ARVADA, Colo. -- 12/26/2011 -- Texas Congressman Ron Paul became the fifth Republican presidential candidate to sign the Personhood Presidential Candidate Pledge on Thursday. Personhood USA received a signed copy of the pledge along with a statement attempting to clarify his position on the personhood rights of the preborn.
Paul joins Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and Texas Governor Rick Perry in signing the organization's Personhood Republican Presidential Candidate Pledge.
Paul, well known for his defense of liberty, authored an addendum to the signed pledge in which he stated, "You can't have Liberty without Life."
"I don't just believe life begins at conception; I know it as a scientific certainty," he writes.
Upon receiving the signed pledge with the addendum, Personhood USA requested clarification from the Paul campaign for inconsistencies between the accompanying statement and the pledge language.
The pledge requires that the candidates "stand...with the Republican Party platform in affirming that [they] "support a human life amendment to the Constitution, and endorse legislation to make clear that the 14th Amendment protections apply to unborn children."
Regarding the latter, Rep. Paul stated that "The Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to cancel out the Tenth Amendment. This means that I can't agree that the Fourteenth Amendment has a role to play here, or otherwise we would end up with a 'Federal Department of Abortion.'"
The 14th amendment, which protects individual liberties from state encroachment, requires that: "No 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."
"We should allow our republican system of government to function as our Founders designed it to: protect rights at the federal level, enforce laws against violence at the state level," writes Paul.
"The United States suffered through a terrible civil war precisely because the federal government left it to the states to decide whether an entire class of people were to be considered persons or property," explained Personhood USA Legal Analyst Gualberto Garcia Jones, J.D.
"If Rep. Ron Paul believes that the preborn are persons under the law, why wouldn't they be protected under the 14th amendment?" asks Garcia Jones. "Rep. Paul's vague statement on the duty of the federal government to 'protect rights' is without effect if there is no mechanism for guaranteeing those protections."
"Personhood USA understands and agrees with Rep. Paul, that crimes, including murder, are to be prohibited by state laws," continued Garcia Jones. "However, pro-lifers are left wondering how a President Paul would seek to protect the right to life in states that would choose to continue to allow abortion after Roe vs. Wade is overturned."
