Re: Neither the 5th or 14th amendment mentions anything about women's rights ...[W:86
I didn't ignore it to be honest... I was seriously confused as to all you "rock being" and "human being" stuff. I have minor dyslexia AND I woke up at 2:34am this morning and never got back to bed so I am seriously tired.
Well, perhaps after you are rested you could look again at that
Msg #1194.
A relatively important question is,
Why Do We Bother calling humans "human beings"? --when we so-obviously don't do that for any other life-forms on Earth? ("dandelions" not "dandelion beings"; "minnows" not "minnow beings", and so on).
There is an obvious answer in terms of human egotism: We think we are special
because we can think we are special --and we label ourselves accordingly. Well, most of us can think that, anyway. Our unborn, for example, totally lack that degree of mental ability, to think themselves to be special. Neither can human infants; all they mostly do is eat, sleep, and excrete. And while certain aspects of the Law properly recognizes that
persons are minds, not bodies, other aspects of the Law are muchly simplified by focusing on bodies and ignoring non-existent minds.
In #1194 I mentioned the brain-dead adults on life-support. A dead brain means the mind is dead and the person is dead, so a Death Certificate gets filled out. The status of the body is otherwise irrelevant. At the other end of the spectrum, it is to be noted that Laws about personhood and birth existed long before any scientific data was gathered on the subject. Nevertheless, ignoring the concept of persons as minds, it just so happens that
birth marks a HUGE turning point in the life of a human. Birth was an indisputable event, before modern incubators began to exist to help preemies survive. (My personal opinion is that they shouldn't be considered "born" until they don't need any equivalent of the womb environment to survive.)
One advantage the Law has, over scientific data, is its Arbitrariness.
IF the Law was synchronized with scientific observations regarding when humans become more capable than ordinary animals (such that those humans start thinking of themselves as being special), then A Huge Bureaucracy Would Have To Be Established, to test each and every young human at multiple points after birth (because all humans develop at different rates from each other), seeking to detect the answer to this question: "Is he or she a person YET?" All of that, along with the associated expense, is completely eliminated by the simple Arbitrariness of assigning "legal person" status at birth, regardless of scientific status.
As such I am not going to go further with this "being" line of debate. One I am not following what you are trying to say apparently and two I find it kinda irrelevant. Don't call it a being for all I care. *shrug*
The word has its uses. If used consistently --and it mostly is, outside the Overall Abortion Debate-- it can aid in accurate communications. Only in the Overall Abortion Debate does "being" get mis-used.
EDIT: And why did you not respond to post #1203?
I DID, but perhaps not completely enough. While my #1204 was a direct response to your #1200, I also wrote, "Regarding your other message and "legal semantics" ---that was a reference to #1203. I see now that I didn't address all of what you wrote in #1203, so...
I do recognize that the 14th Amendment doesn't deny the possibility that unborn humans could be persons. BUT the Census Requirement of the Constitution --including how it got modified by part of the 14th Amendment-- wants ALL persons counted (except Indians not taxed). LOGICALLY, if unborn humans qualified as persons, then the Constitution requires that they be counted in the Census. It Is That Simple. But the fact is, they have never been counted. THEREFORE they have never been considered to be persons.
Regarding black people and the Census, you are mistaken. Only
slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person, each. Black freedmen existed who were counted as full persons. White slaves existed (rare, though) who were counted as 3/5 of a person each.
I'd say that reinforces the conclusion that unborn humans, not counted at all, didn't in the least qualify for person status! And after the 14th Amendment threw out that slave-counting stuff,
unborn humans continued to be ignored by the Census, for about a century until Roe v Wade formally stated they were not persons (for reasons having nothing to do with the Census, but still consistent with that Census argument).