Liberals’ ‘Big Brother’ Push for Federally-Funded Abortion

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

On Jan. 17, 2020, Kenneth Roth, the president of the purported human rights organization euphemistically known as the Human Rights Watch, testified before the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights.

The topic under discussion was abortion.

Mr. Roth was straightforward and to the point. “Abortion,” he contended, “is a fundamental right” for “anyone who wants or needs it.”

He then proceeded to tell the commission that the right to terminate a child is simply an assumed corollary to the right to health care. “Millions” of deaths could be prevented by abortion, he argued.

Setting the legal assumptions for his position, Mr. Roth proceeded.

All arguments that an unborn child is human and, therefore, has the unalienable right to life are merely “philosophical,” Mr. Roth opined. Such beliefs should have no place in policy or law.

Since no agreement will ever be reached concerning the constitutional rights of our youngest babies, policymakers must defer to the United Nations team of experts in applying international law. No nation should be granted the sovereign authority to “take the absolutist position [on the personhood] of an unborn child.” If a given nation’s laws are pro-life, Mr. Roth told Commissioner David Tse-Chien Pan, then international law must trump that which is provincial. “The whole point of human rights law is to limit governments,” said Mr. Roth.

When challenged by Commission member Peter Berkowitz that many people believe a baby in gestation is, in fact, a human being, and, thereby, worthy of ontological recognition, Mr. Roth acknowledged that there are different religious views on this subject.

Pushed further, however, to respond to what most thinking people see as a legal and moral tension between Mr. Roth’s argument for federally-funded abortion and our nation’s First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, Mr. Roth was blunt and clear.

There is no such tension, he claimed, because when it comes to religious freedom, the only thing protected by human rights is a “freedom of belief” and not the right to exercise such beliefs in public roles or venues.

So let’s review Mr. Roth’s worldview.

First, it is a moral good and “human right” to kill our youngest children any time, and for no other reason than we “want” to.

Second, killing young human beings somehow and mysteriously results in saving millions of human lives.

Third, defending the dignity of all persons is a “philosophical” argument that has no place in actual law.

Fourth, freedom of religion means you are free to believe, but you are never free to act upon your beliefs.

Fifth, the Constitution of the United States and its premise that all human beings are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights (first and foremost of which is life) is not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Sixth, and this is the take-home: Power — pure power — absolute power — rests, with Mr. Roth and his club of “experts.” “We the People;” we the “deplorables,” we the “credulous boomer rubes,” we the fly-over folks who “cling to our God and our guns,” be damned. Big Brother is only too ready to tell us how to practice (or not practice) our faith, which pronouns to use, how many new genders there are this week, and even how to use the bathroom. Our smarter-than-thou sibling is also ready to tell us whether our babies should live or die.

Mr. Roth and his cabal have a palpable hatred for the practice of Christian virtue, and they have a frightening love for the degradation of the human being. They have no regard for human freedom, but instead seek to oppress it. And all while waving a sanctimonious flag of “human rights,”  “choice” and “democracy.”

Can you hear Orwell laughing?

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power … We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others … pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that.

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship … The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me. Power is in tearing human minds [and bodies?] to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing … If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever …” — George Orwell, “1984”

Everett Piper, former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is a columnist for The Washington Times and author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017).