"Friday" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 12:53:53 GMT, "Jeff Lowe"
wrote:

snip


Should abortion be discouraged? Yes, of course it should, but to ban
it
would be to impose a very narrow interpretation of just one religion
on
the whole population. Kind of seems like "Establishing" to me.
Jeff


I don't see this as a religious issue so much as a _Pure Constitutional
Argument_ - as much as some people would like it to be.

All religious considerations aside: A woman mosy certainly has a right
to her liberty and pursuit of happiness, while a child most certainly
has his or her right to life. _Both_ are inalienabale and unarguable
rights clearly defined in the US Constitution.

The _BIG_ question (as it's ultimately boiled down to) is defining " a
human." Is an egg a human, and thus entitled to the rights guaranteed
in the Constitution? When the egg meets a sperm and the cell spilts
does it then become entitled to the right to life? At 3 months? Three
days? Not until it leaves the womb?

This issue has troubled me for as long as I've been aware of it. I
would _NOT_ want to be a Justice of the SCOTUS, having to struggle with
this one.

They didn't have to struggle with it. Roe v Wade was decided on the basis of
default in a potential conflict of rights. The 14th Amendment Due Process
rights, which are the relevant ones, are not established under law nor under
the Constitution for prenatal life. (In the actual decision of this case,
that meant that the state of Texas had no compelling right to prevent an
abortion.) OTOH, the rights of a woman to life and to privacy are
established under law.

As the justices themselves said (from the majority opinion of Roe, written
by Blackman): "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life
begins. 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."

Ed Huntress