The 140 Amicus Briefs filed in Dobbs v. Jackson

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This forum was created by Dave Leach R-IA Bible Lover-musician-grandpa (talk) 13:35, 2 October 2023 (UTC) to mine the gold from the 140 "Amicus" Briefs filed in Dobbs v. Jackson, June 24, 2022, the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), returning the decision whether to continue the slaughter to voters state by state. The search here is for nuggets that can help end the slaughter in every state. I am mining these nuggets for my book, Reversing Landmark Abomination Cases.


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Below are the titles, dates filed, and links to, the 140 Amicus Briefs filed in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), and excerpts from them, and my comments. I indicate which of them I include in my book, Reversing Landmark Abomination Cases. They are numbered in the order they were filed.


Contents

1. Roman Catholic Diocese of Jackson and Roman Catholic Diocese of Biloxi

July 14, 2021 filed. Summary: this Court should find that the state’s interest in protecting unborn children who have the capacity to feel pain is sufficiently compelling to support a limited prohibition on abortion.

Excerpts

"The purpose of H.B.1510 is to protect those unborn children who, at 15 weeks gestation, have the capacity to feel pain. ...The government supplied expert testimony on this point" (which was excluded by the district court).

The main argument seems to be that banning abortions at 15 weeks is not a "substantial" obstacle to abortion, so it doesn't violate Casey, 1992, which prohibits a "substantial" obstacle. While it enhances "respect for life", which Gonzales, 2003, endorses. "Respect for life is clearly shown in Gonzales to be a sufficient governmental interest in abortion regulations."

States have an "important interest regarding the sanctity of life." Quoted from Carhart, 2000.

Justice Thomas was quoted saying SCOTUS has “struggle[d] to find a guiding principle to distinguish fundamental rights that warrant protection from nonfundamental rights that do not", and then it is asked, "Does an unborn child have a fundamental right to be free from pain in the womb?"

[COMMENT: what an understatement! No mention of the right to live? Actually being dead is an effective way to be free from pain. Life involves pain, and every day of life is a gift.]

The district court shouldn't have forbidden expert testimony about babies feeling pain as they are being murdered. "Whether an unborn child can feel pain when a doctor...kills it, it is clearly relevant to a law which forbids abortions at a time when the unborn child can feel pain."

"Consider how the Supreme Court has construed the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the Eighth Amendment to forbid executions of convicted murderers that involve unnecessary pain." Judge Ho added, "If courts grant convicted murderers the right to discovery to mitigate pain from executions, there's no reason they shouldn't be even more solicitous of unborn babies."

"Should Lady Justice turn a blind eye to the cry of the unborn child, sucking its thumb, hidden in the sacred dark refuge of his or her mother's womb, only to have that womb become a tomb? Justice should not abandon the unborn child. One of the most important roles of law is to fight for those that cannot fight for themselves."

"...the most fundamental of all rights - life. The right to life is, according to the Declaration of Independence, 'self-evident'. It is the sacred duty of our government to protect and respect this right...." "...a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person - among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life." That's a quote from the Catholic catechism. Paragraph 2270.

"Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Jeremiah 1:5."

[COMMENT: It is stated that babies are people, yet far less is asked than the outlawing of murdering them in every state, which that fact demands. Not even the overturning of Roe and Casey are asked, but merely the survival of Mississippi's 15 week aborticide ban. Only one Bible verse in support of that fact is given. No evidence that babies are people is offered. The testimony of court-recognized fact finders is absent.

[The comparison with pain studies for the benefit of convicted murderers being executed is a very strong point. But I am suspicious of the theory that babies much younger can't feel pain. A worm on a fish hook obviously feels pain. And a human baby, at the same size, can't?]

2. American Center for Law & Justice

Filed July 14, 2021. Stare decisis cannot trump adherence to the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

Excerpts

"Stare Decisis...cannot exalt knowingly incorrect supreme court decisions over the Constitution itself." "...the justices must prefer a a faithful reading of the Constitution to an acknowledged false reading."

