Do you have any evidence to present that this was the intent of the people who wrote and ratified that amendment, or are we working off of "penumbras and emanations"?
Read the Fourteenth Amendment. What it says is the law. No state may deny any person the equal protection of the laws. Either homicide is illegal or it is illegal. It cannot be illegal to murder some people, and legal to murder other people. The fact that the amendment was written with the primary purpose of guaranteeing equality before the law to former slaves and to negroes is irrelevant. The amendment is made of words, and the word used is not “former slave” or “negro,” but “person.”
Roe v. Wade says that if Congress finds that a fetus is a “person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” then “appellant’s [Roe’s} case collapses.”
It is obvious that Perry has given the whole issue of abortion and the Constitution about thirty seconds’ thought, probably while jumping in or out of a limousine.
The “intent” of the authors of the amendment is not relevant. What is relevant is the WORDS. The amendment does not refer to “former slaves” or to “negroes.” The amendment forbids the states to deny “any person” the “equal protection of the laws.”
Would it be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment if a state declared that its homicide laws protect white people only? Of course it would. Just so, it is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment if a state holds that its homicide laws apply only to people who live outside the womb.
People who claim that the Fourteenth Amendment “only applies to blacks” are ignoring the plain meaning of the WORDS of the amendment.
Yes. In the late 19th century (when the 14th amendment was written and ratified), abortion was widely considered to be the murder of a human person and was therefore illegal throughout most the United States. Aborting an unborn child at that time was punishable regardless of whether any harm befell the pregnant woman and the fact that many of the 1860s era statutes punished not only the doctors or abortionists, but ALSO punished the women who hired them.
Furthermore, it was clearly intent of the framers of the constitution that unborn children constituted human persons that were protected by U.S. law. James Wilson, a framer of the U.S. Constitution, explained as follows: “ With consistency, beautiful and undeviating, human life, from its commencement to its close, is protected by the common law. In the contemplation of law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. By the law, life is protected not only from immediate destruction, but from every degree of actual violence, and, in some cases, from every degree of danger."