BY FLORIDA BILL During the recent Democratic debates, Bernie Sanders asserted that women have a "constitutional right to an abortion." Sanders who has declared himself a candidate for President, knows, or should know, that he is factually wrong, and is as much of a "liar" as he accuses President Trump of being.
The fact is that a woman has a "right to choose" pursuant to a finding in the 1973 Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade. The court did not find that the Constitution provided a woman a right to an abortion; it ruled that a woman had a right of privacy from which flows her right to choose with regard to her own body. The right of privacy is not stated outright in the constitution but exists, justices said, in the arching penumbra of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the constitution.
Roe v Wade is considered by legal scholars to be a poorly reasoned decision. That being the case, critics of the decision and pro-life conservatives are pushing the high court to revisit that decision and to overrule it, or determine what rights the developing fetus is entitled to.
The right to choose by a woman to terminate her pregnancy ignores any rights to be accorded the fetus, no matter how far along the baby has been alive in the mother's womb. The fetus is not a "person" under the U.S. Constitution, and only a "person" is entitled to protection as is set forth in the 14th amendment.
The Supreme Court has in the past declined to made a determination as to when a fetus becomes a person. Is it at the moment of conception or when there is a heartbeat detected? Is it when that fetus can survive and live outside the womb, at, say, four, five or six months? Currently. a fetus becomes a person with constitutional protection upon birth, and correspondingly a woman's right to choose allows for destruction of the fetus at any time prior to birth.
In recent months there has been discussion of terminating a baby's life, even after birth, if that is the mother's desire in consultation with her doctor. Such acts would constitute infanticide and would certainly subject the doctor and the mother, or perhaps both, to prosecution for murder. Nevertheless, some liberal Democrats have said that such actions should be the subject of conversation.
If the court decides that a fetus is a "person" at some point during the gestational period, that fetus, at that moment, will receive constitutional protection, and subsequent abortion of that "person" will be prohibited. The prohibition however, would very likely be subject to exceptions such as the need to protect the life of the mother.
xxx
No comments:
Post a Comment