On the issues of life and death

Karl Denninger dissects the "Personhood Pledge" and finds more than a few problems with it.

This is list is not exhaustive, but it ought to make people sit down and think.  The founders put forward the declaration of where rights vest ("all persons born or naturalized") under The Constitution not because they were ignorant Neanderthals (they certainly understood that a "quickened" fetus was alive!) but because there were serious and, for them, irresolvable conflicts between the various interests involved.

Nothing in this regard has changed over the intervening 225 years.  If anything technology has made the questions more complex, in that we can now do things that were unthinkable in the times of Washington, Madison and Hamilton.  We can intervene to save life that would otherwise perish, and we can intervene to make the creation of life possible where it formerly was not.  In addition, we have learned to block the transmission of life where it would otherwise occur, and with that knowledge has come the ability to destroy life.

The United States Supreme Court, in Roe .v. Wade, did not, as many people claim, decide that "all abortion is ok."  In point of fact The Court decided quite-narrowly -- that in the first three months, where separate and distinct existence apart from the mother is biologically impossible, the mother's privacy rights and the right to determination of her own body trump those of a fetus.  But the Court's same ruling sets forth that in the second and third trimesters the question does not resolve as cleanly, and that in point of fact in the third trimester, where separate and distinct survival becomes possible, the presumption is exactly in the opposite direction as it is in the first.

RTWT.  Sometimes, things aren't as simple as they're described.