OPINION:
Next week we have a rather awkward conflict presented to us. First, we celebrate the 90th birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then we commemorate the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decisions that decreed a pre-born child is not legally a person, and thus has no right to live.
Effectively the court decisions, ignoring the mandate given in the Preamble of the Constitution to secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity, asserted that no one in America, including King, had any right to be born. Of course, this was in line with the court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which denied that even free blacks could be citizens.
After a bloody Civil War, that decision was eventually negated by the 14th Amendment, which asserted, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
This confirmation of birth citizenship was effectively nullified by the Supreme Court in 1973. Its decisions that year asserted that a human fetus only becomes a legal person after the birth process is completed. Up to that time, such a human being may legally be killed, even while being delivered, by the most cruel, hideous and barbaric methods imaginable.
Legally, then, no “person” ever actually went through the process of being born. Effectively, the court rendered null and void the birth citizenship ratified in the 14th Amendment. So it seems the only citizens in America are those who have become naturalized citizens. This is not a cause for celebration.
TOM COLLINS
Hot Springs, Va.
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