Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1973

Publication Information

10 Hous. L. Rev. 1059 (1972-1973)

Abstract

In the 1973 abortion cases, the Supreme Court quoted this language from an 1871 report of the Committee on Criminal Abortion of the American Medical Association. The Court, however, did not follow the advice. Instead, the seven man majority held that the child in the womb is not a "person" within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment, which provides, "No State shall . . . 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. The Court refused to call the child in the womb a living human being and refused to say that "life, as we recognize it, begins before live birth."

Comments

Reprinted with permission of Houston Law Review.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.