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- Title
ADDING CONSENT TO CHOICE IN THE ABORTION DEBATE.
- Authors
McDonagh, Eileen
- Abstract
This article offers a blueprint for refraining abortion rights by invoking not only the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, but also on the Equal Protection Clause. The pro-consent argument for abortion rights is a prototypical sameness argument. It asserts that women, as well as men, have a right to bodily integrity and liberty that is so fundamental that it includes the right to self-defense against one's own offspring, whether that offspring is a fetus in the womb or a born child. Although the maternal thing to do would be to carry a pregnancy to term and find a supportive adoptive home for the born infant, women have not only maternal identities, but human identities as well. As such, following along the lines of this argument, women, as human beings, are morally, constitutionally, and politically justified in obtaining an abortion because the fetus has no more inherent right to use and massively transform a woman's body than does a born child. What is more, to the degree that the government assists other human beings in their self-defense against state-protected entities, the government is obligated to assist a woman in her self-defense against a fetus. If anything, since the entire police power of the state already clearly entails assisting people in their self-defense in relation to other people, defining the fetus as a person with the same rights as a born person strengthens, rather than weakens, a woman's right to government assistance in obtaining an abortion.
- Subjects
UNITED States; ABORTION laws; ABORTION policy -- Citizen participation; PRO-choice movement; WOMEN'S rights; REPRODUCTIVE rights
- Publication
Society, 2005, Vol 42, Issue 5, p18
- ISSN
0147-2011
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/BF02687478