The "Supremacy Clause" of the Constitution, declaring the Constitution "the supreme law of the land", does not include "decisions of the United States Supreme Court". Judges take an oath to uphold the Constitution.

"Abortion advocates, recognizing the doctrinal flimisness of this court's abortion jurisprudence, invoke the doctrine of stare decisis as counseling adherence to Roe and Casey even though they were wrongly decided."

[COMMENT: The brevity of this brief is itself a strong statement, along with its only court cites being about judges not putting themselves above the Constitution. I think it is less than half the length allowed by the Court for an amicus brief. As if to say "Look, you know how wrong Roe and Casey are. Just, STOP!"

[Nothing is explicitly said about a right to life for babies, to counter all the arguments from Hell for murdering them. But the nose-thumbing at all the arguments from Hell is breathtaking.]

3. 375 WOMEN INJURED BY SECOND AND THIRD TRIMESTER LATE TERM ABORTIONS AND ABORTION RECOVERY LEADERS

Filed July 20, 2021 “The Dignity Of Infant Life In The Womb” is appealed to.

The brief says “Amici Women who actually experienced this gruesome reality request this Court to consider the effect on the woman who has felt her baby moving alive in her body, then realizing the baby is dead and not moving, for two days, before removal. This overall description is clinical gruesomeness at its most wretched level.”

[COMMENT: Dignity of infant life. It was not pointed out that their “dignity” is made possible only by realization that they are human beings. We eat animals, and do not talk about their “dignity” as we slaughter them. Oh wait, I'm wrong. Democrats regard animal slaughter as way more violative of "dignity" than human slaughter. So maybe it is a more powerful argument in court to DENY that babies of humans are humans? They are animals, which merit greater protection?

The sentence following: “Especially if one inserts the term ‘baby’ which is the term most women use instead of the clinical term ‘fetus.’”

“Late term abortions are also a crime against humanity, which occurs when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings.”

[COMMENT: Three things are missing from making this a powerful argument against legal abortion: (1) evidence that babies are “human beings”, to trigger what Roe said would “of course...collapse” legal abortion, (2) a request of the Court to end legal abortion, without which there is little pressure on the Court to address this evidence, and (3) citing the fact that babies are human beings - not just the fact that some mothers are grossed out - as the reason legal abortion should end.]

The only “remedies” requested by the “amici women” brief are: the right to “Protect Women’s Psychological Well-Being (Health), The Dignity Of “Infant Life” In The Womb, And The Integrity Of The Medical Profession And Society”. Amici women never ask for the end of all legal abortions, but only for an end to abortions after 15 weeks as the Mississippi law targets, because “Late Term Abortion Severely Injures Significant Numbers Of Women”. It causes “Grief More Anguished and Sorrow More Profound” and “Devastating Psychological Consequences”. (For some mothers, that is.)

The murder of babies, though alleged, is not presented as a reason for the Court to do anything. The fact that only abortions past 15 weeks, which are only 4.5% of abortions, are the target, is consistent with the primary concern being for mothers, since concern for babies would call for outlawing all abortions.

This analysis should not be taken to imply that the lawyers and women involved don’t care primarily for the slaughtered, dismembered babies! Of course that is their primary concern! But I marvel that they don’t say so in their brief, citing the overwhelming, irrefutable evidence of unborn personhood by the consensus of every court-recognized finder of fact that has taken a position on “when life begins”.

4. The States of Texas Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas Georgia Idaho Indiana Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Missouri Nebraska Ohio Oklahoma South Carolina Tennessee West Virginia

Filed July 20, 2021

Summary: Changed circumstances require the Court to reevaluate its viability precedent.

5. Illinois Right to Life

Filed July 20, 2021 Our Declaration of Independence guarantees the “right to life.” This Court is the guardian of the Constitution and thus should take cognizance of the changes in culture, science, and law since Roe. The Court should revise its abortion jurisprudence to allow Mississippi and other states to enact laws to protect and further the inalienable and constitutional rights of preborn human beings. A consensus of biologists now acknowledges that a human fetus is, biologically speaking, a human being.

