Respect for life

MADISON  The pro-life movement already has in its legal arsenal the argument that could help persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, its 1973 landmark decision that legalized abortion — that God has granted certain inherent rights to all people, including the unborn, by virtue of human nature, according to Natural Law.

On Nov. 8, Hadley P. Arkes, founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding in Washington, D.C., made that cogent case for using Natural Law in Catholic positions defending human life and the traditional family in a talk about life, faith and the law at St. Paul Inside the Walls here.

Advocati Christi, the diocesan fellowship of Catholic lawyers and judges, sponsored the talk at the diocesan evangelization center, where Arkes spoke about incorporating that argument as the chief architect of “The Born-Alive Survivors of Abortion Protection Act,” which President Bush signed into law in 2002.

“Can a child out of the womb be protected? Yes, it’s a human being. But what’s the difference if it’s six months before that [in the womb]or months before that?” said Arkes, a U.S. political scientist and the former Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions emeritus at Amherst College, where he had taught since 1966. “That Right to Life extends to every child, even those who have Down syndrome, are not wanted by their parents or are born without arms.”

But many legal professionals and politicians disregard the universal truths of Natural Law, which draws from the doctrine of the philosophers, such as Aristotle and the Founding Fathers, as well as contemporary thinkers. Opponents object under the misguided assumption that people’s disagreements about certain points indicate as absence of truth. Therefore, judges cannot rule in favor of Natural Law without objective truth, they say. But the Catholic Church has become the standard bearer for Respect for Life, advancing arguments based on reasoning and science through Natural Law, not on religious grounds. The Church asserts that all humans are endowed with basic rights — a case that non-Catholics and non-lawyers can understand, said Arkes, a convert from Judaism to Catholicism.

Arkes served as the chief architect of the “The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act,” which defines such words as “person,” “human being,” “child” and “individual” to include “every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.” He called the measure’s “spare” language as “truly momentous,” because it provides “a predicate that can be built into the foundation now of every subsequent act of legislation touching the matter of abortion: that the child marked for abortion is indeed a ‘person’ who comes within the protection of law,” Arkes wrote in previous reports.

President Bush signed the “Born-Alive” Act without it containing legal penalties, making it almost impossible to enforce. Originally, the bill was introduced in 2000, but the sponsors of it in the House — fearing a veto from President Clinton — chose to remove the penalties. So in 2014, Arkes convened a working group of accomplished friends in Washington to restore those penalties. Later, every Republican in the House voted for the new bill, while every Democrat opposed it in the 248-177 straight party-line vote. The bill failed in the Senate. President Obama threatened to veto it.

“In eight weeks, babies feel pain. The opposition doesn’t want to acknowledge the pain of an unborn child,” said Arkes, who earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois and a doctorate from the University of Chicago and has authored seven books including “Beyond the Constitution,” he said during the question-and-answer period at the end of his well-received presentation, “the rights of every human being start, when he or she starts to be [a human] — from the time that a child is formed in the womb.”

Arkes’ presentation, which filled one of St. Paul’s classrooms, marked Advocati Christi’s first scheduled talk by notable religious and legal minds on faith and law for the 2017-18 season — part of an ongoing lecture series that started a few years ago.

In his introduction that night, Father Paul Manning, St. Paul’s executive director and diocesan Vicar for Evangelization, stated, “The writing, speaking and life work of professor Arkes are in harmony with and are an echo of my hope for Advocati Christi.”

“As I expressed at our second Red Mass [on Oct. 1 with Bishop Serratelli at St. Paul’s], I hope to be reminded again of the truth that we sometimes forget and need to know always — that the foundations of the world and of human culture rest on the bedrock of the wisdom and creativity of the Divine Being and that our practice of the law, our deliberation of right and wrong, our discernment and imposition of justice all presuppose an objective standard of what is true and good — a deeper norm, an interior and innate true north that orients us toward the One who is lawgiver and lovebringer,” Father Manning said.

After Arkes’ talk, Frank Tinari, a parishioner of Holy Family in Florham Park and a trustee with the Legal Center for the Defense of Life in Morristown, said, “Hadley brings a lot of understanding about Natural Law and I want to become more conversant in it.”

A professor emeritus of economics at Seton Hall University, South Orange, Tinari noted that the pro-life movement can use Arkes’ arguments of Natural Law because they re-affirm, when “human beings become human” and that “every person, including fetuses, have rights.”

The next Advocati Christi presentation will be Wednesday, Feb. 8, with Paula Franzese, a professor at Seton Hall University and advocate for government ethics reform. The outreach will welcome Father Paul Scalia, head of the Clergy Personnel Office in the Diocese of Arlington, Va., and son of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, on Wednesday, May 2.

[Information: (973) 377-1004 or www.insidethewalls.org.]