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To: Sherman Logan
The Supreme Court, in the Roe v Wade decision, interpreted the term “person,” as used in the 14th Amendment, to not include a fetus.

Once again your premise is 100% wrong. Roe v Wade did not interpret anything existing in the Constitution leading to their decision.

Roe v Wade: FULL Text (The Decision that wiped out an entire Generation 33 years ago today - 2006)

Your premise that Congress can't pass a law that overrules a prior SCOTUS interpretation of the Constitution is also 100% wrong. And utterly ridiculous.

43 posted on 11/27/2012 2:05:12 PM PST by TigersEye (Who is John Galt?)
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To: TigersEye
"The Supreme Court, in the Roe v Wade decision, interpreted the term “person,” as used in the 14th Amendment, to not include a fetus."

Roe v Wade did not interpret anything existing in the Constitution leading to their decision.

A. The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a "person" within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. 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. ...

The Constitution does not define "person" in so many words. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment contains three references to "person." The first, in defining "citizens," speaks of "persons born or naturalized in the United States." The word also appears both in the Due Process Clause and in the Equal Protection Clause. ... But in nearly all these instances, the use of the word is such that it has application only postnatally. None indicates, with any assurance, that it has any possible pre-natal application. 54

All this, together with our observation, supra, that throughout the major portion of the 19th century prevailing legal abortion practices were far freer than they are today, persuades us that the word "person," as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.

>>>In other words, I'm right and you're wrong. The SCOTUS interpreted the term "person" as not including the unborn. Therefore, any attempt by Congress to pass a law using the language of the 14th Amendment to protect the unborn would be invalid, since the 14th (as interpreted by SCOTUS) authorizes Congress to pass implementing language as needed to protect the rights of "persons," not any other group.

Your position that Congress makes the final decision about who qualifies as "persons" under the Constitution makes just about as much sense as deciding that an animal-rights Congress could pass laws proclaiming certain animals (dogs, cats and horses) but not others to be persons entitled to all the protections of the 14th Amendment and other parts of the Constitution. Congress would also by definition have the power to define other groups of humans as "not" being persons: gingers, short people, the unattractive, those over 85 years old, for instance.

The Roe v Wade decision was improperly decided, IMO. But the actual decision itself is not nearly as bad as what it has morphed into, an absolute constitutional right to abortion right up to the instant of (complete) birth.

But saying the Constitution says something it doesn't say is exactly how we got into this mess in the first place. Roe v Wade was not wrongly decided because it said the fetus wasn't a person under the Constitution. That was correct. It was wrongly decided because it unilaterally found new rights in the Constitution that were never intended by the Founders, and used these newly discovered rights to invalidate all state (and federal) laws against abortion.

If the 14th Amendment applied to the unborn, then the fetus would have an absolute right to life, once again taking any authority to legislate on the subject away from the states. In 1973, when Roe was decided, such a decision would have invalidated more state laws than Roe did, arguably every single one of them.

Since, as the SCOTUS correctly ruled, the fetus is not a person under the 14th, the decision about abortion should have been left where it was from the earliest days of the country, with the individual states.

That's the proper Constitutionalist position. If one wants the Constitution to protect the unborn (or not), the correct cure is not for either Congress or the Court to re-interpret the Constitution to suit one's whims, it's to pass an Amendment that properly changes the Constitution.

In Roe the Court produced the equivalent of an Amendment without all the fuss and bother of actually passing and ratifying one. That's why the decision was wrong, not because it decided the fetus is not a "person" under the Constitution.

In this it exactly duplicated a previous SCOTUS decision whereby black people were declared to not be "persons" under the Constitution. According to the Dred Scott decision no state or federal law could change this. Persons of African ancestry were not and could never become citizens of the United States.

Both decisions were produced because a majority of the Court thought they could bring controversy over an extremely divisive issue to an end by removing it from the political arena. Both failed, though Scott, to date, more spectacularly than Roe.

46 posted on 11/27/2012 7:27:48 PM PST by Sherman Logan
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