• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Of Course the Constitution Has Nothing to Say About Abortion

j brown's body

"A Soros-backed animal"
DP Veteran
Joined
Jun 18, 2018
Messages
53,596
Reaction score
49,886
Gender
Male
Political Leaning
Progressive
"Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is surprised that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787. As it happens, there is also nothing at all in that document, which sets out fundamental law, about pregnancy, uteruses, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is nothing in that document about women at all. Most consequentially, there is nothing in that document—or in the circumstances under which it was written—that suggests its authors imagined women as part of the political community embraced by the phrase “We the People.” There were no women among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. There were no women among the hundreds of people who participated in ratifying conventions in the states. There were no women judges. There were no women legislators. At the time, women could neither hold office nor run for office, and, except in New Jersey, and then only fleetingly, women could not vote. Legally, most women did not exist as persons.

...Alito cites a number of eighteenth-century texts; he does not cite anything written by a woman, and not because there’s nothing available. “The laws respecting woman,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in 1791, “make an absurd unit of a man and his wife, and then, by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cypher.” She is but a part of him. She herself does not exist but is instead, as Wollstonecraft wrote, a “non-entity.”

...If a right isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, Alito argues, following a mode of reasoning known as the history test, then it can only become a right if it can be shown to be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” As I have argued, the history test disadvantages people who were not enfranchised at the time the Constitution was written, or who have been poorly enfranchised since then. Especially important is the question of who was enfranchised at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, the nation’s second founding, since many arguments defending abortion rights (and many other rights, too) turn on the equal-protection and due-process clauses of that amendment. Here, too, Alito is baffled to discover so little about abortion and women.

He might have consulted the records of the U.S. Senate from the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, when Jacob Howard, a Republican senator from Michigan, got into an argument with Reverdy Johnson, a Democrat from Maryland. Howard quoted James Madison, who had written that “those who are to be bound by laws, ought to have a voice in making them.” This got Johnson terribly worried, because the Fourteenth Amendment uses the word “person.” He wanted to know: Did Howard mean to suggest that women could be construed as persons, too?

mr. johnson: Females as well as males?
mr. howard: Mr. Madison does not say anything about females.
mr. johnson: “Persons.”
mr. howard: I believe Mr. Madison was old enough and wise enough to take it for granted that there was such a thing as the law of nature which has a certain influence even in political affairs, and that by that law women and children are not regarded as the equals of men.


Link

Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.
 
There's nothing in Constitution about syphilis or gonorrhea either. The Founding Fathers had more important issues to deal with. Does that mean venereal diseases are unconstitutional?
 
No mention of beer either.
 
There's nothing in Constitution about syphilis or gonorrhea either. The Founding Fathers had more important issues to deal with. Does that mean venereal diseases are unconstitutional?

That you equate women with vernaral disease says a lot.
 
Last edited:
No mention of the number of justices on the supreme court... ;)
 
The point is that they did not consider women to exist as persons. Since, presumably, it is no longer possible to believe such a thing, how can relying on text that makes that assumption be reasonably used to support an argument?
Why doesn't "People" comprise men and women? The document doesn't mention premature ejaculation, impotence, bedwetting either. People covers it all.
 
There's nothing in Constitution about syphilis or gonorrhea either. The Founding Fathers had more important issues to deal with. Does that mean venereal diseases are unconstitutional?

Take out the word "either" and you are correct. There is a lot about abortion in the Constitution.
 
Why doesn't "People" comprise men and women? The document doesn't mention premature ejaculation, impotence, bedwetting either. People covers it all.

Do you equate premature ejaculation with women?

Some very curious responses here, but it is helping me understand the anti-choice crowd a little better.
 
No mention of beer either.

Beer does not have to be specifically named for the 18th Amendment to obviously ban the manufacture, sale, and consumption of beer. You have to be an idiot if you think it needed every kind of alcoholic beverage to be identified.
 
I notice in the preamble to the Constitution our founding fathers assumed our personal pronoun is "We" as in "We the people of the United States". Shame on them the bunch of old white conservatives.
 
Really? Can you cite just a few of those (many?) references?

I love this article from the top law school in America:


I see no reason abortion should be exempted from the HIPAA law, which is based on . .. the Fourth Amendment. If her medical papers and decisions are private in every other department, why not gynecology and obstetrics?
 
I love this article from the top law school in America:


I see no reason abortion should be exempted from the HIPAA law, which is based on . .. the Fourth Amendment. If her medical papers and decisions are private in every other department, why not gynecology and obstetrics?

OK, so basically you just lied to get attention.
 
OK, so basically you just lied to get attention.

How about that, a former moderator personally attacking me with a stupid lie.

Show me exactly what makes a totally unbiased, objective, factual link from the nation's top college of law a lie just to get attention?
 
How about that, a former moderator personally attacking me with a stupid lie.

Nonsense because you said “There is a lot about abortion in the Constitution.” which is a lie. I addressed only the content of your post which is not a personal attack.
 
Nonsense because you said “There is a lot about abortion in the Constitution.” which is a lie.

Answer my question.

If what I posted was a lie, you would have undeniable proof from a totally unbiased source (such as Harvard College of Law) that my statement is not true.
 
How about that, a former moderator personally attacking me with a stupid lie.

Show me exactly what makes a totally unbiased, objective, factual link from the nation's top college of law a lie just to get attention?

That link is not from the Constitution, which was your claim.
 
That link is not from the Constitution, which was your claim.

I never claimed it was from the Constitution. It explains the Constitutional right to privacy includes abortions.
 
Answer my question.

If what I posted was a lie, you would have undeniable proof from a totally unbiased source (such as Harvard College of Law) that my statement is not true.

If you keep editing your posts it makes it very hard to reply to them.
 
I never claimed it was from the Constitution. It explains the Constitutional right to privacy includes abortions.

Read your post #9. It contains the following assertion:

There is a lot about abortion in the Constitution.

The fact is that abortion appears nowhere in the Constitution, thus your statement was a lie.
 
Back
Top Bottom