Footnote 10 a. The scientific literature has established that fertilization initiates a new human being. . An overwhelming majority of biologists recognize that a human’s life begins at fertilization . . . . . . . . . .

Footnote 13 c. Legislative hearings on when life begins marshalled scientific evidence that life begins at fertilization . Even doctors who perform abortions and proponents of abortion rights admit fetuses are human beings Views opposing the position that human life starts at fertilization are unscientific and ideological . Changes in the law have further e r o de d t he u nde r pi n n i ng s Roe. Those changes recognize the human fetus as a human being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Footnote 17 a. Enactment of fetal homicide laws in almost 80% of states demonstrates that, outside of the abortion context, a human fetus is legally recognized as a human being St at es a re i ncrea si ngly proposing and enacting laws protective of unborn human beings even when abortion is curtailed as a result . . . . . . . . . .

Footnote 18 4. P r ot e c t i ve le g i s l at ion h a s ameliorated many detriments associated with pregnancy The Court should not continue to follow Roe’s viability standard since it ignores the fact that a human fetus is a biological human being and legal person at all stages of the human life cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 II. SINCE A HU M A N FET US IS A HUMAN BEING, H.B. 1510 SHOULD BE SUSTAINED AS A REASONABLE PRO T EC T ION OF A PR EBOR N PERSON UNDER THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT The Fourteenth Amendment covers all human beings, including preborn humans, and guarantees the due process right to life and equal protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 1. The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to protect every human being within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Over whelming evidence now exists that human fetuses are human beings and therefore protected by the Fourteenth Amendment The Court has a constitutional duty to recognize the right of human fetuses to legal protections as persons, and to begin to build a consensus favoring protection of fetuses under law . . . . . . . . . . . .

23 B. Mississippi is entitled to pass legislation that protects prenatal humans from abortion

The question of when a human’s life begins is now recognized to be biologically determinable, and an overwhelming scientific consensus confirms the view that a human’s life begins at fertilization. (See infra at Argument I.C.2.a-c). This growing scientific consensus has prompted 38 states to enact changes in fetal homicide laws that recognize the humanity of preborn humans in non-abortive contexts, and other laws are being passed to protect preborn humans even though abortion restrictions are a consequence ...RECENT DEVELOPMENTS ESTABLISH PREVIABLE FETUSES ARE HUMAN PERSONS, RENDERING ROE AND ITS PROGENY OBSOLETE. A. State interest in protecting life is the most fundamental and important government duty.

In Roe, the Court based its “viability” standard on: (a) lack of a scientific consensus on when human life begins, (b) absence of uniform legal protection of fetuses, and (c) maternal burdens of pregnancy and child-rearing.

....” Roe, 410 U.S. at 153. The Court rejected that argument. Id. It recognized that if a human fetus is a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment, the case for unrestricted abortion would be untenable “for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.” Id. at 157.

The Court acknowledged that the state may assert a “legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life.” Id. at 154, 162. But the Court ultimately determined that the evidentiary record was insufficient to establish in science or in law when a human’s life begins. ...Thus, in Roe, the Court’s decision was based on its stated inability to locate in the record a scientific or legal basis for the humanity or personhood of the fetus, and the detriments posed by pregnancy and child-rearing. However, these conditions no longer prevail,12 so the Court is obliged to reconsider Roe in light of these changed circumstances. C. Scientific, legal, and social developments have robbed Roe’s viability standard of its original justification p. 8 ...Casey: “[I]n constitutional adjudication as elsewhere in life, changed circumstances may impose new obligations.” Id. at 864

...Roe’s recognition of a right to abort a previable pregnancy rests on the belief that the termination would not extinguish the life of a human person. That belief is no longer factually tenable given the current state of scientific knowledge concerning the origin and development of the human fetus. Roe also rests on a determination that the humanity and personhood of a human fetus was not generally recognized in law. That legal context has changed as well. Among other changes in the law, fetuses are now protected as human beings under laws prohibiting fetal homicide. Other laws, such as “heartbeat” laws and laws protecting against fetal pain, which are increasingly being enacted by the states, demonstrate their interest in protecting the youngest and most vulnerable humans. Finally, changes in the laws and the availability of social services that support and protect pregnant women have ameliorated the plight of pregnancy and lessened the burden of child-rearing. All of these changes rob Roe of its factual and legal underpinnings and require the Court to revisit and overrule it or, at a minimum, to recalibrate the viability standard in Roe and Casey, to reflect the current state of scientific understanding and the legal realities of today. 2. A consensus of biologists now acknowledges that a human fetus is, biologically speaking, a human being. a. T he scienti f ic lit er atu re ha s established that fertilization initiates a new human being.

