IT WAS DONE TORIE! At the federal level in 1970 (see below) and please respond to this. Three years before Roe v Wade, another case was decided at the federal level that was consistent with the objective truth (as well as biological-genetic-scientific truth) that life begins at conception.
The case went to the extent to say that legally, Human Personhood Begins at Conception : "Once new life has commenced," the court wrote, "the constitutional protections found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments impose upon the state the duty of safeguarding it."
More specifically, the "personhood" case is the legal factor that is the heart of the matter as to why this nation has had a 30-year holocaust of people waiting to be born.
From Constitutional Persons: An Exchange on Abortion
The common law basis of our system embodied in the principle of stare decisis and the just requirements of consistency in applying the law demand a respect for precedent. To this objection I offer two replies. First, there was a federal court precedent for the unborn person reading of Fourteenth Amendment before Roe v. Wade, though this fact was virtually ignored by Justice Harry Blackmun and the Roe Court.
In Steinberg v. Brown (1970) a three-judge federal district court upheld an anti-abortion statute, stating that privacy rights "must inevitably fall in conflict with express provisions of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law."
After relating the biological facts of fetal development, the court stated that "those decisions which strike down state abortion statutes by equating contraception and abortion pay no attention to the facts of biology."
"Once new life has commenced," the court wrote, "the constitutional protections found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments impose upon the state the duty of safeguarding it."
Yet in commenting on the unborn person argument in Roe, Justice Blackmun wrote that "the appellee conceded on reargument that no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment." He did so despite the fact that he had cited the case just five paragraphs earlier!
The failure of both appellees and the Court to treat this case is both unfortunate and inexplicable. Second, while our system is based upon a reasonable and healthy respect for precedent, this has never prevented the Court from revisiting and modifying precedent when the erroneous foundation and unjust results of that precedent become manifest. Such is the case with respect to abortion and the Fourteenth Amendment.
In a separate section--by a different author:
Blackmun invented a right to abortion....Roe had nothing whatever to do with constitutional interpretation. The utter emptiness of the opinion has been demonstrated time and again, but that, too, is irrelevant. The decision and its later reaffirmations simply enforce the cultural prejudices of a particular class in American society, nothing more and nothing less. For that reason, Roe is impervious to logical or historical argument; it is what some people, including a majority of the Justices, want, and that is that. Roe should be overruled and the issue of abortion returned to the moral sense and the democratic choice of the American people. Abortions are killings by private persons. Science and rational demonstration prove that a human exists from the moment of conception. Scalia is quite right that the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion. FT January 2003: Constitutional Persons http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0301/articles/schlueter_bork.html Robert H. Bork is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
"Isn’t it ironic that those who trumpet their beliefs that we should separate God from our political lives insist on playing God when it comes to their politics regarding what they like to label “quality of life” issues?" -- Pamela Rice Hahn (www.ricehahn.com)
cpforlife.org,Thanks for the ping.Very hard to read about Brooke.