Right to Life in the Constitution

At Pray California in 2025, a constitutional lawyer asks the room a plain question. Can we find a right to life in the Constitution we have now? Where is it?

He says he did not know the answer himself until March of that year. He is a constitutional lawyer. He should have known. They do not teach it in law school. But it is there, and he says God is revealing it.

The answer people usually give is the Declaration of Independence: self-evident truths, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That will not settle it. For a hundred years the Supreme Court said the Declaration is not part of the Constitution, so what it says does not decide the question.

The right is in the Constitution itself, written twice, and written explicitly. Roe drew a right to abortion out of what the Court called penumbras, the dark shadows, with nothing on the page. Life is on the page. He tells the room that after this day they can go out as skilled ambassadors for the right to life in the Constitution.

The Fifth Amendment, in the Bill of Rights from 1791, binds the federal government. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Life is named first. Liberty and property are the next two words. The focus this day is life. The founders were building a new government, and they wrote down what it must not take.

The Fourteenth Amendment binds the states. No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, or deny any person the equal protection of the laws. He says that amendment exists to make fundamental rights the same in every state. A state may lay its highways badly, or dig its rivers the wrong way, or make a lesser mistake. It may not take a fundamental right. If California writes abortion into its laws or its constitution, he says the Fourteenth Amendment wipes that out.

Then the question that decides a case. What did the word life mean when the forefathers wrote it into the Constitution twice? Did they believe life began at birth, or before birth? The abortion industry says you are not alive until you are born. Why does that matter? Because of what he calls the triumph of original intent. Six justices hold that applying the original meaning of the words is the duty of judges. That is their job. If those six are convinced, in a real case, they must follow the Constitution. It is the only way that honors the consent of the governed: of the people, by the people, and for the people. It is not optional.

Use this when someone says the Constitution is silent on life, or that the only words we have are in the Declaration. The lawyer’s answer is on the page twice. Then ask what life meant to the men who wrote it, and open the Scriptures with them on the God who gives life.