A Spiritual/Legal Defense of Abortion Rights
Outlawing abortion violates several sections of the U.S. Constitution
When does life begin? Those who oppose abortion insist life begins at conception. They lobby hard to add a fetal personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
That is a severely limited perspective. From a wider reality, physical life may (or may not) begin at conception. But that is not when life truly began. It began at creation, when our divine parents first called souls into being.
We live long before a physical body is born. And we continue to live after that physical body dies. The soul is an eternal continuum of love-energy-consciousness. It has the potential to become a physical being in a material reality, like earth.
For that to happen, souls need the help of physical women. In seeking to be born into a physical body, a soul is asking an enormous favor of a woman. Women endure months of physical discomfort and often pain during pregnancy.
Childbirth can be downright agony, depending on each woman’s physical condition and other circumstances. Yet those who oppose abortion consistently downplay what women go through when they are pregnant and giving birth.
The attitude seems to be, Oh, well. It’s just women. Who cares?
Pregnancy and childbirth are risky, especially in the United States. In 2022, the maternal death rate in this country was nearly twice that of most other high-income nations, according to the Commonwealth Fund.
A lot of women are dying needlessly as a result of pregnancy and childbirth in this country — even above and beyond state abortion bans.
But somehow that does not seem to be a priority for those with the ability to do something about it, regardless of their views on abortion. Because unwanted pregnancy directly affects only women, it’s just not that big a deal.
I disagree to the core of my being. And I base my position on the U.S. Constitution — and the spiritual principle of free will.
No one, in this country at least, has the right to compel a woman to endure pregnancy and childbirth against her will. No one. Doing so violates the prohibition on involuntary servitude in the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
If coerced pregnancy and childbirth isn’t involuntary servitude, what is? The 13th Amendment is relevant to any ban on abortion, as is the First Amendment ban on establishing a state religion.
Why? Because those who use secular law to outlaw abortion justify it based on religious doctrines—even if they are coy about admitting to it. This nation’s laws were never grounded in any sectarian set of beliefs or creeds. The United States is not yet a theocracy, although a lot of people would love to establish a Christian theocracy — provided it hews to their version of the faith.
History reveals state-backed religion to be a nightmarish cauldron of sectarian strife and violence. Such violence is already happening to women denied abortions even in dire emergencies. Apparently, sectarian violence and repression must affect men directly before this nation takes the issue seriously.
From a wider realities’ perspective, banning abortion grossly violates women’s free will. While a woman is pregnant, her will prevails, not that of the developing fetus. Remember? She is the one taking an enormous risk and enduring discomfort and pain to help a soul into a new physical life.
Her will comes first. Not the soul’s. If, for whatever reason, she does not want to carry the pregnancy to term, then that is her spiritual right. End of pregnancy. Plus, end of discussion, and mind your own damn business.
Of course, when abortion becomes unavailable throughout the United States, there are still options for those open to wider realities. There are ways to end a pregnancy without resorting to coat hangers or toxic herbs or other noxious substances that desperate women have turned to for millennia.
That is a topic for future articles in this abortion series.