{"id":7622,"date":"2006-06-07T14:08:42","date_gmt":"2006-06-07T18:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7622"},"modified":"2006-06-07T14:08:42","modified_gmt":"2006-06-07T18:08:42","slug":"there-is-no-constitutional-right-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/there-is-no-constitutional-right-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"There is no constitutional right to life"},"content":{"rendered":"

State lawmakers in [tag]Louisiana[\/tag] passed a pretty sweeping [tag]ban[\/tag] on [tag]abortion[\/tag] this week, dependent on the [tag]Supreme Court[\/tag] overturning [tag]Roe v. Wade[\/tag]. A leading sponsor of the bill, state Senator Ben Nevers (D), said<\/a>, “I had a strong belief that we could finally protect the innocent life of an unborn child. This is about the U.S. [tag]Constitution[\/tag] granting every person the [tag]right to life[\/tag].”<\/p>\n

The remark prompted Jacob Sullum<\/a> to suggest that the implication of the remark “is that the Constitution not only permits but requires a federal ban on abortion.” Matthew Yglesias<\/a> responded by arguing that under the circumstances, “if a fetus is legally a person, then I think permitting abortion is pretty clearly unconstitutional.”<\/p>\n

At the risk of sounding like a picky strict constructionist, there’s one minor point that Nevers, Sullum, and Yglesias neglected to mention: the Constitution doesn’t say a word about anyone having a “right to life.” That whole “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” line is in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. If a fetus is deemed a person under the law, abortion may fall under murder statutes, but unconstitutional? I don’t think so.<\/p>\n

If abortion-rights opponents want “right to life” language in the text, they’re going to have to push for an amendment. I suspect if they tried, they’d have even less success than they did today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

State lawmakers in [tag]Louisiana[\/tag] passed a pretty sweeping [tag]ban[\/tag] on [tag]abortion[\/tag] this week, dependent on the [tag]Supreme Court[\/tag] overturning [tag]Roe v. Wade[\/tag]. A leading sponsor of the bill, state Senator Ben Nevers (D), said, “I had a strong belief that we could finally protect the innocent life of an unborn child. This is about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}