Every procured abortion is the taking of an innocent human life and violates the fundamental human right to life of a child. It is an intrinsic evil. As hundreds of thousands of people travel to Washington, D.C., on January 22nd to march for the right to life of children in the womb, we must shout from the housetops that our country cannot continue to allow legal abortion on demand.

Our struggle on behalf of the right to life is a new abolition movement. The same way of thinking drove the Supreme Court’s thinking in 1973 in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton — as well as in their progeny, the court decisions which followed — that drove the Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857.

In that decision, the Court ruled that slaves could not be American citizens and therefore had no real rights. The chief justice insisted that the founding fathers believed black people to be “a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.”

The Court was wrong then and it is wrong today. An entire class of persons has again been made “chattel,” personal property, which can now be disposed of by those more powerful however they wish. Since 1973 almost 60 million of our youngest neighbors have been intentionally killed by abortions in this country alone.

Many justify this as the exercise of “abortion rights.”  There is no such thing as an “abortion right.” The true right is the one being denied in every procured abortion, the right to life of the child. The notion that the Supreme Court can deny the fundamental human right to life of an entire class of persons and make that perverse and evil opinion the “law of the land” rejects the foundation of the natural moral law that is the measuring stick against which positive or civil law must always be judged. One can never have a right to do what is always and everywhere wrong.

Look again at the Dred Scott decision. Human persons whose skin pigmentation was darker than those who held the reins of power were treated as property who could be owned, used and discarded entirely at someone else’s choice. According to seven out of the nine Supreme Court justices, a slave wasn’t much different than a plow, a field, or any other piece of property. The proponents called it a “slavery right.”

That is precisely what happened in Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton. The highest court in the United States decided to treat unborn Americans the way it had once treated black Americans. It relegated an entire class of persons, our youngest neighbors in the first home of the womb, to the status of personal property to be disposed of by their mothers at will.

The justices refused to recognize the equality of all human persons and their fundamental human rights as an endowment from a Creator, which cannot be taken away by any government. They rejected the Natural Moral Law and engaged in a lawless action.

They may speak of the “rule of law” in defending abortion and trying to suppress the pro-life movement, but that’s just verbal and judicial sleight of hand. One can only believe that the legalized murder of the innocent unborn child is a good law by rejecting the American founding father’s insistence upon the existence of a natural moral law and their understanding of fundamental human rights having been endowed by a Creator.

In his Gettysburg address, President Abraham Lincoln spoke of the “unfinished work” of freedom. Our task in this hour is to continue that work of freedom. The true law of liberty is the Natural Moral Law once understood to undergird the American experiment. When we defend the unborn, we call American back to her founding principles.

These children have no voice except our own. They are killed by chemicals and surgical strikes, all of which is now protected by the police power of the State. They have no power to resist being made slaves, treated as the property of someone else. We have to speak for them, to remind the world that they are human beings with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s why we march on January 22nd.