Readers of Arkansas' Newspaper may not be familiar with the name John T. Noonan Jr., for he served as a judge for a different appellate circuit. But his death this spring was mourned by all those who love and respect the endangered species ironically called Homo sapiens, or rational man. Or as Justice Noonan, an eloquent critic of the U.S. Supreme Court's pro-death jurisprudence, just put it for the Human Life Review:
"Until the child in the womb is viable, the Supreme Court has determined that it is to be treated as a thing, as a zero, as entitled to less protection than a bird or a blade of grass in a national park. An alligator in Avocado Creek, Fla., is entitled to more protection than a five-month-old human fetus anywhere in America. So whole-hearted, so intense have the Justices been in eradicating protection for the unborn that they have not only invented a right to abortion unknown in over a thousand years of Anglo-American jurisprudence; they made that right absolute, subject to none of the restraints by which even such truly basic rights as the right to free speech are channeled. Once a woman has decided to abort her young baby in the womb, no legal power in the United States may stand in her way."
Throughout human history and literature, man has been celebrated and welcomed--not viewed as a danger and burden to be blotted out. To quote Shakespeare's Hamlet: "What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals."
And yet so many of our elite would crush him like a bug, as if he or she were not worth a thought before a life that had only begun would be ended.
How refreshing then to see, tucked inside the Trump administration's 400-page-plus plan to reconstruct and rectify the country's tax structure, a mention of the rights of yet unborn children as heirs and legatees of their parents' wealth. It even allows mothers and father to designate their unborn child--"a child in utero"--as a rightful heir. Or to use the bill's legal definition of the yet unborn: "A child in utero means a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, says the mention of unborn children in the federal tax code represents a breakthrough for the forces of life, for it treats "the unborn child, as she or he should be, equal and protected in the eyes of the law."
Let's hope this case is now closed and any question that the unborn of the human species are human and not some tumor or stray growth is settled law. It's about time the stork was welcomed into American homes instead of being treated as fair game for those prepared to shoot it down on sight.
So let's hear it for this administration, and for all those, religious or irreligious, who revere, not despise, human life. Let's raise a glass to all those life-loving Americans who won't rest till the rights of the unborn are codified on every level, including the federal tax code. Here's to life.
Editorial on 11/12/2017