Tea at Trianon: Abortion is Unconstitutional

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Abortion is Unconstitutional

From First Things:

Plainly, there is an individual, a human being, as soon as there is a living individual in the mother’s womb. For some purposes (guardianship, for example) the law treats such an individual, even at that beginning stage, as equal to a born child. For other purposes, notably direct protection of the right to personal security by the criminal law, the life of the unborn begins “in contemplation of law” only when the “infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.” But an English statute of 1803, only a generation after Blackstone, made it a felony to attempt abortion even before the child was provably “quick.” Thus, by the dawn of the nineteenth century, English criminal law “established” the “great fundamental right” uniquely important for an unborn child, beginning when the child did: at conception. (Read more.)