A review of recent discoveries13 and the development of scientific literature since Roe reveal a strong consensus that sperm-egg plasma membrane fusion (fertilization) is the starting point of the life of a human organism (a human being).14 Dr. Maureen Condic, who is a member

Footnote 13. The Virtual Human Embryo (VHE), a 14,250-page illustrated atlas of human embryology, describes the stages of human development called the Carnegie Stages of Embryonic Development. Mark A. Hill, Embryology Carnegie Stages, University of New South Wales, Dec. 24, 2019, https://perma. cc/QX4R-UZXM; see also: Conception to birth -- visualized | Alexander Tsiaras TED Talk, YouTube, https://perma.cc/VL9ZRQB5, and 9 Months In The Womb: A Remarkable Look At Fetal Development Through Ultrasound By PregnancyChat.com, YouTube, https://perma.cc/ZNJ3-T4GU.

Footnote 14. Maureen L. Condic, When Does Human Life Begin? The Scientific Evidence and Terminology Revisited, 8 U. St. Thomas J.L. & Pub. Pol’y, 2013, https://perma.cc/JP33-Y8BH; Rita L. Gitchell, Should Legal Precedent Based on Old, Flawed, Scientific Analysis Regarding When Life Begins, Continue To Apply to Parental Disputes over the Fate of Frozen Embryos, When There Are Now Scientifically Known and Observed Facts Proving Life Begins at Fertilization?, 20 DePaul J. Health Care L. 1, at 8-9. (2018).

Footnote 18. Dr. Alfred Bongiovanni, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in his testimony in connection with the 1981 hearing on Senate Bill 158, the “Human Life Bill, see infra at 15-16, concluded, “I am no more prepared to say that these early stages [of development in the womb] represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty . . . is not a human being. This is human life at every stage.” Cited in House Resolution No. 214, https://perma. cc/6XRG-L2C8.

b. An overwhelming majority of biologists recognize that a human’s life begins at fertilization. A recent international study involving 5,577 biologists from 86 countries who work at 1,061 top-ranked academic institutions22 confirmed the scientific consensus on when life begins.23 The study asked biologists to confirm or reject five statements that represent the view that a human’s life begins at fertilization. The majority of the biologists in the study identified as liberal (89%), prochoice (85%), and non-religious (63%). 5,337 biologists (96%) affirmed at least one of the statements and only 240 participants declined to affirm any statements (4%). The study participants were also asked to answer an essay question: “From a biological perspective, how would you answer the question, ‘When does a human’s life begin?’” Most biologists (68%) indicated fertilization. Thus, while in Roe, the Court found that experts could not arrive at any consensus at that point in the development of man’s knowledge, that is no longer the case.

c. Legislative hearings on when life begins marshalled scientific evidence that life begins at fertilization. During hearings conducted by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Senate Bill 158, the “Human Life Bill”, numerous scientific experts testified regarding when life begins. The Official Senate Report concluded that: “Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being - a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.”24 In the hearings, Dr. Jerome Lejeune testified that “[l]ife has a very, very long history, but each individual has a very neat beginning – the moment of its conception” because “[t]o accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion ... it is plain experimental evidence.” S-158 Hearings, April 23, 1981 transcript, 18.25

Experts from leading institutions have testified that there are no alternative theories on when a human’s life...

Footnote 24. Report, Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate JudFootnote iciary Committee S-158, 97th Congress, 1st Session 1981, 7; similarly, in 2006, the legislature in South Dakota heard expert medical testimony on when human life begins and concluded that “abortion terminates the life of a unique, whole, living human being”. Report of The South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion, Submitted to the Governor and Legislature of South Dakota, Dec. 2005, https://perma.cc/4WF8-TNM3.

