Sunday, August 9, 2015

Self-Defense, Fetal Personhood, Stand Your Ground All Support Abortion Rights

With misleadingly edited Planned Parenthood videos putting abortion in the news, I think it's important to again bring up a missing justification for abortion that hardly ever gets the attention it deserves: self-defense.

A pregnancy certainly is an assault on a pregnant woman's body. She, therefore, should be legally allowed to take measures to end the attack, including abortion. The legal recognition of self-defense as a valid action goes back millennia.

But adding to a valid self-defense claim are two tactics pushed by anti-abortion forces that actually increase the legality of abortion. The first is what's known as the fetal personhood idea. If, as supporters of this idea desire, a fetus is declared to be a person like any other, the claim of self-defense against that "person" becomes just like any other claim against any other person. There is no exception to the legal concept of self-defense when one person is being attacked by another. This is constitutionally supported  under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause.

The second tactic comes form those who support "stand your ground" laws, the legal idea that "individuals can use force to defend themselves without first attempting to retreat from the danger." These laws exist in some jurisdictions now and are being pushed by conservatives to be enacted elsewhere.

People who to try to outlaw abortions don't realize it, but these combined legal points actually increase the legal justification for abortion at any time.

So, if a fetus is not legally seen as a person, there is no basis in the law on which to outlaw abortions because the pregnant woman is not harming anyone. On the other hand, if the fetus is declared to be a person, a pregnant woman actually has the addition legal support of the universal tenet of self-defense that clearly allows an abortion to be performed if so desired, and in areas where "stand your ground laws" exist, her legal justification is even more solid.


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