Menu

Argument: The right to choice/privacy (abortion) does not override the right to life

Issue Report: Abortion

Support

Jesse Jackson, U.S. civil rights activist, now in favor of legal abortion, in National Right to Life News, (January, 1977) – There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of [a] higher order than the right to life … that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned.[1]

Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), The Defence of Every Life – “It is not possible to speak of the right to choose when a clear moral evil is involved, whan what is at stake is the commandment, Do not kill!”[2]

Nicaraguan government decree declaring March 25, 2000, as the “National Day of the Unborn” – “The right to life, inherent in each of the inhabitants of the nation and the world, is the principal axis of human rights and, therefore, merits the determined attention of the government.”[3]