"For Catholics, a prohibition on abortion would not be a gratuitous addition to the UN’s Declaration, but instead a recognition of the principles that supported the entire human rights tradition. Human rights, Catholics believed, were not the product of modern secular values, but were instead derived from the natural law—an unwritten code which, in accordance with the view of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, could be discovered through reasoned reflection on the purposes for which God had created human beings. Pope Pius XI’s papal encyclicals of the early 1930s had defended both the “sacred rights of the workers that flow from their dignity as men and as Christians” and the “sacred” life of the unborn as inviolable principles derived from the “law of nature”. One of the most influential Catholic proponents of international human rights in the mid-twentieth century—and a contributor to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights—was a natural-law philosopher, Jacques Maritain, who grounded his ethical principles in the thought of Aquinas. Though proponents of abortion law reform often appealed to the principles of New Deal liberalism in arguing that the legalization of therapeutic abortion would save women’s lives and alleviate poverty, Catholic opponents of abortion legalization believed that they were the true guardians of liberal values and the human rights tradition, because their arguments against abortion were grounded in the claim that all people—born and unborn—had the right to life. Without protection for that fundamental right, they believed, no one’s rights would be secure and the “law of the jungle will prevail”."