Created Equal, Not Born Equal: A Constitutional Tension We Refuse to Resolve

The American political experiment rests on a premise stated plainly in the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal.” The wording is deliberate. It does not say born equal, nor does it say made equal by government. It says created—and further clarifies that human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” These rights are not conferred by law, recognized by courts, or granted by consensus. They exist prior to government, and government exists to secure them.

That distinction matters, because creation is a status-based concept, not a developmental milestone. To be “created” is to have come into existence; to be “endowed” is to possess inherent worth before the state acts at all. The Declaration intentionally grounds equality and rights outside of government authority. If rights are endowed at creation, then government cannot logically decide who qualifies as created without contradicting the very philosophy that justifies its own legitimacy.

The Constitution, however, does not resolve this question. Instead, it operates downstream from the Declaration’s moral claim. Nowhere is that tension more apparent than in interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly its guarantees of due process and equal protection. Over time, courts have been asked to decide not merely how rights are protected, but who is entitled to them. In doing so, they have effectively been asked to define when a human being is considered “created” for constitutional purposes—a question the founding philosophy explicitly places beyond government authority.

This is where the contradiction emerges. If equality and rights are inherent at creation, and if creation precedes birth, then grounding abortion rights in the Fourteenth Amendment requires the state to draw a line that the Declaration refuses to draw. The justification for abortion under constitutional doctrine has historically relied on defining personhood in a way that excludes the unborn, not because the Declaration says they are uncreated, but because the law has chosen not to recognize them. That is not a philosophical resolution; it is a legal workaround.

The problem is not merely legal—it is foundational. The Declaration asserts that human worth exists before law. The Fourteenth Amendment, as interpreted in abortion jurisprudence, has at times been used to determine when that worth begins. That inversion places government in the role of arbiter over creation itself, contradicting the Declaration’s insistence that rights are endowed, not assigned.

This does not mean the Constitution is invalid, nor that legal systems cannot address complex realities. It does mean, however, that we should be honest about the tension. A nation that proclaims equality as a self-evident truth grounded in creation cannot simultaneously claim moral neutrality when deciding which humans count as created. If equality is real, it cannot depend on visibility, dependency, or stage of development. If rights are unalienable, they cannot be contingent on legal recognition.

The enduring conflict over abortion is not simply about privacy, autonomy, or health. It is about whether the American system can reconcile its founding claim—that human equality exists prior to government—with a legal framework that sometimes treats human existence as a matter for government definition. Until that contradiction is squarely acknowledged, the debate will remain unresolved, not because Americans cannot agree on policy, but because we have not agreed on whether we still mean what we said when we declared ourselves equal at creation.