Michael F Schundler
5 min readJul 17, 2024

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You made misstatements right off the bat.

First, human rights accrue to humans, they were granted by the Creator and are unalienable, so there is no need or ability for government to grant them or withhold them without violating its right to exist (at least according to the Declaration of Independence).

Human rights are not the rights of persons. The word "person" is a legal term of art and can apply to corporations, trusts, and other legal entities. Person is therefore defined by law as are the rights of persons, which are separate from human rights.

There is a lot of discussion on this subject of persons in both Roe v Wade and the Citizens United cases. Perhaps one of the easier rules of thumb is that anyone or thing that can own property or be sued is a "person". So, if your neighbor's dog bites you, you can't sue the dog, it is not a "person", but you can sue your neighbor, who owns the dog. If your child gets injured in school, you can sue the school district, because the school district is considered a "person".

Under Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that once an unborn baby became viable it was recognized as a "person" and as such acquire "personhood" rights. This decision was not unanimous, nor was it careless. But it was arbitrary since the only logic behind it was the idea that in theory the baby no longer needed the mother to survive.

This person status did not create the "right to life" for the unborn baby. That always existed, instead by recognizing the unborn baby as a "person", the unborn baby became entitled to having its "human right to life" protected by the government. This created the "authority" of the government to restrict abortions of "viable babies" (persons) unless the mother's life was threatened by the pregnancy.

As an aside, there is third status, citizenship. In the US citizenship is acquired at birth or upon becoming naturalized and with citizenship comes special rights that don't belong to all persons like voting (though even in this case, felons and minors do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship until they reach the age of "majority"). When the rights of citizens are infringed upon, typically, the law argues it must be done to protect the rights of others or because the person is not mentally fit to act to exercise their rights. So, like "persons" the rights of citizens can be defined by law.

Your little finger is not human, it is an appendage of a human. The definition of what is "life" has been established by science. The definition of human life derives from that definition. Here is NASA's definition...

The NASA definition of life, “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”

Clearly, your little finger does not fit this definition, but the unborn baby does. Now if your finger could grow the rest of a human if it were detached (like some species), then it would meet the criteria of human.

You are correct, human rights are not part of our Constitution, because human rights are unalienable, they were not required as part of a social contract, which is effectively a societal legal document. No government has the right to take them or grant them human rights. When we say that China is violating the human rights of the Uighurs, China is not violating its Constitution.

However, having rights does not automatically earn you the right to have government protect them... that requires you be recognized as a "person" of that society. We don't recognize Uighurs as US citizens and so they have no right to our government's protection. We may advocate for them out of compassion, but there is no legal obligation to come to their rescue.

You are wrong regarding unborn babies being recognized as persons. Under Roe v Wade the viable unborn baby was recognized as a person. At that point the baby already had human rights, but the baby now had the right to have the baby's human rights protected by government.

The term "murder" is again a legal term, not a biological one or scientific one. If a pregnant woman is shot, the guilty party is often charged with a "double" murder. The term "murder" applies to any unborn baby covered by the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. You might enjoy reading what the law defines as a human.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-212) is a United States law that recognizes an embryo or fetus in utero as a legal victim, if they are injured or killed during the commission of any of over 60 listed federal crimes of violence. The law defines "child in utero" as "a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."[1]

The term "child in utero" extends to any stage of development. So, under the law, if the baby is killed as a result of an illegal act, the baby has been "murdered". Sorry, it does not fit your narrative, but that is how the law works.

So how can abortion be legal and not be murder? The catch is if the unborn baby dies as a "result of an illegal act". So, an abortion would only not be "murder" if it was performed under the protection of the law much as the application of the death penalty by the state.

To be clear, a woman having an abortion would not be guilty of murder, the murder charge would be levied against the physician or person who performed the procedure, and it has been in the past!

So, most of your response is not grounded in science or the law, but it is largely a narrative you have constructed to argue that abortions are okay. That narrative might work for you, but it is neither biologically nor legally valid.

Instead for any abortion not to be murder, it must be a legally sanctioned medical procedure or to protect the life of the mother. In Roe v Wade, the government accepted the argument, that the baby's human right to life and the mother's reproductive rights (derived under Roe v Wade's exceedingly nuanced interpretation that the Right to Pursue Happiness extended to the right of a woman not having to carry a baby she does not wish to carry to term).

This creates a situation where both the baby and woman have human rights that are irreconcilable and only when that is the case, does our Constitution empower the people through their elected representatives to resolve this conflict. Every society must have a way to resolve conflict even between unalienable rights.

To survive challenge, the resolution must show that both the baby's right to life and the woman's right to pursue happiness were considered and the compromise no matter how individuals within society might feel represents what the society collectively has decided as fair under the circumstances.

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