Truths are simple. And moral truths are the simplest. “All human beings have a right to life” is a simple truth that is included in our Declaration of Independence and serves as the motivating principle of pro-life Americans who continue to work toward state and federal protection of the right to life of preborn children.
In contrast, untruths are complicated. They are particularly complicated when used to deceive and distract attention from simple truths. Sometimes untruths are self-evident, as when Vice President Kamala Harris recently embarrassed herself and Democrats generally by attempting to revise the Declaration of Independence to promote abortion rights. However, recognizing untruths can often be difficult for Americans, especially in our modern world of information overload from a multitude of sources, both subscribed and unsolicited, and of uncertain credibility.
As a scientist, I have spent most of my life identifying and exposing things that were not true. In science, this is done by recognizing and investigating contradictions and anomalies. A classic example of this method of detection in the sciences is the discovery of new planets and other heavenly bodies due to anomalies in the behavior of known bodies. Other disciplines, like criminal prosecution, also discern untruths by identifying and resolving contradictions in the testimonies of suspects and witnesses.
The recent public demonstrations by pro-life groups at the March for Life followed later by pro-choice groups, highlights this important distinction between the nature of the messaging of these two opposing positions. Unlike the simple pro-life message of the right to life of all human beings, including preborn children, the pro-choice messaging has evident contradictions and anomalies.
The leading provider of abortions in the U.S., Planned Parenthood, earns the majority of its revenue by stopping pregnant mothers from being parents. Pro-choice protesters pronounce abortion to be healthcare, although every abortion kills a child, many women are injured by the procedure, and the frequency of injury is increasing with the surge of chemical abortions. Pro-choice marchers claim to want to give their daughters a future with abortion rights, but current abortion practice will end the lives of millions of those daughters, along with their brothers, long before their childbearing years. Abortionists who profit from abortion persist in semantic bickering about the personhood of preborn children, while they ignore their irrefutable humanhood – as living human beings.
If we were in a rational moment, with referenda and legislative actions to ban abortion decided by truth, the self-evident right to life of preborn children would prevail. But America is still in a protracted irrational period on the issue of abortion. Our irrationality is maintained by the untruths engendered by nearly 50 years of the scientifically illegitimate rule of Roe. Now, with the correction of Dobbs, Americans are free again to constitutionalize the right to life of all human beings. Like the end of slavery in America, this social reformation is inevitable. But how soon it will occur will depend on how long it takes for most Americans to recognize and insist on the simple moral truth about us all.
Dr. James L. Sherley, M.D., Ph.D., is President & CEO of Asymmetrex, LLC and an associate scholar at Charlotte Lozier Institute. He was a co-plaintiff in Sherley vs. Sebelius, a lawsuit filed to enjoin the National Institutes of Health from using federal funds for human embryonic stem cell research.
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