If men could get pregnant, the saying goes, the Declaration of Independence might well have declared that all men are endowed with the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and a safe abortion. A colleague once suggested to me that such phrasing wouldn’t have been necessary. It would simply have been taken for granted that men had an inalienable right to terminate a pregnancy.
The eloquent manifesto lays out in detail how the king of Britain had tyrannized the colonists and why they now had a right to create a new government to “effect their Safety and Happiness.” (Lot of “happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.) Given the declaration’s precision of language, I’d expect abortion would have been singled out in the list of rights — just in case anyone reading it thought “liberty” didn’t cover it.
Same with the U.S. Constitution — if men could get pregnant, the white male framers of the Constitution would have written in the right to an abortion. Then we wouldn’t have had Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. last year complaining he couldn’t find abortion in the Constitution and having to rely on 17th century common laws criminalizing abortion for guidance when he was overturning Roe vs. Wade.
