Word: fetus
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First Mr. Gooen suggests that the majority of state laws banning abortion before Roe were intended not to safeguard the life of the fetus, but rather to protect the mother from dangerous proceedings. The only evidence he offers in support of this is the fact that most of these statutes criminalized only the abortionist and not the would-be mother. This proves only that those outraged by abortion, then as now, understood that abortion was a crime in which often the woman would be victimized almost as much as the unborn child. Also, since 36 of the states had abortion...
Starting from scratch will present a serious problem to these folks, who are used to arguing soley from a moral standpoint. Abortion may or may not be morally equivalent to murder, but considerations arising from the nature of the relationship between the fetus and the pregnant woman require a legal distinction...
...treating abortion as premeditated, first-degree murder--even if there were a death penalty involved? Obviously, treating abortion as any sort of murder would implicate both-abortionists (as murderers) and pregnant women (as accomplices, at least). But would fathers be legally culpable as well? Their roles in creating unwanted fetuses are at least tangentially related to the demise of those fetuses, so it seems they should also be held somewhat responsible. But what if the father of an aborted fetus had tried to prevent its abortion? What if it were uncertain who the fetus's father...
Still, there are ways to trim back Roe without reversing it. Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe ruled that while women a right to "personal liber ty," the fetus has no rights its own until it can live outside the womb. The decision relied heavily on medical evidence that the fetus was not viable until about the seventh month of pregnancy, the third trimester. But recent advances in in fant care challenge that decade-old assumption. "It is certainly reasonable to believe that fetal viability in the first trimester of pregnancy may be possible in the not too distant...
...there any "right to privacy" that would protect homosexual conduct, he concluded. Some experts think that Bork would vote to reverse Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on the ground that a woman's constitutional right to privacy outweighs the rights of a fetus until it can live outside the womb...