By Larry Craig

I would like to suggest another approach to the abortion debate. 

The subject is routinely presented as a right — a woman has the right to end the life of her child if she does it before he or she is born. You can quibble about the viability of the child, the size of it during the first three months, or whether it was conceived under undesirable circumstances, but it is all really meaningless because the abortion movement now insists that the mother has the right to end the child’s life even after it is born.

Once the right to an abortion has been established, it will not allow or accept any restrictions. It may have done so at first to pave the way, but once the way was paved, the outcome was assured.

Now this is where it gets a little tricky.

There are only two kinds of rights: unalienable rights, and government-given rights.

The Declaration of Independence says that our county was founded on unalienable rights given to us by God. These rights precede and supersede government. Government cannot give them, and government cannot take them away. Unalienable rights are things you can do without the government’s permission, interference, or restriction.

But our leaders and our society have been slowly rejecting and eliminating these rights, quietly so that nobody gets riled. Why would they do that? Because our rights come from God, and we have to reject God publicly in society today.

More than that, it is the Christian God who gave unalienable rights. No other religion has this.

The other kind of rights is what the government gives people. A right to a quality public education is not an unalienable right. It is one created by the government.

Now here is where the problem lies.

Abortion rights are treated as unalienable rights. We need abortion-access laws, we’re told, because we have rights that precede and supersede government.

Is that true? Is abortion a right given by God? The only source of information about the Christian God is the Bible, wherein children, all children, are a gift from God. They are described as being handcrafted by God in their mothers’ wombs. Several notable people were called by God while they were in the womb to some noble work for God. So does the Bible support or condone abortion? Uh, no.

So if God did not give humans the right to end a child’s life while still in the womb, then it is the government’s decision. You can’t argue that the government must allow it because there is an unalienable right to abortion. Yet it is the government’s legalizing the act that creates the right. And it is not an inviolable right. It can be taken away at a later date.

Once God is removed from the abortion discussion, as our society insists, then there will never be a resolution to the discussion, because there is no common ground.

There is no right to an abortion apart from what the government dictates.

Please visit my blog at poligion1.blogspot.com for articles I have written on politics, culture, and public life.