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Protect Unborn Children by Protecting the Environment

The Georgia Supreme Court recently heard an argument about sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity guards government from lawsuits unless the Georgia legislative branch gives the go-ahead. Georgia now has a law that bans taking the life of an unborn child after 20 weeks because this gestational age is thought to be when a fetus can feel pain. This 20-week law was enacted after a Georgia judge invoked sovereign immunity.

Sovereign immunity should always be challenged. Victims of proven government wrongdoing should have a viable and protected mechanism for redress without any interference from executive, legislative or judicial bodies. The judicial challenge this week has been cast as a legal showdown between a team of abortion doctors and the Georgia Attorney General’s office as to who should be in control when it comes down to dissent over fetal pain.

Somewhere lost in this argument is a fundamental question of human safety. Why doesn’t full constitutional protection exist for a safe prenatal environment free from harm? Threshold of pain should not serve as the qualifier for a right to a safe prenatal environment. The in utero right to be free of modern societal threats should be acknowledged and preserved.

While I was living in Athens in an environmental justice community, we consumed water from a poisonous aquifer. While we didn’t know, the government did. Environmental protection laws were secretly, intentionally and illegally withheld from our neighborhood while government meetings were held with our perpetrators. These behind-closed-doors meetings were conducted without any formal representation for us.  We were known to be in harm’s way of a major public health hazard.

As a result, my unborn baby was deliberately given a daily dose of industrial toxicants at conception, in utero, during infancy and in early childhood. At age 4, he was diagnosed with childhood leukemia after tremendous suffering near death’s door. Through divine intervention, we discovered the poisoned aquifer. As victims of government and industry collusion, we fought for justice for our child and environmental cleanup of the aquifer.

Did my baby feel pain from this water poisoning? Childhood leukemia is a disease initiated prenatally. His damage began at conception. Some emerging science would even argue he was at risk before conception due to both his parents’ daily water poisoning.

Should my offspring have a right to sue government for manipulating data, withholding environmental protection from him, colluding with his perpetrators without representation of his interests and keeping him secretly in harm’s way during critical windows of his development? Does he have rights as an in utero victim before 20 weeks for recourse due to the corrupt and callous disregard of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, whether his pain was biologically “felt” in the prenatal environment or not?

A protected and safe prenatal environment is the cornerstone of a healthy nation. Anything compromising the health and safety of our first environment (the womb) which pilots the entire lifespan is primitive, not progressive.

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