{"id":315516,"date":"2024-07-14T09:14:57","date_gmt":"2024-07-14T14:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=315516"},"modified":"2024-07-12T18:20:20","modified_gmt":"2024-07-12T23:20:20","slug":"14th-amendment-protects-the-rights-of-preborn-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/14th-amendment-protects-the-rights-of-preborn-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the rights of preborn human beings are also protected by the 14th Amendment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A recent op-ed inaccurately claimed that pro-lifers are perverting the 14th Amendment to justify laws protecting preborn children from abortion. But is this true? Does the 14th Amendment exclude human beings living in the womb who are not yet born?<\/p>\n

A “dark and cruel inversion’ of the intent?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing for the New York Times<\/a>, opinion columnist\u00a0Jamelle Bouie responded to the changing platform<\/a> for the Republican National Convention (RNC), which did not include blanket protection for all preborn lives for the first time in four decades. For Bouie, this is a positive development. He wrote:<\/p>\n

It should be said as well that in the same way it is perverse for conservative legal activists and Supreme Court justices to use the Reconstruction amendments \u2014 written and ratified to assist the formerly enslaved and enshrine a principle of anti-subordination in the Constitution \u2014 to dismantle this nation\u2019s halting efforts at substantive racial equality, it is also perverse for the anti-abortion movement to use the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against bodily autonomy in the name of so-called fetal rights.<\/em><\/p>\n

Animating that amendment, as well as the 13th, was the reality that Black Americans could not be secure in their persons \u2014 in their bodies and reproductive capacities \u2014 as long as the badges, incidents and vestiges of chattel slavery endured in the nation\u2019s constitutional order. If, in other words, American slavery rested on reproductive enslavement \u2014 the forced birth and breeding of men and women for profit \u2014 then anti-slavery had to mean reproductive liberation.<\/em><\/p>\n

What the anti-abortion movement wants is a dark and cruel inversion of what the Reconstruction framers intended.<\/em><\/p>\n

First, one cannot argue in favor of abortion on the basis of bodily autonomy. The preborn child may reside within the mother’s womb, but she is a separate, unique human being, with her own body, DNA, blood type, genes, and traits.<\/p>\n

READ: Why protecting human life should not be decided by \u2018the will of the people\u2019<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n