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Feb. 9, 2005 In logic, when your conclusion is absurd … it negates the argument that produced it. Roe v. Wade is an argument that has arrived at an absurd conclusion. What follows are the details. I saw a lawsuit discussed on a cable channel. A woman sued a fertility clinic for carelessly disposing of embryos that she and her husband created. She called the event a “wrongful death,” and was suing on the basis that the embryos were living persons. When I first tuned in, I thought it was a story of a frivolous lawsuit. I moved on to the basketball highlights. Logic, though, has a habit of lingering in the mind. While I was watching the basketball highlights, a few thoughts knocked on the door. The legal status of the fetus, according to current law, depends on how pregnant the mother is. According to Roe v. Wade, the pregnancy has three trimesters. In the last trimester, the state has a compelling interest in regulating abortion. In the first two trimesters, according to Roe, it falls to the woman and her doctor. In actual practice, it always falls to the woman. She pretty much has the final say, and because of mental health provisions, she can say it at any time, even in the third trimester. Politicians, especially those who claim to be pro-life but who don’t want to do anything to change things, have lately agreed that Roe v. Wade is “settled law.” It may be settled law, of course, but that hasn’t settled the issue. Still, no matter how much pro-lifers hate it, we can’t argue that Roe is the standard that counts in law. OK, then, what can Roe say about this case? After all, if the decision is up to the woman, this woman made her decision. According to Roe, she has the right to decide whether her embryos are living persons. In this case, she decided they were. I switched back to the discussion. If you were a disingenuous supporter of abortion, you might be tempted to say, fine, we’ll live with that. After all, how often does a fertility clinic negligently dispose of embryos for willing parents? Abortions happen every day. Just by the numbers, pro-choicers would rather protect the vast majority of standard abortions than lose the whole argument fighting the one-in-a-million event. Let the clinic take the fall, to protect the argument. Wait. It gets better. The couple themselves originally had nine embryos, but they only saved one to freeze. They threw out the other eight. By using their same logic, the fertility clinic may be guilty of the wrongful death of one person, but the clinic and the couple are also liable for the wrongful death of the other eight. After all, you can’t claim that losing one of nine is murder, but the other eight were irrelevant. The mother is using Roe to recover damages for the death of one embryo, even though she was a willing participant in the destruction of the other eight. Sounds absurd? Of course it is, but once you choose to argue that the mother gets to decide the legal status of the fetus, you have no way out. In logic, when your conclusion is absurd … it negates the argument that produced it. This is precisely why we can’t discuss these issues in courts. Courts work entirely according to the laws of logic and implication. If you agree to X in one case, then you can’t object to X in a similar case elsewhere. Logic forbids. When cases go to the Supreme Court, the justices compare whether a current law is consistent with the Constitution. In essence, the Supreme Court’s decides what the Constitution implies. Would that the Constitution always offers clear implications; but it doesn’t. The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, as it turns out, causes a host of problems. If you try to derive implications from it, you can imply anything. The offending text is in the second sentence: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” No one disputes the due process part, and we all applaud the equal protection in principle (we may differ as to who’s covered equally, but that’s another issue). The problem lies precisely with the idea that citizens have privileges and immunities. They certainly do, but the Constitution doesn’t specify what they are. The courts, whose only authority is implication, have decided that they can imply just about anything from these ambiguous and open-ended terms. Thus, the Constitution never specifies a privacy right, but recent Courts claim privacy is implied by it. From privacy, we get abortion, sodomy, and gay marriage. Libertarians rejoice, but having made the implication, the Court is stuck with it. Logic demands. I say the whole problem is the sloppiness of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment. By implication, it brought us to the absurdity of the present case: a woman accuses wrongful death of one tossed embryo, when she happily tossed its eight siblings. In logic, when your conclusion is absurd … it negates the argument that produced it. ------------ About the author: KC Mulville holds graduate degrees in philosophy, and is an ex-Jesuit. Now a husband and father of four, he is a programmer for databases and for the web. Email KC Mulville: kcmulville@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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