We claim that there is a separation of church and state, and there is this debate about how much this is a Christian nation or a secular one. However, regardless of where you stand on the issue, the one thing that both church and state share is the practice of claiming what was meant by people long dead and who cannot be consulted except through seance which allows anyone to claim they know what the Founding Fathers actually meant by anything they had said or written just as religions do with their origin personalities because somehow they just know.
“When he said the sky is blue, what he was actually saying was…….”
If this were a nature blog, I would now write that this particular trait is most often seen within large gatherings of creatures wearing red hats and golden crosses hanging from their necks on thin chains.
While in the Second Amendment the Founding Fathers were somehow able to anticipate future forms of weaponry, including ray guns, in days when each bullet fired had to be loaded just before firing, somehow after Abigail Adams had told her husband that in the founding deliberations to not forget the women, it never dawned on them that women just might want the same rights that men had then or someday in the future.
In recent news about the leaked SCOTUS Roe v Wade presaging an end to legal abortions, what the Founding Fathers thought about this is extrapolated from a limited understanding of their religious beliefs while ignoring their philosophical ones.
They referred to an unspecified creator as the endower of human rights and mentioned God nowhere in the Constitution except in the formal rubric of dating, “In the year of our Lord”, and all men being created equal was not a Biblical concept but one by Locke and Hobbes, two secular philosophers.
According to the leaked SCOTUS draft,
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”
What did the Founding Fathers actually think about abortion?
In 1748, Benjamin Franklin adapted the British book The Instructor, a manual for everything from arithmetic to caring for horses’ hooves, to be more relevant to the colonies.
Accordingly, he made changes throughout the book with place names and inserting colonial histories, but he also added some things that weren’t in the original and asserted his new edition was “better adapted to these American Colonies, than any other book of the like kind” noting in the preface that he changed or omitted parts of the original because
“in the British Edition of this Book, there were many Things of little or no Use in these Parts of the World: In this Edition those Things are omitted, and in their Room many other Matters inserted, more immediately useful to us Americans.”
One such addition to make the book more relevant to the colonists was the inclusion of some of The Poor Planter’s Physician, a medical pamphlet published in 1734by John Tennent, a Virginia doctor, and, I am sure, judging by his reputation, was included because it was important to Franklin and to many others in the colonies.
Population growth was important to the colonies, but too many kids in one family could ruin that family’s ability to support itself, so the number of children in a family was important but too many could cause problems. You may have needed a kid to replace a lost child because they were needed to help the family, but an extra kid was a burden especially in places outside the big cities like Boston and Philadelphia.
Because of this, Franklin included Tennent’s formula for dealing with the interruption of Menses because of a pregnancy. Considering this book was meant for people throughout the colonies to learn reading, writing, arithmetic, and other basic information, such an inclusion would imply that there was a need for this information by the general public.
Tennent prescribed Angelica, an herb known to be an effective abortifacient in the early stages of pregnancy and had been known as such for thousands of years, and his formula included several herbal abortifacients known at the time.
Franklin’s addition to the original Tennent formula included attention to potent herbs with careful dosages to treat the “misfortune”, and he added the caveats that patients
“shou’d be cautious of taking Opiates too often, or Jesuits-Bark”,
and
“nor must they long for pretty Fellows, or any other Trash whatsoever.”
Being a scientist, Franklin insisted on careful attention to measurement and counting, asked the preparer to work with repeated multiples of three, and insisted that education may end certain wayward practices of some of the women who needed to use the elixir, so he recommended
“a branch of education for our young females.”
It would seem incorrect to assume the Founding Fathers opposed abortion or that
“a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”
It was generally practiced enough for Franklin to have made it more safe in his book as his herbs did not have certain bad side effects.
It is also interesting that Benjamin Franklin had determined that learning how to end an unwanted pregnancy had equal standing with the need to know how to read, write, and do some figuring. Otherwise, would he have not made a separate pamphlet in his printing shop to keep the topics separate and without the implication of their being of equal importance?
