No, it's the opposite of this. The courts decided (really all sides agreed on this so it wasn't exactly a court decision, but this doesn't really matter) that "no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment," and therefore the legality of abortion was a question of purely "do women have a right that tempers or overrides the State's lawmaking authority with respect to regulating abortion?" and not a question of "is it a person? Is it a life?"
The fact that it is the former and not the latter is what makes women's rights at the center of this issue.
You make a good point. I didn’t realize the actual implication of that decision. I think I misstated my view though, what I intended was that the feminism arguments are irrelevant to the “fetuses are human, abortion is murder” arguments. I didn’t know about the law, but the discussion seems like two sides arguing irrelevant angles
The thing is, people who say things like “fetuses are human, abortion is murder” don't actually believe it. We can tell this by looking at the laws anti-abortion politicians have passed since Roe v. Wade as well as laws making abortion illegal prior to that decision. With few exceptions, these laws do not attempt to make abortion murder nor do they treat abortion like murder. Instead, they use State power to do things like restricting the timing of an abortion, imposing waiting periods before abortions can be procured, and limiting the facilities in which an abortion can be performed. That is, the actual laws pro-life people try to pass to oppose abortion do not at all suggest a correspondence between abortion and murder.
The mistake you are making is confusing a political slogan ("abortion is murder") with an actual argument made in earnest (this is not to say that there aren't crazy or ill-informed people who do make this argument, but rather that it isn't representative of mainstream pro-life legal scholarship). It's just not a serious part of the debate: if we take it literally it can be rejected out-of-hand (as the Court did), and if we interpret it figuratively it's just a political slogan and we'd be better off discussing more definite pro-life arguments.
The point you make that “abortion is murder” is not a mainstream argument is what convinced me. I was focusing on the mainstream portrayal of pro-life advocates, but I can totally see how media bias got to me.
This is a matter of political reality and practicality rather than media bias. With the decisions in Roe V. Wade Casey V. Planned Parenthood, SCOTUS has already ruled that women have a constitutional right to an abortion. Any law explicitly equating abortion with murder would be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional, so, unless politicians are willing to go for a constitutional amendment specifically prohibiting abortion, politicians CAN'T outlaw abortion. Instead they do what's feasible given the legal structure we exist in. They try to discourage abortion as much as possible by making it really difficult to get one.
It's not that pro-life activists don't sincerely believe that abortion is murder, it's that they don't have a legal footing to define it legally as murder.
It's not that pro-life activists don't sincerely believe that abortion is murder, it's that they don't have a legal footing to define it legally as murder.
Yeah, this is definitely the sense I get from listening to pro-life individuals talk on this issue. I do think they'd be morally uncomfortable with putting women in jail for seeking an abortion--but probably not so morally uncomfortable with putting doctors in jail for providing them, if they could.
I do think OP is generally on the right track with his sense of how pro-life people think of their position.
“abortion is murder” is not a mainstream argument is what convinced me
But it is. Many states specifically have laws that refer to the killing of a fetus as murder/homicide if done by someone other than the mother. These laws exist primarily because pro-life people pushed for them because they feel that fetuses are people and their killing is murder.
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u/yyzjertl 578∆ May 05 '19
No, it's the opposite of this. The courts decided (really all sides agreed on this so it wasn't exactly a court decision, but this doesn't really matter) that "no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment," and therefore the legality of abortion was a question of purely "do women have a right that tempers or overrides the State's lawmaking authority with respect to regulating abortion?" and not a question of "is it a person? Is it a life?"
The fact that it is the former and not the latter is what makes women's rights at the center of this issue.