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by Free Market Duck

Supreme Court takes giant step backwards
(Apr 19, 2007)

Washington, DC – Pour yourself a hot cup of Rocket Java, girl friends.  The Supreme Court, as predicted when Born-Again Christian President George Bush stacked our National Bench with Jesuits, have just stripped you of your private property rights to your own mind and body.

   In a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling yesterday, the Supremes implied the contradiction that (1) a woman's fetus is an individual while simultaneously living in a parasitical relationship (i.e. not as a separate individual) with its host, and (2) the individual non-individual fetus which is not biologically -- or politically -- an individual yet, somehow obtains individual rights that supersede the individual rights of the woman.  Thus, ruled the Court, the individual rights of the non-individual fetus, obtains its inalienable rights not at birth when the umbilical cord is cut but rather from a precursor "grant" by the government via an unstated and presumed power of attorney.

   This awkward decision and illogical reasoning forgets to ask one important question: what is the legal biological relationship between a woman and her fetus?  And why should any portion of a woman's biological DNA -- whether an unborn fetus or cloned organ -- obtain rights that subordinate the rights of the entire organism, the woman, to the rights of a part of it?  How can the rights of a mature organism be subordinate to a fraction of it?  Further, why should the state presume to speak and act for part of a woman's body, which is what a fetus is until the umbilical cord is cut?

   If the state can assume the private property rights of a woman's DNA, whether it's her cloned liver, kidney, fetus, or left elbow, then the inalienable rights of the woman have just been subordinated to the state.  In China, this assumed right manifests itself as forced abortions.  In the U.S. it has now manifested itself as denied abortions.  Both instances arise from the same erroneous premise and both are violations of a woman's basic right to her own mind and body -- a direct refutation of the stated purpose for our Bill of Rights: prohibitions against infringements of an individual's inherent rights obtained at birth, not before birth.  Using the Court's logic, masturbation will soon become manslaughter, or mass murder in the case of men (knocking off millions of haploid gametogenous cells in one swell foop). 

   The Supreme Court's discussion about the physician and woman's choice of abortion methodology -- whether it's called a D&C, partial-birth abortion, or a Widget -- is immaterial since that is a private medical matter, not an individual rights matter, between doctor and patient.  The state should butt out unless the woman's individual rights are violated during her freely chosen procedure.  Ironically, the state has now become the perp.

   The solution lies in a logical definition of the relationship between a woman and her fetus, which is: until the umbilical cord is cut, the fetus has no individual rights because it is not yet an individual. -- FM Duck 

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