{"id":127284,"date":"2016-09-29T18:08:59","date_gmt":"2016-09-29T22:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"\/news\/?p=127284"},"modified":"2016-09-30T14:38:14","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T18:38:14","slug":"life-at-conception-act-under-attack-by-the-constitution-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/life-at-conception-act-under-attack-by-the-constitution-center\/","title":{"rendered":"The Constitution Center is wrong to attack the Life at Conception Act"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One<\/a> of the two<\/a> most important pro-life bills in the country is the Life at Conception Act<\/a>, which would theoretically overturn Roe v. Wade<\/em> by a simple congressional vote and president\u2019s signature, rather than by waiting to overturn it through a future Supreme Court case or federal constitutional amendment (both extremely uncertain and burdensome options).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the LCA currently doesn\u2019t receive nearly the amount of attention and support it deserves, even from pro-lifers\u2014a situation that isn\u2019t helped by pieces like Lyle Denniston’s<\/a> at the National Constitution Center, which supposedly debunks the LCA\u2019s viability. So let\u2019s look at why pro-lifers shouldn\u2019t let his erroneous critique discourage us from fighting for the most viable means of changing the abortion battle\u2019s status quo.<\/p>\n

First, the author gets the basic summary of how the LCA works correct:<\/p>\n

[Section 5 of the 14th Amendment<\/a>] gives Congress \u201cpower to enforce by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.\u201d Among the protections that the amendment assures is a prohibition on state laws that would \u201cdeprive any person of life.\u201d Senate bill S. 2464 seeks to define \u201clife\u201d to include fetal life, at all stages of pregnancy [\u2026]<\/p>\n

Justice [Harry] Blackmun wrote [in Roe] that the court did not need to settle \u201cthe difficult question of when life begins.\u201d And the senator then turns to another passage in which Blackmun said that, if the court were to accept that \u201cperson\u201d under the Fourteenth Amendment meant a fetus, at all stages of development, that would mean that a claim to a right to abortion \u201ccollapses\u201d because \u201cthe fetus\u2019 right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, Denniston goes on to list several allegedly fatal errors with that theory:<\/p>\n

The Blackmun opinion drew a distinction between \u201cwhen life begins,\u201d which the court was not attempting to decide, and whether a fetus is a \u201cperson\u201d under the Amendment, which the court did, in fact, decide. Indeed, the opinion says flatly that \u201cthe word \u2018person,\u2019 as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two things: first, lawmakers are not obligated to indulge the delusion<\/a> that a human life and a person are two different things, even if Supreme Court justices are among those who\u2019ve fallen for it. Scientific and philosophical questions are not matters of constitutional interpretation for which a legal background bestows special knowledge. Ultimately, though, the fact remains that Roe<\/em> itself unlocked the door the LCA opens: if they\u2019re people, they have a right to life. They are people, so there you have it.<\/p>\n

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