Your so-called “ad hoc rights” are based on the ad hoc hypothesis of “personhood” theory. It is “ad hoc” because it is devoid of supporting evidence, untestable and totally unsubstantiated. It not only is devoid of supporting evidence, but is also contrary to historical truth regarding the term “person”.
The quackery is squeezed out of the Constitution. The primary focus of the 14th amendment was to address the citizenship issue during the contentious time when blacks and black slaves were not considered as citizens of the United States. The focus of the amendment was mainly to overrule the Dred Scott decision, nothing more.
The word “person” was used merely in a pronominal function for the word “human being” the same way “he” is used in place of a male subject. The word “person” as used in the sentences of the Constitution was construed in its ordinary meaning in proper grammatical sense. It was therefore merely a linguistic expression commonly used in our English grammar, nothing more. The context of the Constitution was never ever about abortion, or human reproductive rights or about when an individual human life begins. It certainly wasn’t about defining the term “person” for legal application. That role was appropriately found in Black’s Law dictionary which was established by Henry Campbell Black in 1891. In it, the legal term is defined simply as:
1. A human being.
2. An entity (such as a corporation) that is recognized by law as having the rights and duties of a human being.
Therefore, for pro-abortion folks to persistently claim that “a fetus has never been regarded as a person protected by our constitution” because one has to be born in order to be considered a “person” is not only a grievous distortion of the truth, but also a down right deception. When lies are repeated often enough by many people, gullible people would fall for it and never seems to be able to get out.
What kind of logic is this? How does censes bureaus, failure to prosecute a murder crime, insurance coverage and cemetery burial determine whether an entity is or isn’t a “person”?
A corporation is legally a “person”, yet it doesn’t have to be counted by the census bureaus, or for some other corporation to be charged with a murder crime, covered by insurance for its life, or be buried in a cemetery in order to be considered a person.
Before Columbus discovered America, there weren’t any census bureaus let alone the People of the United States to count the native Indians living on the land. Are you telling me that they weren’t persons by any measure? Aborigines in South America, Borneo Island, etc don’t have any census bureaus to count their people, are they then not persons? They certainly don’t have any concept about “insurance” let alone talking about coverage for life. To suggest they didn’t meet your insurance criterion therefore not persons is ridiculous.
Also ridiculous is the notion that failure to charge for crime will determine whether a human being is or isn’t a person. There are countless murders that go unsolved and those criminals who committed the crimes weren’t even charged due to lack of evidence. Some murders simply remained unknown when unreported. Does that make those victims not persons anymore?
More ridiculous is the notion that one has to be buried in a cemetery in order to be counted as a person. Murdered victims whose bodies are never found won’t be buried in the cemeteries. Deceased persons who chose cremation and then have their ashes scattered in the lake, ocean, or woodlands would not have any body to be buried in the cemeteries. The Tibetans who live up in the high Himalayan Mountains don’t bury their dead. They simply feed the corpses to the vultures out in the open.
A person is simply a human being. No matter how hard you try to brutally force your way to deny the humanity of the unborn human life, your torturous twist in every which way isn’t going to change the fact that a prenatal life is a human being just like you and me. A prenatal human being is simply at different developmental stage just like a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, a teenager, etc is at different developmental stage from each other and from me and you.
Intelligence is spare whenever brute force is enough. Intelligence is none existence when brutal deceptions and absurd contortions are needed to compel a lost cause with the expectation that the unborns must be able to think.
