It shouldn’t.  The pro-life position has never been that the baby’s rights are superior to the mom’s, but that they are equal.  If our country was intentionally slaughtering women by the millions just so children could lead the lives they would prefer to live, the pro-life movement would be fighting that with the same intensity that we now fight abortion.

Our point is that while everyone has the right to live their life as they wish, they cannot kill other people in order to do so.  When we say to a man that he cannot kill someone in order to get the money to buy a new car, we are not saying that he has no right to buy a new car or that he has fewer rights than the person he might kill.  We’re simply telling him that one person’s right to life is more valuable than someone else’s right to buy a new car.          

That same dynamic applies in the case of  abortion.  Remember, the abortion industry’s own data proves that virtually every abortion performed in America is done for non-medical reasons on a healthy baby and a healthy woman who just doesn’t want to be pregnant.  This clearly proves that the abortion issue is a conflict between the baby’s right to life and the mother’s desire not to be pregnant.  And while that desire may be reasonable, we can’t allow her to kill someone in order to fulfill it.    

For over 30 years, the abortion lobby has told the public that protecting the unborn would trample on the rights of women.  That is a lie.  The Constitution was specifically designed to deal with situations like this. 

Assuming that there is a constitutional right to privacy, before the law can say that someone’s right to participate in a certain activity is protected by that right to privacy, it must first ask, “The privacy to do what?” 

One of the principles of the Constitution is that rights are never absolute.  They all have limits.  For example, libel and slander laws impose a limit on free speech, as do some consumer protection and price-fixing laws. 

We also have a right to the free exercise of religion, but we cannot legally kill someone even if our religion requires human sacrifice. 

Rights also have value relative to each other.  For example, a store owner does not have the right to shoot a shoplifter – even if that is the only way he can recover his property.  Our society says a thief’s right to life is superior to a store owner’s right to own property.  This infringement on property rights is based on the relativity of rights which the law and any rational person supports.

This principle of rights having limits and relativity is how the Constitution weighs one individual’s rights against another’s. 

In the case of abortion, the question is not whether a woman has a right to privacy, but whether her right to privacy supercedes her child’s right to life.  To say that it does, is to contend that there are limits to rights specifically expressed in the Constitution, but no limits on a right which had to be invented in a “penumbra.” 

In the final analysis, it is as preposterous to suggest that the intentional killing of an innocent human being is a matter of privacy as it is to say it is a constitutional right.  And this is precisely the reason why abortion defenders viscously attack any nominee to the Supreme Court who says he or she will interpret the Constitution and not legislate from the bench.