Children’s Rights Are Human Rights
From Chapter 4, New Politics: Moderate Politics for Post 2020 America
There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children. —Nelson Mandela, first Black president of South Africa
Like Mandela’s profound insight, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian, wrote, “The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.” From my perspective I’d combine Mandela and Bonhoeffer to also say, “The moral test of a society’s soul is what harm it prevents adults from doing to its children.”
All three statements are founded in the idea made by philosopher John Locke in 1689 in his Second Treatise on Government, that
“all mankind…being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.”
In the modern world, Locke’s pronouncement must include children. A true moderate fully agrees with all four statements and argues that it means children’s rights come first. Many biological parents fully understand as part of their very being what “children first” means. Their sacrifice in so many ways to provide the best lives they can for their children embodies the fundamental meaning of being human because the genetic parent-child trust bond is sacred and is the existential foundation of human life and society. The current generation has begun to break that sacred bond.
Moderates hold that children, like adults, have inalienable human and constitutional rights—rights to life, liberty, and property—from the very beginning of life. Moderates hold children also have civil rights. Children of our society are entitled to their rights, just as much as adults are. It is society’s and government’s duty to ensure children are guaranteed their natural rights. We find constitutional authority for “children first” under originalists’ and progressives’ constitutional interpretations. Children’s rights is an American blind-spot. Both factions and all of government are guilty of prejudice and systemic discrimination similar to the long running systemic prejudice against African Americans in residential housing. I will argue we are all constitutionally and morally bound to honor children first.
Both political factions pride themselves on claiming the moral high ground, justifying their positions as “doing the right thing,” defending human rights, dignity, and inclusiveness. They do so, excluding children’s rights and ignoring children’s dignity in a moderate’s eyes. Though children are the largest, most vulnerable, and defenseless minority, the courts, Congress, and media signal children’s rights have little meaning or no standing before them. Moderates hold everyone has a duty to guarantee children’s natural human rights as citizens. They are to be protected against the willed and ill-will forces of commerce, science, or the political interests of individuals, pairs, or groups in marriage or divorce precisely because they are the most vulnerable and defenseless class of citizens.
Legal Harm to Children before Birth
A true moderate argues that our government and our society have prejudiced children’s outcomes by harming their human, constitutional, and civil rights from the start of life and continue through their developing years due to various discriminatory policies. Moderates do not willingly subscribe to any policy, law, or court ruling that entitles a person’s or special interest’s demand for a right that requires the forfeiture of another’s life or their constitutional or human rights. Liberals seem to hold that there are no rights for the unborn. Conservatives argue to protect one right for the unborn, the right to life once conceived. The moderate counterview is there is not just one right to life for unborn persons, but there are no fewer than ten rights of unborn and young persons to be protected. I will argue that the scientific advances in fertility and genetic sciences and progressive political demands of the last half century require the enumeration and defense of five natural rights to life and five natural rights to liberty and property because all ten are part of the natural world. Presently, they are being largely ignored, denied, and abridged.
The birthrights were inviolable natural law throughout all of human history as natural conception until 1978 with the creation of the fertility industry. Fertility technology can conceive life in a number of ways. Genetic science can now manipulate the genetic code of humans in ways that make it possible in the near future to not only repair humans genetically once living but to create, clone, alter, and design life through a growing list of manufacturing processes and technologies if allowed. The pursuit of profit from growing commercial markets by the retail fertility industry and publicly traded corporations marketing nontraditional paths to parenthood for anyone demand a defense by people who care about children. Their human rights, dignity, and prospects in life are legally harmed by definition the moment natural biological union of conception-to-birth is violated by synthetic means, individual consumer choice, or contractual fiction, or when it is treated as a marketplace of buying and selling humans or human parts for creation. Moderates likely agree there are at least these ten natural birthrights, not just one narrowly defined and adjudicated by liberals and conservatives, and not among any rights a new person, a new citizen, must surrender to enter life in United States of America. Abortion will be addressed in chapter 7 to illustrate how a moderate might look at and solve an important ongoing political issue.
Children’s Five Natural Rights to Life
1) Right to be conceived and born in the biological and relational union of two opposite-sex humans.
2) Right to be conceived with natural nuclear genetic material of two and only two natural biological conceiving opposite-sex humans.
3) Right to be conceived under equal protection free from involuntary servitude to contractual obligations and commercial transactions.
4) Right to be a person, defended and protected, once alive in utero.
The argument of conscience is: a live human exists at conception and a live person exists at detection of first heart beat (~week 6 of gestation) if not earlier.
5) Right to be born once viable. The current judicially set standard.
At a minimum replace with once conceived and a person. Strive for once wanted, planned, and then conceived. Moderates hold it is the right thing to do as the twenty-first century standard for America and all nations whose people claim to be civilized or principled or progressive or moral.
Children’s Five Liberty and Property Rights
Each new person is entitled to these two civil liberty rights.
