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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

I'm not taking a stance for or against your argument. I'm simply point out a logical gap that doesn't make this as simple as your suggesting.

The root of the issue is not the rights provided by the 14th amendment, but when, exactly, those rights apply during the process of conception, gestation, and birth. This is further complicated by the fact that scientific advances enable situations that our founders could have never predicted.

I see two facts that are very clear:

* A person cannot exist without conception.

* At some point during pregnancy, a baby can survive as an independent living human. The youngest living baby was born on day 132 of pregnancy.

Unfortunately, that leaves a massive grey area and your opinion on those is likely highly personal - including religion and living situation.

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The rights provided by the 14th amendment are exactly the issue. Today's ruling does not strike a balance between the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn child. It eliminates the rights of the mother.

There is a massive gray area, and Roe/Casey dealt with it just fine. Prohibiting restrictions early on in pregnancy and allowing restrictions later in pregnancy seems like a good solution to the competing interests at play.

> Today's ruling does not strike a balance between the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn child.

Striking a balance between the rights of a mother and child is not the job of the Judicial branch. That’s a job for the Legislative branch.

The court’s job was to determine if the Constitution prohibits the State from making their own state-wide decisions about regulating or permitting abortion.

Those aren't mutually exclusive jobs. If you determine that the Constitution does prohibit states from eliminating access to abortion, then you as the court must step in and adjudicate the competing interests between the mother and the unborn child. Balancing competing rights is a huge part of what the courts have always done.

Fundamental rights like life and liberty should not be subject to the whims of political majorities in legislative bodies. This is a fundamental pillar of our system of government. It's a big reason why we have a Constitution in the first place.

That second "fact" is not a fact. Baby is the term we use to describe children soon after they are born. Did you mean fetus?

Fertilized eggs have the potential to become fetuses, and fetuses have the potential to become babies, but fertilized eggs are not fetuses, and fetuses are not babies.

I think the spirit of your argument is that we cannot decide when to call a fetus a human. Like I mentioned in another comment, this grey area does not preclude undisputed humans from their constitutional rights.

279 days into a pregnancy, the baby can survive fine outside the mother's womb. If it's born the next day, nothing physically changes about the baby whether it's inside the womb or outside. It's literally a baby. Yet in roughly half of the liberal states, it's perfectly legal to kill that baby for any reason while it's inside, but the next minute when it's outside you'd get life in prison for killing it. How is that logically consistent?

First, you can't call a fetus a baby just because it can become a baby. (Just as you can't call a child an adult just because it has the potential to become an adult.)

Second, pregnancy varies from person to person. You can't reasonably assume that all fetuses that are 279 days old will survive and become healthy babies.

Third, there are substantial physical differences between fetuses and babies. I'm sure you're aware that fetuses receive most of their nutrients through the umbilical cord, whereas babies do not.

Maybe I'm wrong and you're right, maybe "nothing physically changes about the baby whether it's inside the womb or outside." Let's test this hypothesis. Go feed a baby through its belly button and see how that works out.

What methods are there of killing an unborn baby a day before it would otherwise be born that wouldn't cause massive harm to the mother? What examples of this actually occurring do you know of? Personally I agree that ethically, intentionally killing the foetus/baby just before birth is not significantly different to doing so just after birth. But it doesn't mean the same legal protections make sense, given the very practical differences between either act. Perhaps the only scenario where they're not so different is where the mother is already dead. That we might need laws against anyone actively killing an unborn baby in such a case (given they'd obviously require active intervention to survive more than a few minutes) seems a little farfetched.

This doesn't affect the reasoning. American women are indisputably citizens and people, whereas fetuses are not.

The existence of this grey area doesn't preclude obvious constitutional rights.

> American women are indisputably citizens and people, whereas fetuses are not.

Foetuses are disputably citizens and people. There's your grey area.

Did you read my comment? I don't dispute the existence of the grey area.

Yes, I read your comment, thanks. You didn't appear to making reference to the same grey area that was referred to in the comment you responded to. It's not often that I see absolutism and the acknowledgement of a grey area within the same breath so do forgive my mistake, if it is one.

What absolutism are you talking about?

> American women are indisputably citizens and people, whereas fetuses are not.

It reads very black and white to me.

Do you dispute that American women are citizens and people?

Do you recognize that there isn't consensus about whether fetuses are citizens and people?

You could waste less of our time if you were either clearer in your writing, if you feel you've been misunderstood, or you just got to the point.

Answering rhetorical questions though, nope.

My claims are concise and straightforward, so I don't know what you're talking about. I also didn't ask any rhetorical questions.

Like I said in another comment, I'm done with this conversation, have a nice day.

I suppose you can dispute anything then, but the upthread comment is right, and the same amendment of the Constitution is pretty clear about it:

> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

You've only taken half of the statement, it was:

> Foetuses are disputably citizens and people

Citizens is one part, people is the other. Whether a foetus is a person, whether it has constitutional personhood, was argued by Texas in the original Roe v Wade case. You may also note that the difference between person and citizen has been debated many times before in constitutional law. From [1]:

> Thirty years ago, Bickel made a statement about the relationship between citizenship and personhood in American constitutional law that is well known among scholars of immigration and citizenship. He said: “It has always been easier, it always will be easier, to think of someone as a noncitizen than to decide that he is a nonperson.”

> What is expressed here is both a descriptive and normative claim about the significance of the category of citizenship in our constitutional system. Bickel argued that, as a historical matter, the Constitution has never set much stock by the category of citizenship; that one of the most disastrous aspects of Dred Scott was that it treated the denial of rights to slaves and free blacks as turning on their lack of citizenship; that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment came close to entrenching this mistake, constitutionally, via passage of the privileges or immunities clause of section 1, which might have appeared to make rights contingent upon citizenship; but that, in the end (by way of Slaughterhouse,7 which eviscerated the clause), “innocence was restored.” And Bickel concludes by expressing satisfaction with this state of affairs: “I find it gratifying … that we live under a Constitution to which the concept of citizenship matters very little.”

In important ways, Bickel is descriptively right. True, citizenship status is still quite significant in a variety of settings, and conflicts between citizenship- and personhood-based groundings of rights persist in various contexts. Still, for a great many purposes, the “right to have rights” is not contingent on the possession of citizenship status. In the international arena, it is largely persons who are the subjects of human rights

[1] https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/8/1/9/682631

> You've only taken half of the statement, it was:

Because I was only responding to that half of the statement. The argument for banning abortion must stand without it. Your insistence on it was why I chimed in.

What you're now alluding to is a different claim than the one I responded to: that a. a fetus is a person (as you both seem to agree, disputable) and that even if we concede that question, the rights of the fetus outweigh those of the woman; taking some of the bills and laws that have passed in the various states, at the extreme, that it's fine to deny to a woman bodily autonomy, even where it will put her through great trauma, up to and including death.

> What you're now alluding to is a different claim than the one I responded to

Yes, because you were only responding to half of the sentence. My advice would be to respond to full sentences even when inconvenient.

I'll add, I'm not making a claim about personhood nor citizenship, I'm pointing to where the grey area is. How that becomes an insistence is something you'll only know.

Finally, I do not agree that accepting the personhood of a foetus would necessarily outweigh the woman's rights, as again, it would come up against bodily autonomy - another grey area that I hope would be ruled on to be as absolute as possible.

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