A recent report on National Public Radio spoke about the “fight for reproductive rights.” Reproductive rights are not the issue in the argument over abortion. By the time a new life has begun within a woman’s womb, reproduction has already taken place. “Reproductive rights” are not the issue in the argument over abortion. By the time a new life has begun within a woman’s womb, reproduction has already taken place. The issue is whether the newly-arrived individual has rights, whether the child, growing inside his or her mother, should be protected against harm, against murder.
Some years ago, I came across an article filled with the most monstrous ideas delivered in the most casually cavalier manner. The title: “So what if abortion ends a life?”
In this piece, Mary Elizabeth Williams shared her belief that “life starts at conception” but she added, “that hasn’t stopped me one iota from being pro-choice…Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always…the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.”
A seared conscience. A heart of stone. More than sixty-three million abortions since Roe v. Wade. Sixty-three million.
In Roe v. Wade, the state of Texas argued that “the fetus is a ‘person’ within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” To which Justice Harry Blackmun responded, “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.”
But…“the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,” Blackmun declared in his landmark opinion. The Supreme Court held that personhood could not be granted to a fetus before “viability”—the point around 24 weeks of pregnancy when a fetus can survive outside the womb—and established a constitutional right to abortion access.
On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court officially reversed Roe v. Wade declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists. Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.” Alito further wrote, in that ruling, that in the decision the court took no position on “if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth.”
The following October, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court declined to decide whether fetuses are entitled to constitutional rights. And the fight for fetal rights continues.
DFG Hailson 