When are rights born?
Laurence Tribe explains what’s wrong with the claim that overturning Roe v Wade would be like the ruling that overturned “a long line of decisions that had blocked minimum wage and maximum hours and other worker-protection laws in the name of employers’ rights of “private property” and the “liberty of contract”.”
Professor [Akhil] Amar treats as laughably naïve the observation by ACLU national legal director and Georgetown law professor David Cole that, although “Parrish took away some rights of business owners … its real effect was to expand rights protections for millions of Americans subject to exploitation by powerful corporations.” Amar’s rebuttal? He says, and I’m serious here, that it’d be equally legitimate to say that “Dobbs’ real effect would be to expand rights protection for millions of innocent, unborn Americans … unborn humans, subject to extermination by society.”
It’s hard to know where to begin in unraveling that alleged parallel. Suffice it to note that the status as rights-bearing persons of embryos and fetuses remains a matter of profound sectarian controversy in America and throughout the world while no such controversy attends the status as rights-bearing persons of the array of workers whose rights, at least under laws designed to limit economic exploitation if not directly under the constitution itself, were indisputably expanded by virtue of the Parrish decision and the overturning of the Lochner line of cases.
Now why might that be? Why is it controversial?
For one thing, it’s because an embryo is an embryo. It’s unfinished. Its rights are in the future. If a woman and a man decide one convivial evening that they want to have a baby, that notional baby doesn’t instantly acquire rights. An embryo is more solid than a decision, but it’s still lacking the full humanity that needs rights.
And for a second thing, unlike all other kinds of persons, an embryo and a fetus are inside a full human being. She is making them, with her body. They can’t have any rights without her. They’re parasitic on her. She gets to reject that arrangement.
That’s what the anti-abortion faction means by “innocent” of course – they’re innocent because they’re not formed yet, they’re not independent yet, they can’t do things in the world yet – they’re hidden away inside someone else’s body. But what we’re supposed to take from that word is that they’re tiny saints, when the reality is that they’re raw material. Of course they’re “innocent” in the sense of not having shot up a school yet, but that doesn’t give them a 9 months lease on a woman’s body if she doesn’t agree.
I’m not sure if it’s still available, but at talk.reason there was an essay that an abortion is really a favor to a fetus, because they are dead before they have a chance to sin, so they go straight to heaven.
The continued primacy of guns over people because “It’s in the constitution ” really puts the lie to the abortion opponents being Pro-Life. They want guns, and they want women.kept in their role as baby makers subject to the whims of male needs.
Male desires, male needs. Fetuses are just their prop.
I’d argue that if Cluster-B disorders are inborn as they seem to be, then at least some embryos are already encoded as quasi-evil with no real choice in the matter. Is this innocence?
Sounds like fetal rights begin with the gleam in the father’s eye…
For me, the giveaway has always been birth control and comprehensive sex education.
I get that social conservatives believe that premarital sex is morally wrong, and that teaching teenagers about birth control will make them more likely to have sex (they’re factually wrong here, but put that aside). But if you truly believed that abortion is murder, then you would be doing whatever you could to teach, promote, and subsidize birth control, as the lesser of evils.
That essentially no social conservatives take this position speaks volumes about their priorities. It’s similar to their position on prevention of sexually transmitted infections: as much as they like to cite STIs and pregnancies as reasons people shouldn’t have sex, they secretly view them as positives because the more bad things that result from sex, the better their chances of deterring people from having sex, and that’s their real goal.
Screechy Monkey@4:
It’s actually worse than that, somehow. Socio-religious conservatives also oppose any programs (including sex ed, girl’s sports, etc) that have been shown to reduce the incidence of teenage girls having sex. So it’s not exactly true to say they want to deter sexual activity–they want teens to have sex, and to ensure that the teens (specifically the girls) who do will suffer for it.
Of course, the first story in their holy book is about God setting a fruit tree in a garden, then lying about what it would do if they ate from it, then just waiting to pounce as soon as they inevitably succumbed to temptation.
@screechy monkey and @freemage
When Gardasil was introduced the argument against providing it to teens before they started having sex was that it took away the threat of cervical cancer and encourage girls to have premarital sex at a younger age.
Did anyone that you know decide as a teen not to have sex because it could lead to cancer 30 years down the road?
No. I seriously doubt that was a cold shower thought.
#6 – the more so because when you’re a teen, you honestly think it couldn’t happen to you.
And they’re not sluts yet, unlike the dirty woman that opened her legs to fornicate for fun rather than procreation.
/s