This is simply wrongheaded and misleading.The official determination specified as such: [Texas abortion law] is violative of the Due Process Clause of the fourteenth Amendment.
Which apparently ends the moment an infant can live without the mother. It's an excuse wrapped around the notion that viability produces right, however thinly sliced. In point of fact, Texas stated its interest and the Court held the interest could not attach prior to viability.
Stewart noted the intellectual inconsistency of the ruling, in that it attempted to use the 14th and Due Process, but historically that would call for the state (Texas) to meet a rational relations level of scrutiny, which the state did before the Court got creative with standards.
To quote him:
"[T]he Court's sweeping invalidation of any restrictions on abortion during the first trimester is impossible to justify under that standard, and the conscious weighing of competing factors that the Court's opinion apparently substitutes for the established test is far more appropriate to a legislative judgment than to a judicial one."
Your objection here seems more the impassioned plea than reasoned rebuttal.
Nothing wrong with passion where the defense of human life is concerned, but it remains entirely reasoned and you've yet to illustrate a deficiency on the point while declaring it soundly enough.
Wrong. Everybody is not in such an agreement.
Well, not literally everyone. The suicidal, those so lost that they don't value any life, but I'm speaking to the rational who aren't in the grips of a merciless lack of perspective. They, most of us, overwhelmingly agree that at some point we possess right and that right cannot be abrogated short of some fairly horrific action on our part. The qualifying (and debated) actions aren't the stuff the unborn can manage.
This notion presupposes a particular and selective theory of life..one of which is beyond the purview of the law. As noted by Blackmun:
When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer. |
And yet that is precisely what the Court does, choosing to draw its own arbitrary line in the sand at viability instead of following reason to the only certain safeguard of right against invasion to which we are not entitled.
In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake. |
Except the woman has no more right than I do to end the life of another human being and no empirical or objective way to distinguish the particular moment when that right attaches that gives the unborn equal standing before the law.
Lest you solicit the court to proceed on a ruling by way of inexplicability...a virtual appeal to ignorance.
Rather, I call upon the Court to revoke a rule issued upon the back of ignorance, an intellectual dart throw founded in circular supposition by suggesting a right on the part of the woman in relation that it creates and using a standard that should not be applied by its own foundational justification (Due Process).
No such clear vestment exist.
Of course it does. I have it in full. And you cannot rationally separate me from it moving back along my chain of being. You can only arbitrarily, emotionally decide that at THIS point you value something more and so I must not possess it.
Anti-abortion law (pre Roe/Wade) had complete exception for instances where the mother's life was in peril.
Self-defense has ever been considered justifiable homicide, prickly as it can be to sort out.
These exception were entirely inconsistent with the idea of legal protection for the unborn under the 14th amendment (nor the defacto variety).
I don't agree, supra. It's a thorny issue, but as between the mother and the unborn, the mother cannot be made to forfeit her life for a competing interest or you elevate the unborn above her. At that point, rationally, and that point alone, viability becomes of moment, as the child may only possess what it can lay claim to independently, against the life of the mother.
Likewise, within abortion proceedings women were neither a principle nor accomplice while her sentence was significantly less than the penalties for murder.
And once upon a time the penalty for killing your slave was what? Largely nothing. That's no argument.
There's simply no objective place to hang your hat...legal nor otherwise.
To the contrary. Rights vest. There is no objective litmus for determining the point of that vestment. The only way then to be certain that right is protected against an unjust abrogation is to deny abortion at any point where right could be rationally said to exist. That point begins with conception, which must then act as the catch-all.
Each of the statements preceding the conclusion is objectively true. The conclusion is a logical necessity.