Thread: Legal opposition to Roe V Wade?

Originally Posted by Seraphim

To all those arguing that an embryo is "just a group of cells...", well scientifically, aren't YOU simple a collection of cells as well? Why is there any legal protection for such a group of cells such as yourselves?

The legal protection is for your "person." When does a group of cells become a person? I don't know and neither does the "law." In fact, in some countries and societies you aren't a person until you reach a certain age or pass some rite of passage. In our society, birth guarantees personage. Before that it is very murky.

re: why child support etc.

Because without forcing the father to pay child support, the child and unwed or divorced mother becomes a ward of the state and the state most certainly does not want that. That is the historical answer and still holds a lot of weight in modern times. Actually, IIRC child support is actually a modern creation. In the old days, the father would actually take care of the children if the parents divorced. The wife would be kicked out on the street to go her own way. This is in Britain and the US of course, other societies have chosen to deal with breakups differently.

Child support is probably a modern invention mostly because of the increase in children born out of wedlock. If a child was born in wedlock the father would take care of the child. If the father was dead, the children would either starve to death or the mother and children would live with the grandparents or other relative. It really wasn't a large problem back then. They didn't have welfare, the children wouldn't become a ward of the state. There was usually some extended family to support the children or else they were in so remote an area that they would simply die off or so far removed that no one would care what happened to them.

Then with the invention of cities came the rise in orphans and the problem of orphanages.

Originally Posted by Seraphim

To all those arguing that an embryo is "just a group of cells...", well scientifically, aren't YOU simple a collection of cells as well?

Not simple (simply)

Originally Posted by Seraphim

Why is there any legal protection for such a group of cells such as yourselves?

Well, I always thought it was self-evident that the laws of nature and nature's God entitle these collections of cells to separate and equal stations. So protecting those stations by securing and defending the rights of those bunches of cells seems to me to be a logical and rightful reaction.

There is legal protection because I am an individual person with individual human rights and US law provides (in theory) legal rules for protection of every such person's legal rights. What makes me a person? I think maybe that is the question that must be answered if there is going to be a legal debate. At any rate, I would like to at least see the courts assume that embyros are people with individual human rights to the extent that there is no legal permission for anyone who intends to end an embryo's life to do so. To have the legal power and authority to let live or let die, and to assume embryos are not people with individual human rights and yet be wrong, is a terrible and most regrettable position to be in. I would rather be wrong in infringing on a woman's right to kill a relatively unimportant mass of cells than to be wrong in infringing on an innocent's right to be alive. That's why I think if there is to be a legal debate, the question of what the embyro is must be answered.