Whenever someone in the mainstream media claims that we are facing a constitutional crisis, you can bet that chances are we are not. That is, unless that person is talking about a constitutional right to abortion. Then we know there is indeed a crisis.

Why is that so? Because there is nowhere in the Constitution where you will find a right for one human being to take the life of another innocent human being. As a matter of fact, that act is murder, and it’s against the law.

But the abortion zealots do not think so, even though Supreme Court justices like William Rehnquist and most recently Justice Clarence Thomas have explained the error in the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions. In fact, Thomas said: “Those decisions created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text. Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled.”

There you have it: a genuine constitutional crisis that is ignored by nearly everyone.

This is so because we have allowed others to define the language we use and the manner in which we address the fate of preborn children. You see, the killing and subsequent death of a preborn child at any point during his young life is not defined as killing a human being. It is couched in terms of women’s rights and privacy concerns. This is because scientific and moral facts do not matter when we are talking about abortion and its progeny.

This is why Pope Paul VI approved a Vatican document specifically addressing “procured abortion.” In that declaration, aborting an innocent child is defined as murder—as an “abominable crime.” Saint John Paul II reiterated that same fact in Evangelium Vitae. Yet in the United States even Catholic lawmakers and others behave as though abortion were no more serious than an ear piercing. No wonder the country is in such crisis.

According to current law, preborn children are not human beings. They are consequences that must be dealt with according to the wishes of the woman who is pregnant. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading proponent and provider of abortion, tells clients: “Abortion is a safe and legal way to end pregnancy. . . . The decision to have an abortion is very personal, and only you can decide what’s best for you.”

Planned Parenthood never defines the pregnant woman as an expectant mother because those words admit that she is with child—a truth that can never be admitted by any proponent of aborting the innocent.

This is the constitutional crisis.

But all is not lost; it never is. Once America confronts the obvious fact that those who argue that abortion is a constitutional right are actually mired in false ideology based on the fictional right to privacy, the tide may well turn. But the road leading up to that turn is hazardous at best.

We echo the words of our dear friend, the late Michael Schwartz, who wrote: “The legalization of abortion represents an extreme form of imbalance in the relation of the individual to the family, permitting one family member to kill another and it marks the first instance in our legal history since the Roman Republic that intra-family killing has been tolerated by the public authority.”

This imbalance—this barbarism injected into the family by a set of Supreme Court decisions—is the constitutional crisis.

And this crisis—this act of violence—has bred even more violence, hatred, and division among us. After all, if the law permits a mother to kill her own child, what else could possibly be intolerable?

Indeed, we are having a constitutional crisis—one that thus far has not only resulted in the deaths of millions of members of the human family, but that has also resulted in immense sorrow and violence well beyond anything anyone could have ever imagined.