Footnote 25. S-158 Hearings, April 23, 1981 Transcript, https://perma. cc/6DCT-UT4P.

begins in the scientific literature. Dr. Hymie Gordon, Professor of Medical Genetics and physician at the Mayo Clinic, testified: “I have never ever seen in my own scientific reading, long before I became concerned with issues of life of this nature, that anyone has ever argued that life did not begin at the moment of conception and that it was a human conception if it resulted from the fertilization of the human egg by a human sperm. As far as I know, these have never been argued against.” Id. at 52. This lack of any published, let alone generally accepted, alternative scientific theories was also attested to by Dr. Micheline Matthew-Roth, a principal research associate in the Department of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. Id. at 41-42.

d. Even doctors who perform abortions and proponents of abortion rights admit fetuses are human beings.

Many practitioners of abortion and supporters of abortion rights acknowledge human life begins at conception.26 For example, when abortion doctor Dr. Curtis Boyd was interviewed, he acknowledged with respect to abortion: “Am I killing? Yes, I am. I know that.”27 Abortion rights supporter and ethicist Peter Singer has written that being “a member of a given species is something that

Footnote 26. Derek Smith, Pro-Choice Concedes: Prominent Abortion Proponents Concede The Barbarity Of Abortion, Human Defense Initiative, Nov. 7, 2018, https://perma.cc/GXH8-MAUU. See also, A New Ethic for Medicine and Society, California Medicine, Sep. 1970.

Footnote 27. KVUE Austin Interview of Dr. Curtis Boyd, at 0:23, YouTube, Nov. 6, 2009, https://perma.cc/GYB2-3YFY.

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can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.”28

e. Views opposing the position that human life starts at fertilization are unscientific and ideological.

While some oppose the consensus view that human life begins at fertilization, the few counter-arguments made are philosophical or ideological, rather than scientific or fact-driven. In point of fact, no viable alternative to the consensus view has been propounded.29

One opposing argument is that biological principles are incapable of classifying humans30 despite the fact that scientists have done so for countless other animal species on Earth. Other opponents suggest that a human zygote cannot be considered a human individual because it is physiologically dependent on another human. Setting aside the fact that infants are also wholly dependent on other humans for survival, this ableist distinction rejects the humanity of conjoined twins who are physiologically dependent on each other’s bodies for survival. It is also sometimes claimed that a human zygote is not yet a human

Footnote 28. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 85-86, 1993.

Footnote 29. See supra, p. 15.

Footnote 30. Richard J. Paulson, The unscientific nature of the concept that “human life begins at fertilization,” and why it matters, Fertility and Sterility, Volume 107, Issue 3, Mar. 2017, https:// perma.cc/QDE5-C5C4.

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being because many fetuses fail to survive pregnancy and childbirth. But this view is fallacious because whether a human being is able to continue in life is not a condition of his or her status as a human being. A human life is always a life with potential, which may or may not be realized.

Ultimately, opposing arguments to the scientific consensus that a human’s life begins at fertilization are fallacious or focus on aspects of biology that are not relevant to the biological classification of human beings.

3. Changes in the law have further eroded the underpinnings Roe. Those changes recognize the human fetus as a human being.

a. Enactment of fetal homicide laws in almost 80% of states demonstrates that, outside of the abortion context, a human fetus is legally recognized as a human being.

