Abortion Rights and Majority Rule

A Washington Post op-ed, Women are not ‘community property,’ a Georgia judge rules, echoes a fundamental American principle: individual rights to life, liberty, and property are inalienable and precede government. Ruth Marcus, quoting extensively from Judge Robert McBurney’s decision overturning a Georgia abortion law that prohibits abortion once there is a “detectable human heartbeat,” writes:

“Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote,” McBurney wrote. “Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have.” 

Bravo! This is exactly the point. It’s why the blather about leaving this decision up to individual states gets things wrong. The choice is for the woman to make, not the government, at any level. [My emphasis]

Marcus is a solid Leftist on most issues. As such, she is not a consistent defender of inalienable  individual rights (to put it mildly). 

I posted this comment:

“Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote.”

Absolutely! Protecting our liberties from democracy is fundamental to Americanism. And it goes for all of our fundamental individual rights, including rights to free speech, property, and free trade. But the Democratic Party was founded on the primacy of majority vote, and has held that reactionary position since 1828, when it held that the enslavement of a racial minority should be determined not by reference to the principle of inalienable individual rights promised in Declaration of Independence, but to popular vote in each state.

To this day the Democratic Party still adheres to its horrifying anti-American roots. To wit:

President Joe Biden: “The fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland: "The right of all eligible citizens to vote is the central pillar of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.” 

Vice President Kamala Harris: “And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”

Well, by its own long-held totalitarian democratic principles, the Left should be cheering the end of Roe. Leaving a woman’s fundamental right to her own body to the whims of state voters is exactly what “The fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow” looks like.

And, what about a woman’s, or anybody’s, other property? I couldn’t address this point explicitly due to word limitations. But, as John Locke understood, “every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.” The Founders concurred. The fundamental right to property begins, but does not end, with the functions of one's body. Property rights extend open-endedly to encompass the results of the work of one's mind and body. A woman's body is not subject to majority vote. Neither is the money I earn or the house I buy with that money, or a businessman's pricing policies. All of these rights are linked. You violate one, and you violate all.

In other words, rights to material and intellectual property extend from right to person. Of course, the Left routinely violates property rights in the economic realm, and increasingly threatens rights in the intellectual realm. Where is their outrage when Kamala Harris proposes price controls and wealth taxes, or the Biden Administration creates a “Disinformation Governance Board?”

Memo to the Democrats: Be careful what you wish for. You’ve long preached the supremacy of democracy over inalienable individual rights. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, which returned the right to reproductive freedom to state voters, is exactly what your democracy worship means. You can’t cancel the foundational principles of the Declaration of Independence in your quest for your statist Progressive policies, and then call on them when it’s convenient. Either you adhere to them or you pay the price.

I have long ago decided that I would never vote for a Democrat, at least on the national and state levels. The Democratic Party’s historical support for slavery, democracy fundamentalism (in direct opposition to our constitutionally limited republic), white supremacy, the KKK and lynching, Jim Crow, and socialism. That, to this day, it has not changed its ideological and philosophical stripes compels me to write off the party as the central focus of anti-Americanism. I don’t expect that to change in my lifetime.

Related Reading:

In SCOTUS’ Draft Opinion Overturning Roe Abortion Ruling: Double Standards of Left and Right Exposed

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The Dangerous Totalitarian Premise Underpinning the Justice Department’s Suit Against Georgia’s New Election Law

The Truth about Harris’s Proposed Tax on Unrealized Capital Gains

On the Candidates’ Disastrous Price Policies—and Harris’s Moral Obscenity

Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’

America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters

Right to Abortion, Not Others' Wallets