I was under the impression that the Constitution’s purpose was to limit GOVERNMENT, not to limit rights. Seems that abortion should be at the very most under state control, not federal.
Jack
The abortion issue is tied up with the definition of legal person, i.e. who is a legal person and who is protected by the Constitution.
If a fetus is a legal person then it should be protected by the Constitution as much as a fully grown person.
One would think that something as basic as the definition of who it is protecting would need to be decided at the federal level. After all, slavery was allowed to continue in the South because the southern states had a different definition of who was a person, i.e. blacks are property not persons.
Unfortunately the legal persons that the Consitution originally referred to were white property-owning males.
Now we are left with a conundrum: either we agree that the Constitution has "grown" to include women and blacks and non-property owners and now potentially fetuses, or we believe that somehow the founding fathers meant all along to cover everyone but couldn't say it at the time.
If the Constitution can "grow" then it can "grow" to find abortion acceptable. If the founding fathers hid things in the Consitution then it is open to endless interpretation of what other stuff they might have hidden, such as that abortion is acceptable.
The toleration of slavery and sexism at the time of the writing of the Constitution has caused it to be fatally flawed.
We need to add an amendment to the Constitution that clearly defines who it is that is being defended by it. This amendment needs to make it clear that fetuses are to be considered citizens, children of people here illegally are not, etc.
The fact that this will never happen means that we are doomed to live in a fuzzy world where nothing is ever completely true or just. What is true will be what a majority of activists say is true. When liberal activists are in power they will grow the government. When conservative activists are in power they will merely slow the growth of government.
In the long run we will become a socialist dictatorship ... but at least we'll all be able to have abortions whenever we want ... so long as the government hasn't instituted a pro-natalist policy.
How can the constitution be construed to protect the “right” of SOME people, without due process of law, to completely destroy each and every right of 50 million slaughtered unborn children and counting? Scalia is correct. There is and can be no such “right” to murder. Under the 5th and 14th, neither the federales nor the states have any power to stand idly by ignoring the slaughter much less encouraging and funding it. The 5th and 10th are simultaneous in time as parts of the Bill of Rights. In such matters where there are simultaneous enactments and ambiguity is claimed, the courts will regard and construe them so as to make them consistent. This means the babies win as far as the federales are concerned. The 14th is a later enactment. Where there is ambiguity or possible conflict between two enactments that are not simultaneous, the courts will construe the latter enactment as controlling. This means the babies win at a state and local level because the constitution demands it.