When then did you, for example, begin to exist? At what other point could you have possibly begun to exist other than at the beginning?
My rights to life, liberty & property did not begin until they were capable of being separated from my mothers rights, at viablity. That's the dilemma of abortion.
Do you believe that your mother had, or should have had the right to kill you at some point in your life?
At the early stages, any woman has an absolute constitutional right to refuse to be pregnant, as I understand it. As viabiliy becomes more certain, the state can step in and reasonably regulate abortion, under its 'compelling interest' police powers..
If yes, then that view doesn't seem logical to me. It seems self-defeating.
You refuse to admit that early term abortion is a moral dilemma, one the state has no power to control.
At the early stages, any woman has an absolute constitutional right to refuse to be pregnant, as I understand it.
You are saying that at some point ("viability", whatever that means, and which is nevertheless repudiated by Bolton) of your existence that you did not have certain inalienable rights, among which would have been the primary and ultimate inalienable right to your own life. Your propositions raise some obvious questions. First, what does "inalienable" mean anyway, if it's something can be taken away from you at some point of your existence? Or is it that first you don't have them and then suddenly at some unkown point you do have them? If that is the case, what is their source? Where do these inalienable rights come from? Don't you have intrinsic inalienable rights simply by virtue of your humanity? Or alternatively, do you think it is just by some operation of law?
Second, if your mother had some absolute or inalienable right to refuse to be pregnant (ignoring for the moment the use of the vague term, "pregnant") why should her her proported right to "not be pregnant" with you trump your own "right to life"?
Third, because parents used to be and sometimes still are considered in the law as being responsible for the care and nurture of their offspring, why should female parents only have the inalienble right to kill their children? Why should men not have the inalienable right to kill their children, too? What is fair and equitable, for example, about a woman being able to kill her male offspring, but a male not being allowed to kill his female offspring?
You refuse to admit that early term abortion is a moral dilemma, one the state has no power to control.
Of course I refuse to admit that unless a new human being threatens someone else's life, there is no right that trumps that individual's right to life. Absent such a case there is no moral dilemma because an individual's life is prior to his mother's "right not to be pregnant". Once he exists, she already is, so to speak. Parents have the moral (and legal, at or least until Roe and Bolton turned the law on its head) obligation to provide for the care and nurture of their children.
If states have no power to control this how then did the states control this prior to 1/22/1973?
Cordially,