Friday, July 01, 2022

Erika Bachiochi in NYT on "What Makes a Fetus a Person?"

 Here is the link to Ms. Bachiochi's article. And here is a money quotation:

Dobbs v. Jackson has returned the issue of abortion to legislatures. There, pro-lifers will work to ensure that unborn children in every jurisdiction are protected by law. Though individual states can (and already have) sought to protect the most vulnerable human beings through ordinary legislation, constitutional protection of unborn children as equal “persons” under the law remains the movement’s ultimate — if elusive — goal.

Making this constitutional case will require rejecting the concept that a rights-bearing person is fundamentally self-owning and autonomous. Indeed, it is precisely the unborn child’s state of existential dependence upon its mother, not its autonomy, that makes it especially entitled to care, nurture and legal protection too. To exclude some human beings from the law’s protection because of their size, location and state of dependency (and post Roe, whichever jurisdiction their mother happens to be in) seems to pro-lifers an egregious human rights violation, just the kind we believe the 14th Amendment was meant to prevent.

 If you are interested in where we might be going in a post-Roe world, read her entire article in the Times.

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