That was prescient of him. He's been pushing this hard for several years now.
...there is no enumerated right which defines when life begins that Congress can enforce via 14A imo...
LOL The enumerated right is the right to life. All his bill does is define when life begins. There is no new right being defined here. Nice red herring.
While I appreciate what Senator Paul is trying to do, although Section 1 of 14A defined general citizenship, it did not introduce new rights for all citizens, so no rights for the unborn imo. What Section 1 did was to extend the scope of enumerated personal rights protected by the Constitution to the states and insured equal applicaton of laws. Section 1 also gave Congress the power to legislatively force the states to comply with constitutionally enumerated rights.
And although I'm dissapointed with the wording of Sec. 1 where unborn children are concerned in the context of today's issues, I've noted a likely reason why Bingham didn't foresee the need to protect unborn children as follows.
Consider that the reason that citizens, mostly rural pioneering families in the 19th century, had many children is this. It was commonly expected that some children would not survive to adulthood. So prohibiting abortion was probably Bingham's least concern when he led the drafting of Section 1 of 14A.
As a side note concerning activist justices wrongly finding so-called abortion rights in the 9th Amendment in Roe ve Wade imo, then applying such rights to the states via 14A, please consider this. Not only does Bingham's wording of Section 1 of 14A, along with his clarification in the congressional record concerning this issue, clearly indicate that 14A applies only enumerated constitutional rights to the states, but also note the following.
Bingham had read only the first eight amendments to the Constitution to the HoR, ignoring the 9th Amendment, as examples of constitutional statutes containing constitutional priviledges and immunities which 14A applied to the states.
"Mr. Speaker, that the scope and meaning of the limitations imposed by the first section, fourteenth amendment of the Constitution may be more fully understood, permit me to say that the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, as contradistinguished from citizens of a State, are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution of the United States. Those first eight amendments are as follows: …" --John Bingham, Congressional Globe, 1871. (See top half of second column.)
Bingham's ommission of the 9th Amendment is further evidence, imo, that Bingham had intended for 14A to apply only enumerated personal rights to the states, as opposed to activist justices putting on their "magic glasses" to subjectively read abortion rights into 9A and then applying this so-called right to the states via 14A.
Again, i think that the reason that the first sentence was edited out of the excerpt from Section 1 of 14A in the referenced article is the following. Sen. Paul is essentially inadvertently(?) pretending that his proposed Life at Conception Act is simultaneously a constitutionally enumerated right and also its own 14A-based congressional remedy to the infringement of this "enumerated" right.