac University polling released just a month ago, barely one-third of Americans think our nation is living up to the ideal that all men are created equal.
The Declaration of Independence listed our God-given rights in deliberate order — life first, then liberty, then the pursuit of happiness. Without life, the Founders knew, the other two are impossible.
“The right to life cannot be qualified by whether a human is born or preborn; otherwise, we undermine the spirit and ideals upon which this nation was founded.”
Public discourse on abortion has shifted since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The question is no longer when life begins — biologists nearly unanimously agree that life begins at conception. The question now is personhood.
And the Declaration already answered it, Hawkins and Mize write. “All men are created equal” comes without qualification.
America has been forced to self-correct repeatedly after attempting to qualify what it means to be a legal person. The Constitution itself fell short, accommodating slavery under the Three-Fifths Compromise just 11 years after the Declaration.
Under that compromise, only three-fifths of the slave population counted for state representation and taxation. Black Americans were denied the rights to own land, marry, be educated, or vote — wrongfully regarded as property, not humans endowed with inalienable rights.
Even President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation nearly 100 years later didn’t provide a complete remedy. The proclamation declared that all persons held as slaves “are, and henceforward shall be free,” but black Americans would still suffer under Jim Crow laws and continued racism.
The 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause established that no citizen would be denied “the equal protection of the laws,” but another century passed before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 upheld enforceability of equal rights for black Americans, including among private individuals and businesses.
The Constitution also failed to recognize and protect the rights of women. The women’s suffrage movement fought for decades for functional equality with men — starting with the right to vote. It took the 19th Amendment to ensure no citizen was denied that right on the basis of sex.
America has persevered, correcting these tragic distortions of equal rights. But after 250 years, the nation has still failed to recognize the personhood of the preborn child.
The 14th Amendment itself revived the language of the Declaration, stating “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Abortion denies preborn children that due process.
Hawkins leads more than 1,700 Students for Life groups on middle school, high school, college, university, medical, and law school campuses in all 50 states. Mize heads Americans United for Life, the nation’s leading pro-life legal advocacy organization.
Both argue the same conclusion: on America’s 250th birthday, the nation must return to the founding principles declared self-evident in 1776 — first among these, life.
