The claim is made that women in America have a "constitutional right" to kill unborn babies. I thought this was a moral question - since we are talking about killing another human being when discussing aborting the unborn baby's life.
Normally law is against murder. So what is this "constitutional right" to murder? Turns out ... they claim it is in the short little "due process" clause of the constitution ...protecting "life, liberty and property".
"No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
And the Bible says "thou shalt not kill"
You would "think" that "not depriving the baby of life" would mean "a law against killing unborn babies".
But maybe the ruling was that "protecting liberty" meant protecting the liberty to "kill other humans".
Normally, the Due Process Clause applies only to
government interference, saying that the government itself shall not deprive someone of life/liberty/property without due process of law. It doesn't apply to non-governmental actors; laws preventing murder, theft, and kidnapping by non-governmental entities (e.g. random people) are left to the government's discretion and created independent of the Constitution. So using the whole "no person shall be deprived of life" to argue that abortion must be prohibited doesn't really work.
Even if there was merit to it, it's a non-starter to believe this would be convincing to the Supreme Court. The late Justice Antonin Scalia was no friend to Roe v. Wade, and he wrote in his Planned Parenthood v. Casey dissent (joined by the other justices who wanted a complete overturn of Roe v. Wade) that "The States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not
require them to do so."
As for Roe v. Wade itself, the "logic" in that decision was that the government can't take away your liberty without process of law, and that this guarantee of liberty includes a right to privacy, which "is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The problems with this train of thought, and why Roe v. Wade "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be", were elaborated quite well all the way back in the 1970's by John Hart Ely in his classic essay "
The Wages of Crying Wolf", so I will not repeat them here--a few parts have been rendered obsolete but otherwise it holds up. I really cannot recommend that essay enough.
However the Bible does not "change" just because someone makes a strained argument of the form "the constitution protects life so that means you should be able to kill an unborn baby".
Are churches and church members so mixed up on this point that they think the constitution trumps the Bible command against murder?
And what sort of rendering is that for the right to life in that "due process" clause, that can spin it on its head to say "the right to life is the right to kill other humans"??
Well, as noted, the argument never was that the "life" portion of the Due Process Clause limited government regulation of abortion, but that the "liberty" portion did.
Setting that aside, I'm confused what this is supposed to be arguing (specifically the "Are churches and church members so mixed up on this point that they think the constitution trumps the Bible command against murder?"). Is this an argument that the moral law prescribed by the Bible should be the highest law in the land rather than the Constitution and judges should judge laws on that basis, e.g. blasphemy should be made illegal despite it obviously defying the First Amendment?