Personhood: A history of getting it wrong
It’s a favorite talking point for abortion apologists, but I know of few pro-life people who are single-issue minded. As if having a singular focus on a human injustice is something to be ashamed of, anyway. Abolitionists had a singular focus to abolish the inhumanity of slavery. Perhaps they should have first worried about housing, health care, job opportunities, and equal pay before they embarked on such a narrow-minded mission….
Slaveholders profited from the physical slavery of human beings discarded by our society. Today, Planned Parenthood profits from the discarded children of those no longer physically enslaved. In both cases, personhood has been defined by the government, and ultimately by nine often Supremely wrong justices.
The Roe v. Wade decision made a mockery of civil rights history. It bizarrely contorted the 14th Amendment, which finally ascribed personhood to black Americans, in order to strip it away from another class of people — the unborn.
~ Ryan Bomberger of The Radiance Foundation, LifeNews.com, July 6
[Photo via reformimmigrationforamerica.org]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Simply brilliant. Amen.
The sign in the picture curiously omits the portion of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically restricting its protections to those “born or naturalized in the United States”. Guess they just didn’t have the space?
No, Joan, the point is that the unborn child is a PERSON. Endowed by her Creator with the unalienable right to LIFE. The right to live and be born is not granted by governments, but by God.
In that case, quoting the 14th (or any law, amendment, constitutional provision, or other act of government) would be a pretty bad way to make that argument.
Actually, Joan, the 14th Amendment only defines citizens as those born or naturalized. It then states that the government cannot take the right to life, liberty, or property of ANY PERSON without due process of law, and affords all PERSONS equal protection under the law.
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
“The sign in the picture curiously omits the portion of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically restricting its protections to those “born or naturalized in the United States”.
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Where does the 14th Amendment say that to be a person you have to be born? I think you might want to re-read the 14th Amendment again. The first sentence of section 1, which you seem to be referencing, defines who is a citizen, not who is a person (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). Sentence two of section 1 states that a person cannot be deprived of his or her life without due process of the law. Nowhere, however, is the term person defined or explicitly limited to those born.
Joan, if as you say, those who died are not American citizens according to the 14th amendment, then through Roe vs Wade the USA has committed an atrocious human rights violation by allowing 50+ million foreign human beings to be killed. Who shall be tried for this crime?
Or can words of laws adapt to new meanings? (Animal Farm-like?)
It all comes down to what the word “born” means in the context of the 14th Amendment and who holds a morally just use of that word.
Being conceived is the epoch beginning of life – after which the child is carried (born is the past participle of bear). In this case, from the moment of conception on, the child is “born” by the mother. Considering the founders were concerned with the unjust taking of life, and considered it an inalienable right given by God, a more encompassing and accurate usage of the word is critical to our execution of the law.
To be born or carried doesn’t indicate the completion of a gestational timeline.
State laws define birth, indicating whether the child is alive or not post-partum. The language is usually much more accurate than our colloquial use of born, and for very good reason. Even an aborted child of twelve weeks gestation is given a birth – albeit, in pieces. So merely stating a transition from one location to another (“being born”) is not enough to indicate the life status of the child, which is the issue at hand.
So Scott Peterson didn’t kill an American baby along with his wife because maybe she was about to fly to Paris? Or perhaps she was moving to Yemen? So maybe he isn’t so bad, being that only one of the people he murdered was American. Doy!
Joan, I can see that you are trying to study law. That’s admirable, BUT throw in a few classes on math and/or logic. Pretty please.
Remember Dred | Abolish Roe
This is a great poster Jay Shepard made about slavery and abortion.
Joan,
Let’s look at Section 1, provided by JB, above. We’ll divide it into two parts.
Section 1. (Part I) 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;
One may note the wording, “All persons born”. It could be argued that persons get born, not made. (That was kinda the central issue in slavery and abolition) The 14th Ammendment didn’t make African-Americans persons, it recognized their personhood, and went on to state that persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. The ammendment establishes who is a citizen, not who is a person, which can be clearly seen in part II:
Section 1. (Part II) 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.
Note here that the Amendment discusses the rights of ALL persons, whether they be citizens or not. Perhaps one can make the case that where a person is born establishes citizenship, but the Amendment does not speak to the issue of the pre-born being non-persons. The reason for that is simple. The law is often silent about what is generally accepted by the citizenry, and speaks to issues that are under question.
Article 1 of the Constitution, with its declaration of Blacks and Native Americans as 3/5 a person for purposes of apportionment and taxation represented the citizens carving out an exemption from what was understood to be a universal norm. The same may be said of the justices in the Dred Scott decision. The 14th Amendment sought to redress these errors by returning American law to the default setting in human anthropology:
No exceptions on personhood.
Dr. Nadal, slight nitpick, but if I remember correctly, Native Americans weren’t even counted as 3/5. They weren’t counted at all for purposes of apportionment. Of course, we should remember, it was the slave holders who wanted the slaves counted as whole persons, and the abolitionists who wanted them to be not counted at all. The fight was over how many representatives each state had, so the more you counted slaves, the more political power the southern, slave owning, states had.
Gah! Confusion all around.
The 14th amendment certainly doesn’t apply to the unborn. And the distortion of the 14th in Roe is not in denying fetal rights the amendment somehow protects; the distortion would be in finding a very specific implication of a right of privacy in the 14th without first considering whether the unborn have any rights at all. This led to the “mystery clause” in Casey, wherein the 14th amendment basically became indistinguishable from a mantric “om . . . om . . . om . . . ”
The 14th amendment was improperly leveraged to identify a right to abortion; it is not improper to fail to find protection for the unborn in the 14th amendment itself. In fact, since the 14th amendment has proven so malleable, it’d be pretty unattractive as a refuge for the unborn even were it possible to wedge ’em into its vague penumbra. And its “protection” of women has had the pedagogical effect of turning such protected women into killers. Some protection! With friends like that for women, who’d want it babysitting their kids?
Parsing the language of the amendment is to miss the point by an insanely wide margin.
Activist judges have beclowned our Constitution. We have to wipe off the face paint and clear away the cream pie detritus before we dare think it worthy of dignifying the unborn with genuine protection.
The Roe v. Wade decision made a mockery of civil rights history. It bizarrely contorted the 14th Amendment, which finally ascribed personhood to black Americans, in order to strip it away from another class of people — the unborn.
Wrong – personhood had never been attributed to the unborn in the US. That abortion was illegal is not the same thing.
Well Doug, what is the difference between attributing personhood and making abortion illegal. I mean just because a group of people were not officially granted personhood by a legal recognition doesnt mean it wasn’t acknowledged that they were persons. For ex., the original census bureau did not include the homeless, but no one would ever say they aren’t people. The same with illegal immigrants, there is no confusion over whether or not they are people yet there is no declaration that the homeless or undocumented immigrants are persons either.
So what is your evidence that the founding fathers did not consider the unborn persons?
Doug,
Actually there is a substantial amount of caselaw, even at the level of state supreme courts, supporting Personhood for the unborn.
This was even discussed in the 1992 Casey deliberations. Blackmun was wrong, in Roe, when he said that no state recognized the unborn as persons.
Ed
To summarize the parts of the 14th ammendment relevant to this discussion:
All people cannot have their right to life etc. taken away without due process of the law.
Those people born in the US have the privileges and immunities of citizenship.
Therefore, you can’t murder any person, citizen or non-citizen.