The Human Life Amendment is the name for any amendment to the United States Constitution that would have the effect of overturning the Supreme Court 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, that denied states the authority to prohibit abortion. All of these amendment proposals seek to overturn Roe v. Wade, but most of them go further by forbidding both Congress and the states from legalizing abortion. Some of the proposals define human life as beginning with conception or fertilization.
These amendments are sponsored or supported by the United States pro-life movement and opposed by the United States pro-choice movement. None of these proposals have succeeded.
Read more about Human Life Amendment: History of The Human Life Amendment, 2012 Developments
Famous quotes containing the words human life, human, life and/or amendment:
“Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)