Fetuses have no rights
A fetus is not a citizen of the United States. It therefore is not protected by the Constitution.
If the religious zealots and right-to-lifers and other supposed do-gooders wish to try to change the Constitution to reflect their views of a fetus, they are certainly free to try.
However, as it now stands, our nation is solidly in favor of reasonable abortion law or decisive precedent. To change the Constitution would require more than a majority of votes to change. That does not satisfy the vocal minority who want to ban all abortions. They smell blood in the water with the leaked draft decision of the U.S. Supreme Court justices. They have waited a long long time to put women a step below a fetus.
The thing is, though, most women in America are citizens and should and must be protected under the Constitution. That is the core reason that Roe vs.Wade was strongly in favor of the woman and not the fetus.
Deciding to abort a fetus, whether by pill or surgery, is not taken lightly by a woman. It goes against a woman’s instinct to abort a fetus from her womb.
But that decision is made because her own survival instinct tells her that it will cause severe mental, physical and financial hardship. She is the main person who will bear the greatest weight of the load created by allowing the fetus to be born. She knows, better than any Congress person or justice, what it will require of her.
The people standing up for the nonstatuary “rights” of the unborn are all too willing to abrogate the true guaranteed rights of the women forced to bear a child.
Where are the rights guaranteed to a fetus in our Constitution?
There are rights guaranteed to women as citizens. A woman’s right to dominion over her own body is her most basic right to privacy.
For you men who think that should not apply, think long and hard about the implications to your own privacy, especially financial privacy. Freedom has deep roots in privacy.
A fetus is not a person until it is born and separate from the woman bearing it.
I can hear the screams already: “Life is sacred!” Yes, it is. There are degrees of sacredness.
I believe that a woman’s completely formed body is far more sacred than a fetus’s incompletely formed body.
A fetus is a potential person. A woman is a completed born person and, therefore, a citizen.
Potential is an idea of what might become. A woman is a physically completed human being.
Tom Beach
Waimea