On Thursday, December 2, 2021 at 7:53:24 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQOQrrbH_w4
Supreme Court hearing started at about the 1 hour mark.
"In Roe, the core factual question was whether a fetus is a person – a human who holds rights and hence cannot be killed lawfully by another person.
The court, ruling in 1973, recognized the problem: “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.”
But the justices were nonetheless compelled to do so. The court ruled that “the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.” Therefore, “the word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the
unborn.”
However, the court saw the personhood of a fetus as developing during the course of a pregnancy. Therefore, “it is reasonable and appropriate for a State to decide that at some point in time another interest, that of health of the mother or that of
potential human life, becomes significantly involved.”
The court concluded that “with respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability.”
This means that in the early stages of pregnancy, abortion cannot be outlawed, but “if the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to
preserve the life or health of the mother.”
Why viability?
There is a long-standing myth that the author of Roe – Justice Harry Blackmun, who had served for many years as chief counsel for the Mayo Clinic – had done copious medical research and come to the conclusion of viability as the emergence of
personhood.
Linda Greenhouse, a longtime Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times, wrote the definitive biography of Blackmun, which clearly demonstrates that this was not the case. Blackmun preferred the point of quickening – when the fetus first begins to
move, at around the end of the first trimester – as the emergence of personhood.
In a memo to the justices in November 1972, he wrote that the end of the first trimester “is arbitrary, but perhaps any other selected point, such as quickening or viability, is equally arbitrary.”"
https://www.penncapital-star.com/commentary/will-the-supreme-court-strike-down-roe-or-let-states-to-decide-when-personhood-occurs-opinion/
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