For decades now, pro-lifers have prayed for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, with prayers fulfilled through the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision. But also fulfilled was that voice inside our popular culture that sometimes jokingly says, “Be careful that you may get what you’ve been praying for.”

Or this one: “No good deed goes unpunished.”

If a hurricane’s most destructive hours come after the passage of The Eye, we have seen that unfold with a post-Dobbs, full-throated counter-attack from hell. Randall Terry once called abortion “Satan’s crown jewel,” and evil is always the most dangerous when it has been cornered.

The fallout has been instructive, in fact we might consider it Divine Grace that we are now able to find out who the true pro-lifers are. There are very few in the halls of government or even among Republicans. They sure don’t like surgical or chemical abortion, but they make exceptions for rape-and-incest or other inconsistent allowances which make a mockery of their claimed belief that “life begins at conception” or “all human life is valuable.”

Most citizens are woefully ignorant of the various U.S. constitutions, the true meaning of “checks and balances,” or the structure of the American Union as intended.

Notice I said, “various constitutions,” and did not capitalize the word, as is usually done for the document approved in 1788. We actually have had three constituted governments, if you count the unwritten provisional government of the Second Continental Congress, which made war against the British in 1775, placed Washington in charge of the army, and declared independence in 1776.

And three written constitutions. The acts and laws passed by the Articles of Confederation are still valid, and recognized by the 1788 document.

The Declaration, capital “D,” is another constitution, small “C.” About the only mistake I can find is that it limited the recognition and powers of God to only four: Creator, Law-Giver, Provider and Judge. For the sake of Deists, Unitarians and the like, they left out “Savior.” But for the sake of pro-lifers, we profoundly treasure the words “Life” as the paramount unalienable right, and the Person who is the Author of it, the “Creator.”

Those two words should be sufficient to make a thinking person realize that there was never any need at all for the near-forgotten call for a human life constitutional amendment. This is heresy to many long-time pro-lifers, but by calling for it, they are making a de facto admission that the words in the Declaration somehow overlooked something, and would grant legitimacy to court cases or any hypothetical federal statute that would codify Roe!

In the face of prolife disasters on the state level that we have seen since Dobbs, some pro-lifers are requiring presidential candidates to answer the question, “Would you sign a bill into law that would outlaw abortion, infanticide and euthanasia?”

It is entirely the wrong question.

Here is what ought to be asked: “Would you veto a law, and if overridden, enforce a law, that permits abortion, infanticide and euthanasia?”

To understand the proper “checks and balances” of the capital “C” Constitution, it is the executive department that enforces laws, no matter what the Congress has passed or what the judiciary has decided. Jefferson refused to enforce the unconstitutional Sedition Act when he assumed office in 1801, even though it was still on the books. Andrew Jackson said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him try to enforce it.” Ronald Reagan ought to have said, “While I am president, this executive will not recognize the legitimacy of Roe, and states will be free to decide the issue according to their own laws.”

I drove Pat Buchanan around my hometown for an hour in 1999, and he agreed with this interpretation, although as Reagan’s Chief of Staff, he said, “We never even thought of it!”

A different president might reverse such a non-enforcement, and a Congress ignorant of history and constitutionalism might have impeached him. But so what? Roe was a moral and constitutional outrage that was allowed to stand for 49 years, and a dramatic claim made by a popular president might have been the constitutional wake-up call necessary to nip Roe in the bud, not after 49 years, but after eight!

Do I hear a voice that suggests, if the Declaration protects human life, then a president ought to have sent in troops to close down all abortion clinics when they first appeared, in Colorado in 1967 and the 13 other states that legalized it before Roe?

This is the dictatorship application to the presidency and, like the falsely deified union or president who spent over 600,000 lives preserving it, would constitute an invasion, which is – war. The union is not a blend of provinces and subsidiary zones of a national government, it is a confederation of independent nations.

This is a fact, loudly proclaimed in the Declaration, the Treaty of Paris where the British admitted defeat, Jefferson in his First Inaugural, or in the sage observations of Alexis de Tocqueville. The Union was primarily created for self-defense and a unified foreign policy. A president should have no more tried to end abortion by force by invading New York, than by invading South Africa to end apartheid.

The first threats to the union occurred not from the South over slavery or tariffs, but over Northern concerns regarding the admission of new states and territories that would have diminished New England’s political influence (1800), the unconstitutional Embargo Act of 1808, and the unpopular War of 1812. As late as 1845 J. Quincy Adams recommended secession for New England when Texas, a slave state, was admitted into the Union.

In a truly constitutional Union, prolife states might have seceded when Roe came down. The late editor of the National Review, Joe Sobran, called for it, and Quincy Adams would have certainly approved. What could have been more important?

Pro-lifers should see by now that the federal government is clumsy, imperfect and oppressive. Trying to use it as a weapon for an imposed solution, unlikely as it would appear to ever happen, opens the door to tyranny.

The true solution is to discard the methods of the last 500 years by using kings, dictators and their armies. Local control, coupled with morality – the province not of government but of Christianity – is the way to make a better world in anticipation of the Second Coming, which will bring us the Perfect World.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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