In its 1973 Roe decision, the Court stated, “the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.” Roe, 410 U.S. at 162. This has changed markedly since that time. Legislators in 38 of 50 states have enacted laws that criminalize the intentional killing of a human fetus. These “fetal homicide” laws, which only apply to non-abortive killings, recognize that preborn human fetuses are human beings entitled to protection under the law. In this context, a majority of states today recognize a human fetus as a human person from the moment of fertilization.31

Footnote 31. A listing of the states with fetal homicide laws can be found at: State Laws on Fetal Homicide and Penalty-enhancement

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Fetuses are recognized as human persons in numerous contexts: (1) laws that restrict abortion at some point in fetal development, (2) fetal homicide laws, (3) prohibitions against capital punishment imposed upon pregnant women, (4) recovery for fetal deaths under wrongful death statutes, (5) the rights of preborn children under property law, (6) legal guardianship of prenatal humans,32 (7) the rights of preborn children to a deceased parent’s Social Security and Disability benefits33, and (8) the rights of inheritance of posthumously born children.34 Despite the plethora of contexts in which fetuses are recognized as persons under the law, this Court has yet to recognize the personhood of preborn humans.

b. States are increasingly proposing and enacting laws protective of unborn human beings even when abortion is curtailed as a result.


Today, 43 states have enacted laws protecting prenatal humans although abortion is thereby restricted. All but one restrict abortion access at the earliest point

for Crimes Against Pregnant Women, National Conference of State Legislatures, May 1, 2018, https://perma.cc/3XTG-WDLB.

Footnote 32. See Paul Benjamin Linton, The Legal Status of the Unborn Child Under State Law, 6 U. St. Thomas J.L. & Pub. Pol’y, 2011, https://perma.cc/XB8E-G375.

Footnote 33. SSR 68-22: SECTION 216(h)(3)(C). – Relationship – Status of Illegitimate Posthumous Child, Social Security Administration, https://perma.cc/W3TR-89L9.

Footnote 34. Alea Roberts, Where’s My Share?: Inheritance Rights of Posthumous Children, American Bar Association, Jun. 13, 2019, https://perma.cc/36VN-HZZ8

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permissible by Roe (viability), and states have recently more emphatically asserted a state interest in the lives of previable human beings by seeking to protect them: (1) after the sixth week since that is known to be the point at which a fetus’ heart first beats (AL HB314; IA SF359) and (2) after the twentieth week since that has been found to be the point at which a fetus can first feel pain (OH SB 127).

Altogether, given the Court’s willingness to permit states to protect prenatal humans from harm and states’ desire to do so, it is clear that our nation prizes the protection of humans over the right to abortion. However, in the present case, the District and Circuit courts enjoined Mississippi’s law because this Court has yet to recognize that previable human fetuses are humans.

4. Protective legislation has ameliorated many detriments associated with pregnancy.

In deciding Roe in 1973, the Court considered the burdens upon women associated with child-rearing such as “a distressful life and future,” “[m]ental and physical health may be taxed by child care,” and “additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved.” Roe, 410 U.S. at 153. These considerations have since been significantly ameliorated through legislation including: Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972,35 the Pregnancy Discrimination Act,36 the Family

Footnote 35. 20 U.S.C. §1681 et seq.

Footnote 36. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, https://perma.cc/MH3SMLFE


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and Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”),37 the Women, Infants, and Children program (“WIC”),38 and the Pregnancy Assistance Fund (“PAF”).39

D. The Court should not continue to follow Roe’s viability standard since it ignores the fact that a human fetus is a biological human being and legal person at all stages of the human life cycle.

Roe’s recognition of a right to abort a previable pregnancy rested on the belief that termination would not extinguish the life of a human being. Developments in science and law since Roe reveal that belief to be erroneous. An abortion does take a human’s life. Given these changes, the Court should reassess Roe. ....

6. American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists

Filed July 20, 2021

THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT DOES NOT INCLUDE A LIBERTY INTEREST TO ABORT ALL PRE-VIABILITY UNBORN CHILDREN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 A. Historical Evidence Demonstrates that the Constitution Does Not Require a Ban Against All State Regulation of Previability Abortion.