6) Right to be carried to birth and nurtured in life responsibly by the opposite-sex humans who conceived unless abridged by natural or compelling moral causes.
7) Right of freedom of association with its biological creators.
And these three constitutional property rights:
8) Right to know the identity of its biological creators.
9) Right to its innate talents.
10) Right to its innate innocence in early life.
All ten natural birthrights are biologically interconnected by nature and inalienable from a moderate’s perspective. All ten rights obligate government and society to uphold the genetic parent-child trust bond sacred as the existential foundation of human life and society. They are obligated to prevent current and future generations from breaking that sacred bond by defending these rights for a child’s benefit before any adult interests. All are constitutionally justified under state action tests—rational and compelling—and a third, new scrutiny doctrine I am calling for of “sacred scrutiny.” Sacred scrutiny is the claim that the Supreme Court as the guarantor of constitutional rights has a sacred constitutional duty under a more perfect union clause and seven amendments to go beyond the strict scrutiny doctrine established in US v. Carolene Products in 1938 to protect those who have no standing, those who are the most legally defenseless in society, children. Sacred scrutiny doctrine is a claim that there is a constitutional burden on litigants, amicae briefs, and the Supreme Court itself to prove that no claim, interest, remedy, or ruling abridges or harms any new person’s ten birthrights to life, liberty, or property.
Each of the ten birthrights place profound moral, legal, and constitutional obligations on the fertility industry and genetic science. Their scientific breakthroughs that decouple reproduction from natural biological union produce a (re/dis)orientation to human creation and of human civilization. The industries have begun to completely decouple and destroy that bond for profit. Commercial fertility and genetic science industries must be regulated, restricted, and restructured through comprehensive legislative and judicial action to constitutionally guarantee these children’s rights. The three property rights have significant implications for children’s rights in federal policy and court rulings on education, health care, housing, citizenship, divorce, Mean Street behavior, proof of parentage, and the doctrine of State Action. These rights prescribe a mandate for a new type of birth certificate to be issued by the federal government that verifies the DNA of biological conceivers at birth.
Moderates reject the claim by some that an individual right exists to choose to reproduce as strongly as all of humanity has rejected the historical claim that a right existed for people to enslave other people. Any process to reproduce individually requires non-natural means, such as multiple parties or artificial or scientific or commercial or contractual means. All such means manifest natural law and moral deficits as well as constitutional prohibitions. The claim for the five natural rights to life argues that each new human has an inalienable, natural human birthright to be conceived by mutual consent choice of two opposite-sex humans through natural (or assisted) biological union—preferably societally sanctioned. All of the estimated 82 to 108 billion humans that have entered life since the beginning of our species (Homo sapiens) have owned that birthright except for those denied post-1978 by providers and individuals using assisted reproductive technologies and other persons’ DNA or bodies. Moderates put the question on the table: “What gives anyone the right to deny new persons their natural right to be created by two opposite-sex conceivers and parents?” The claim posits there is no authority or argument that empowers any court or legislature to deny new humans these natural birthrights. Nor is there any constitutional or legal right that entitles any person(s) or corporation(s) to deny new humans these natural birthrights. The complexities and indignities that are already occurring to newly created human beings only worsens with more scientific advances and mandated adult privilege unless we fully recognize and enforce these natural human birthrights as inalienable.
Nine of the ten rights have already been taken from children—denied, canceled, or assigned—by science, commerce, judicial fiat, or political demands. They are gone unless Americans rise to defend them. The only right not surrendered yet is Right #2, the right to be created with natural nuclear DNA of only two opposite-sex humans. Scientists in the UK have succeeded in making a human with the DNA of three people using the mitochondrial DNA of a 2nd female, for a good cause, to address a genetic disorder. But, the existential question is, “Can or should the nuclear DNA of multiple people or synthetically manufactured DNA by any enterprise be combined and allowed to create a new human as genetic and fertility sciences continue to advance?” The moderate answer is, “No it should not.”
A child’s life is not a commodity to be purchased. Procreation-from-conception-to-birth is a biological capability endowed by nature and acted on by the mutual choice consent union of biologically capable opposite-sex humans. For individuals to conceive using commerce is not an individual choice, a special right, entitlement, or adult privilege. Without the protections of the ten birthrights, children are legally harmed before birth as individuals and as a minority class. Their natural human dignity, their right to the sacred opposite-sex parent-child bond, their personhood, and human and constitutional rights are all abridged. Moderates do not concede anyone is sanctioned or entitled to special rights at the expense of legal harm to children’s rights. “Blood and roots” may not matter to some adults, but moderates respect and defend a child’s rights for many reasons but especially because of the opposite-sex parent-child bond of “blood ancestry”—from whom they came— matters to the child. Which of the ten rights are the ‘right thing to do’ for you? Will you rise to defend all of them? Any of them? Which ones? May all Americans rise to defend all ten birthrights!