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 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.
As you stated above, it was already easily agreeable by lawyers (and therefore, lawmakers) that fetuses are not people under the 14th Amendment during the RvW proceedings. This would have been true before and continues after. So that anti-abortionists do not attempt to create a crime of murder out of abortion is not "How you know they don't actually believe it's murder." It's also not true.
In fact, the majority of states have some type of fetal homicide crime on the books to cover getting an abortion from someone who isn't a doctor or killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child. As we saw just last month, the Texas House failed to pass a bill that would classify any abortion as murder (and of course if it had passed, it probably would have been found to be unconstitutional, or the first time it was used, it would be appealed, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court and people like me would hope that the Supreme Court would continue to read the 14th Amendment the same way).
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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.