Thirty years later, in the case of Dobbs v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court reaffirmed its earlier ruling in Roe when it prohibited states from imposing an “undue burden” or “substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.” Since that landmark ruling, abortion has been so politicized, polarized, and propagandized as to render it a major frontline in the culture wars. Wade that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides for a “right to privacy” that assures a woman’s right to abort her pregnancy within the first two trimesters. Thus far, abortion politics have largely revolved around who has the right to decide-the government or the individual-when it comes to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy in one’s body, sexual freedom, and the rights of the unborn.
Get ready, because it could get scary, ugly, and overwhelming really fast. Where does one draw the line over whose rights are worthy of protecting? And how do present-day legal debates over bodily autonomy, privacy, vaccine mandates, the death penalty, and abortion play into future discussions about singularity, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the privacy rights of the individual in the face of increasingly invasive, intrusive, and unavoidable government technologies?Ĭaught up in the heated debate over the legality of abortion, we’ve failed to think about what’s coming next. Who gets to decide when it comes to bodily autonomy? Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State. Unlike Nazi Germany, which forcibly sent millions to the gas chambers (as well as forcing abortion and sterilization upon many more), the new regime has enlisted the assistance of millions of people to act as its agents in carrying out a program of mass murder.”-Ron Paul The State protects the ‘right’ of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the ‘property rights’ of slave masters in their slaves.
“Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at The Rutherford Institute. This article was originally published by John W.