Roe Vs Wade Essays - James Madison, Abortion Debate,

Roe Vs Wade Roe Vs Wade, the decision. 1. The requirements of the Constitution. Any analysis of Roe Vs Wade must be accomplished within the language of the Constitution. Under the American Constitution the state is obligated to exercise its powers with extreme deference to the rights of the individual. Certain of these rights are so crucial to the establishment and maintenance of a free society that special amendments, i.e. the Bill of Rights, were added to the Constitution to specifically stay the hand of the state when the exercise of its powers placed it in conflict with the interests of the individual. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments specifically prohibit the taking of a human life without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment expands this guarantee by prohibiting any state from denying a person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. The Constitution extends these guarantees to all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States. No other qualification is made. The only conditions which can be identified anywhere in the Constitution are life, which is presumed to be present, and personage, which is a given condition of the human specie. When life begins, stage of development, age, environment, meaningfulness of life, potential, viability, morality, religion nor any other condition are anywhere mentioned and do not compromise or modify these guarantees. In Roe Vs Wade Justice Blackmun acknowledged, regarding the status of the fetus and referring to the Texas statute on abortion, that If this suggestion of person hood is established,......the fetus' right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment. In other words, the only requirements held forth by the Constitution regarding the disposition of the unborn are first, that life be present, second, that it belong to a person, i.e. a human bei ng, and third, if these criteria are met, that due process be extended before its life can be taken. *********************************************************************************************2. Proof that life is present: The spirit and language of the Constitution are such that the presumption of the presence of life, as it pertains to persons, must always preclude any assumption that life is not present. In every action involving law the presence of life is a given. It is the absence of life that must be verified and certified by the State or responsible authority in every instance along with the cause of death, if known. Even the presumption of death, in the absence of a corpus, involves a lengthy lapse of time and a detailed process to accomplish. It was therefore an automatic burden of the Court to establish, beyond any reasonable doubt, that life was not present in the unborn individual before issuing license to those who might take it. This was a duty that the Court not only failed to accomplish but rejected out of hand. The redundant and consistent history of human experience teaches two lessons pertinent to this issue. First, living things eventually become non living things. Second, non living things never become living things. From these two facts we can derive two truths. First, life is either present or it is not. This is a statement of inherent truth, a tautology. Second, no species of life ever arises spontaneously. If these things are true then it follows that life must be present from the point of conception until death occurs. This conclusion is inescapable. When life begins is of no consequence. This is a simple but valid Aristotelian syllogism leading to a simple, valid and irrefutable conclusion. Life begets only life. It may survive only a short time and then die, but first it was alive. 3. Species, i.e. personage. All living things are a product of a reproductive process. The reproduction of anything requires the existence of a template, be it a die, a blue print, a set of repeatable instructions or whatever to determine what species of thing will be reproduced. Among the living that template is genetics. Species among the living is a property of genetics and nothing else. Therefore if the living being in question is of human origin and human destiny then between the point of its origin and any time in the future it can only be regarded as human.