The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is much in the news this month following President Trump’s executive order on ending birthright citizenship. Section 1 of the amendment reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The present legal debate concerns the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” All agree that the phrase excludes the children of diplomats from other countries who reside in the US. But does it include the children of tourists? Those tourists, after all, must obey US criminal law. Or does it only include those citizens and legal permanent residents who have a commitment to this country?

The language of the amendment and the historical setting raise an even more fundamental question, however: As Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas write, “Were unborn children among the ‘persons’ the Amendment protected? Or, should the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of the laws’ … include freedom for women to abort?” (All quotations are from chapter 18 in The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History 1652-2022, Crossway, 2023).

Scripture describes instances in which unborn children are filled with the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:15), leap for joy (Luke 1:41-44), are in sin (Psalm 51:5), and struggle with one another (Genesis 25:22). These are characteristics of persons. We at DGCC have argued time and again that the biblical evidence is thus clear (see these links: first, second, third, fourth).

But does that biblical understanding underlie the fourteenth amendment? Olasky and Savas present evidence that its contemporaries thought it did.

The Congressional debate over the amendment in May of 1866 rightly focused on providing equal protection for African Americans recently freed from slavery. Earlier that same month in Memphis, police and other state officials – even the Tennessee attorney general – did nothing to stop and even encouraged mobs to slaughter dozens of African Americans. With such government-inflicted horrors in the news, no congressman made an explicit statement concerning abortion during the debate.

But the history of the amendment’s ratification displays the widespread understanding that unborn children are persons. In January of 1867 the Ohio legislature ratified the amendment while also passing an anti-abortion law, with a committee stating that doctors all agree “that the foetus in utero is alive from the very moment of conception…. The willful killing of a human being, at any stage of its existence, is murder” (Olasky and Savas). This legislature clearly believed that in ratifying the amendment they were protecting the rights not only of African Americans, but also of the unborn.

State legislatures also passed pro-life laws shortly before or after ratifying the fourteenth amendment in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon, and Vermont. By 1868 more than 80 percent of the 37 states had pro-life laws. As Olasky and Savas write, these laws

referred to the fetus as a “child” and/or “person.” Twenty of them punished equally killing an unborn child at six weeks [of gestational age] or six months. Laws in 17 of the states called abortion manslaughter, murder, or assault with intent to murder, and classified abortion as a crime against a person.

In the next several months, many will argue based on evidence from the 1800s about the implications of the fourteenth amendment for birthright citizenship. I encourage you, when you hear such arguments, bring out this even more important issue from the same century.

And pray:

• Pray that the horror of hundreds of thousands of unborn children killed annually might end
• Pray that we God’s church might work more and more effectively to love and care for women with unplanned pregnancies
• Pray, yes, for better laws protecting unborn children in our own state
• And pray against idolatry, in your own heart and in the hearts of others. For the decision to kill a child in the womb always results from idolatry.

[The Olasky and Savas volume tells numerous stories that illustrate the link between idolatry and abortion over the past several hundred years.]