Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., sent out a fundraising appeal for the National Pro-Life Alliance, an anti-abortion “personhood” group today, seeking contributions to help the group pressure members of Congress to cosponsor Paul’s Life at Conception Act, which seeks to bypass the Supreme Court in order to ban all abortions.
Many “personhood” advocates, including Paul, believe that there is a magic loophole in Roe v. Wade that would allow Congress to declare fertilized eggs to be persons under the 14th Amendment, thereby banning all abortion without the need for a Supreme Court ruling or constitutional amendment overturning Roe. (Many leading anti-choice legal strategists, while they share the ultimate goal of criminalizing all abortion, are skeptical of this plan.) In the most recent version of his bill, Paul tries to allay concerns that granting legal rights to zygotes could outlaw some forms of birth control and in-vitro fertilization, although it’s not clear how effective his attempts at carve out exceptions would be.
Paul has publicly taken several contradictory positions on abortion rights, claiming at one point that abortion laws should not be changed and at another that the Life at Conception Act is merely meant to “drive the debate about when life begins.” However, in his email to anti-choice activists, he is very explicit that the goal of the bill is to enact a national ban on abortion without exceptions.
He writes in today’s email from the National Pro-Life Alliance that the “time to grovel before the Supreme Court is over” and that his bill could “end abortion using the Constitution instead of amending it.”
Excerpts from Paul’s email:
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling forced abortion-on-demand down our nation’s throat.
And each year in our nation, 1.6 million innocent babies are slaughtered for the mere crime of being born.
I suspect that like me, you would sacrifice whatever it takes to see this slaughter of unborn babies end NOW.
Yet you were not one of the tens of thousands of Americans who responded to my prior appeal.
I think I know why…
You probably doubted that anything could be done to reverse the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade and the resulting slaughter.
You want hard proof that there truly is an approach that can end abortion-on-demand in our lifetime.
Having lost hope, many in the pro-life movement have felt limited to protecting a life here and there — passing some limited law to slightly control abortion in the more outrageous cases.
But it always seems that we come back to tiptoeing around the Supreme Court, hoping they won’t be offended.
Well I have good news for you:
The time to grovel before the Supreme Court is over.
Working from what the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, pro-life lawmakers can pass a Life at Conception Act and end abortion using the Constitution instead of amending it.
That is why it’s so urgent you sign the petition to your Senators and Congressman that I will link to in a moment.
Thanks to the results of the last election, you and I are in a better than ever position to force an up or down roll call vote on the Life at Conception Act.
And your petition will help do just that.
Signing the Life at Conception Act petition will help break through the opposition clinging to abortion-on-demand and ultimately win a vote on this life-saving bill to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A Life at Conception Act declares unborn children “persons” as defined by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, entitled to legal protection.
This is the one thing the Supreme Court admitted in Roe v. Wade that would cause the case for legal abortion to “collapse.”
When the Supreme Court handed down its now-infamous Roe v. Wade decision, it did so based on a new, previously undefined “right of privacy” which it “discovered” in so-called “emanations” of “penumbrae” of the Constitution.
Of course, as constitutional law it was a disaster.
But never once did the Supreme Court declare abortion itself to be a constitutional right.
…
But this simple, logical and obviously right legislation will not become law without a fight.
And that’s where your help is critical .
You see, it will be a tough fight, but I believe with your signed petition it is one we can win.
By turning up the heat through a massive, national, grass-roots campaign in this session of Congress, one of two things will happen.
If you and other pro-life activists pour on enough pressure, pro-lifers can force politicians from both parties who were elected on pro-life platforms to make good on their promises and ultimately win passage of this bill.
But even if a Life at Conception Act doesn’t pass immediately, the public attention will send another crew of radical abortionists down to defeat in the 2016 elections .
Either way, the unborn win… unless you do nothing.