To Franklin, not only was abortion necessary and acceptable, but knowing how to induce one was necessary in colonial America.
Justice Alito’s claim in his leaked draft decision that “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion,” but its accepted and Ben Franklin-approved method was known and practiced before, during, and after the founding of this country.
If it were a bad thing or at least unacceptable to proper society, being as it was a not uncommon practice, certainly something against it would have been said or written down somewhere during the founding of the country.
All we have is Benjamin Franklin’s book.
To Franklin, ending an unwanted pregnancy was no better or worse than Arithmetic.
Some have argued that if something is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution it can not be considered a right and to do so would call for a lot of stretching and verbal gymnastics.
During the arguments for and against marriage equality, those opposed to it claimed that with its not being in the Constitution, there was no right to same sex-marriage.
Although in the Second Amendment the Founding Fathers established the right to bear arms, they did so at a time when bullets were loaded manually, each one between firing yet did not mention AR-15s which somehow still get included in the broad term arms
However, any type of marriage in any form is also not mentioned in the Constitution, so if laws are based on the one man/one woman concept, this is bad practice as the right to marry is not in the Constitution in any form, so the established laws concerning marriage and who can be married and receive the civil benefits from it, should also be challenged.
The right to Heterosexual marriage and all the legal benefits of it are not mentioned in the Constitution, but there it is.
The first Amendment might clearly state that “ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exer cise thereof”, but it does not specifically state that religion should hold sway in America, or that it can be proselytized or that laws must be based on it. Claims of this being a Christian nation and that Christianity is predominant and solely to be considered in the making of laws are extra-Constitutional actions as they are not specifically allowed or even mentioned. Laws based on this foundation also need to be challenged.
You can exercise your religion freely, but imposing it on others is also not a right enumerated in the Constitution, yet, while the Supreme Court upheld the right to discriminate against fellow citizens in the name of religion, forced and favored religion is not an enumerated right.
Jesus said that if his disciples were rejected by a town, they were to leave and shake the dust from their sandals and He had this whole Caesar to Caesar/ God to God thing. Neither in His teachings or in the Constitution does it say people must force their religion on others by any means necessary which in the present United States means forcing certain religious beliefs on everyone through legislation regardless of their God-given free will, that which separates us from the animals.
Where is this right in the Constitution?
To claim that actively approaching people in their homes, schools, workplaces, and residences interrupting their lives is part of the free exercise of religion seems to be taking a broad interpretation of a very simple word, “exercise” and, adding meanings as convenient, the broadness of the interpretation of these promoters of special rights for religion, should also be re-examined.
Jesus did tell His followers to exercise their religion by praying in private, doing good works, and loving others as yourself. He did not demand conversion through legislation or brow beating.
The “if it isn’t specifically mentioned it cannot be construed as a right” works both ways.
But here, we have a Founding Father dispensing a remedy for the “misfortune”, and this would seem to clarify that Samuel Alito’s statement that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” is wrong.
This same Justice who belongs to a political party that abhors the intrusion of foreign law in U.S. court decisions, ignores this Founding Father in favor of foreigner, Sir Edward Cooke who, in 1644 declared abortion to be a crime, and was big in the witch hunts under Charles I.
Sure, Franklin was as British at the time as Cooke had been in his, but the thinking of one is 100 years older than the other and so lacks knowledge attained during that 100-years, and, while Cooke’s thinking led to witch hunts, Franklin’s thinking led to the United States.
The truth of the matter is that with Benjamin Franklin including the formula for an abortifacient in an instruction book on basic knowledge available to the general public of any age, and let’s face it, a lot of kids, abortion has been here throughout the history of this country and was promoted and made safer by a Founding Father so, a right to abortion is deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.
I would like to know from Alito and his ilk, if we should stick with a Founding Father or make the opinion of a 17 Century witch hunter precedent in this country?
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