Hillary Clinton, Presidential hopeful and longtime pro-choice activist, caught the attention of both pro-life and pro-choice advocates last week after her controversial comments on abortion.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, news anchor Chuck Todd asked Clinton when an unborn child has constitutional rights. Clinton responded that “under our laws currently, that is not something that exists,” and that “the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.”
Clinton’s use of the word “person” was the center of most criticism. A “person” in the legal sense is anyone who has rights that are protected under the law. Pro-choicers obviously don’t care too much for this label because it implies that abortion infringes upon the rights of the unborn.
The discussion of “personhood” goes beyond the usual debate about whether or not a fetus is a human. You don’t need to go much further than an average high school science textbook to figure out that life begins at conception. The debate has become somewhat more complex. Pro-choice advocates argue that even though a “life” may be present, the unborn human is certainly not a “person,” whatever that means.
This was the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade which decided that the unborn child had no rights. Therefore, the state had no compelling interest to protect a fetus in abortions. But the court could not have been more contradictory in its decision.
Pro-choice advocates fail to recognize that a fetus killed in a car accident or in the murder of a pregnant woman is considered just as much a person as the woman carrying him. But when it comes to abortion, the child is reduced to a measly clump of cells in need of discarding. What is it about abortion that causes us to lose our humanity when confronted with a pair of forceps?
The unborn are also considered people in civil law. An unborn child has the right to inherit property; he has the right to a cause of action for injuries sustained in the womb or for a wrongful death; he has a right to a guardian. Yet, when it comes to the most fundamental right — life — the government somehow falls short in applying constitutional protections to all individuals equally.
If pro-lifers are waging a war on women, then pro-choicers are certainly waging a war on words. The distinction between “human being” and “person” is absurd. This play on words has only led to marginalization and discrimination in the past.
A 1928 Canadian court ruling used similar logic when it upheld that “Women are not persons in matter of rights and privileges.” In 1881 the George Canfield American Law Review did the same by citing that “An Indian is not a person within the meaning of the Constitution.” And in the Dred Scott decision, the United States Supreme Court determined that black people were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
I doubt that any sensible pro-choice advocate would consider these rulings wise and reasonable. It’s obvious that black people, Native Americans and women, though differing from others in certain ways, are still just as human as everybody else. So when we look at a fetus, a biologically distinct human being, why do we insist that his or her rights don’t matter?
Tyler Grudi is a staff writer for the Bona Venture. His email is gruditj15@bonaventure.edu
