LogFAQs > #904585051

Revelation34 posted...

OmegaM posted...

I hope that if Roe v. Wade gets overturned, the Supreme Court will let states allow or ban abortion as they wish and will not declare that all human organisms, even the unborn ones, are people under the Constitution (which, since by the 14th Amendment all people must be equally protected under the law, would effectively ban abortion everywhere).

If unborn humans do get declared people, we'd probably have to do something about all those fertilized eggs that don't implant and pass out of the woman before she knows she's pregnant, to change inheritance laws, etc. And it does seem to me like it would get too invasive to do those things, and I don't feel any moral pull to do them either. (Of course, maybe I should.) I did read a part of Roe v. Wade in which the justices said that since in all matters other than abortion, unborn humans have never been recognized as people, it was appropriate not to consider them as people when deciding whether abortion should be legal.

Well to be fair even if they did that the 14th amendment wouldn't apply to fetuses.

"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any 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."

I thought that too at first, but this guy says that the writers of the Fourteenth Amendment did consider unborn humans to be people. I don't know what the counter-evidence is; I'm sure there is some.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/07/how-to-overturn-roe
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2970761

In the second link (I didn't read the whole thing), he says that the "born or naturalized" phrase tells only what's necessary to be a citizen of the U.S., not what's necessary to be a person; and that the equal protection part of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to all people, not just citizens.

Obviously, if he's right, the Constitution could be amended to state that humans become legal people only at birth. There probably would be a lot of support for such an amendment.