Opposition
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act was strongly opposed by most pro-choice organizations, on grounds that the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision said that the human fetus is not a "person" under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and that if the fetus were a Fourteenth Amendment "person," then he or she would have a constitutional right to life. However, the laws of 36 states also recognize the human fetus as the legal victim of homicide (and often, other violent crimes) during the entire period of pre-natal development (27 states) or during part of the pre-natal period (nine states). Legal challenges to these laws, arguing that they violate Roe v. Wade or other U.S. Supreme Court precedents, have been uniformly rejected by both the federal and the state courts, including the supreme courts of California, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.
Some prominent legal scholars who strongly support Roe v. Wade, such as Prof. Walter Dellinger of Duke University Law School, Richard Parker of Harvard, and Sherry F. Colb of Rutgers Law School, have written that fetal homicide laws do not conflict with Roe v. Wade.
A principle that allows language in a law to not conflict with Roe, which logically should trigger Roe’s “collapse” clause, was explained in Webster_v._Reproductive_Health_Services, 492 US 490 (1989). Until such language becomes the basis for laws that specify penalties for abortion, the issue is not even before the court, of whether or not such language conflicts with Roe, and if so, which should be struck down.
Read more about this topic: Unborn Victims Of Violence Act
Famous quotes containing the word opposition:
“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Women will not advance except by joining together in cooperative action.... Unlike other groups, women do not need to set affiliation and strength in opposition one against the other. We can readily integrate the two, search for more and better ways to use affiliation to enhance strength—and strength to enhance affiliation.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)