Mississippi’s law is partially based on legislative findings pertaining to the advanced development and humanity of pre-born children at the gestational age of fifteen to twenty weeks. Pet. at 7-9. At twenty two days, the child’s heart begins to beat. https://www.ehd.org/your-life-before-birth-video/ (last visited July 15, 2020). At six weeks, the child begins moving. Id. At seven weeks, scientists can detect a child’s brainwaves, and the child can move his or her head and hands. Id. The child displays leg movements and the startle response. Id. At eight weeks, the child’s brain exhibits complex development. Id (Page 18)

7. Inner Life Fund and Institute for Faith and Family

Amici Brief Inner Life Fund.pdf Filed July 20, 2021

SCOTUS should grant Missippi's petition. The time has come to expose the “social equality fallacy” that demeans the ability and contributions of women by presupposing they can only achieve equality through the “right” to abortion. Great progress has been made toward the goal of gender equality in the decades since Roe and Casey — independent of access to abortion or contraception.

8. Robin Pierucci, M.D., and Life Legal Defense Foundation

Dobbs v. JWHO petition AC LLDF.pdf Filed July 20, 2021

“viability threshold for a compelling state interest in preserving human life, created by this Court in 1973, should be abandoned in favor of the medically updated and philosophically consistent standard of an “unqualified” interest in protecting life...”

In Roe, this Court determined that the state’s interest in the protection of human life became compelling at viability, relying on the fetus’ “capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb.” Id. at 163.

By contrast, in Cruzan this Court rejected the idea of “meaningful life,” holding that “a State may properly decline to make judgments about the ‘quality’ of life that a particular individual may enjoy, and simply assert an unqualified interest in the preservation of human life to be weighed against the constitutionally protected interests of the individual.” Cruzan, 497 U.S. at 282; Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 729 (1997) (quoting Cruzan and holding that the state “has an unqualified interest in the preservation of human life”) (emphasis added). See also Britell v. United States, 372 F.3d 1370, 1383 (Fed. Cir. 2004) (“It is not the role of the courts to draw lines as to which fetal abnormalities or birth defects are so severe as to negate the state's otherwise legitimate interest in the fetus' potential life.”); State v. Final Exit Network, Inc., 889 N.W.2d 296, 305-06 (Minn. Ct. App. 2016) (“The state has a compelling interest in the preservation of D.D.’s life, and the prevention of her suicide, regardless of her incurable [non-viable] condition.”)

Limiting a state’s ability to protect human lives directly to only those lives deemed “meaningful” because the arbitrary benchmark of viability has been reached is in direct conflict with this Court’s 1990 holding in Cruzan, that a state need not qualify its interest in the preservation of human life before acting. This Court should grant the petition to resolve the conflict between its abortion jurisprudence and its decisions in Cruzan and Glucksberg allowing states to protect human life regardless of the meaningfulness” of that life as measured by the uncertain yardstick of viability.

9. Cleveland Lawyers for Life

TSAC Cleveland Lawyers for Life.pdf filed July 19, 2021

The viability standard should be jettisoned in favor of the point at which the physical humanity of the fetus has become biologically manifest. Mississippi has met that burden of proof.” (15 week development is described. The cutoff for legal abortion should be when there are “biological markers” rather than when babies can survive outside wombs.)

10. David Boyle

Filed July 20, 2021

This is an attempt at a “neutral” plea for compromise. It promises respect for both sides. The index doesn’t indicate that the humanity of the unborn is remotely addressed.

11. Jewish Pro-life Foundation

Filed July 21, 2021

The Coalition for Jewish Values, Rabbi Yacov David Cohen, Rabbi Chananya Weissman, and Bonnie Chernin (President, Jewish Life League)

Glory to God! This is largely a Bible study that addresses Deuteronomy 30:19, Exodus 21:22-25, Exodus 23:7, Genesis 9:6-7, Isaiah 49:1, Jeremiah 1:5, Jeremiah 22:3, Jeremiah 29:6, Jeremiah 29:11, Leviticus 18:21, Leviticus 19:16, Proverbs 24:11-12, Proverbs 31:8, Psalm 139:13-16, Psalm 106:35-38.

This brief doesn’t say so, but Roe “opened the door” to the relevance of a Bible study by saying the alleged failure of doctors and preachers “to arrive at any consensus” about “when life begins” was Roe’s principal reason why “the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is unable to speculate” about whether babies are people. Roe thus treated theology as highly relevant, and yet Roe analyzed no Scripture. This cries out for correction and updating.

This pleading to the Court is Amici’s attempt to rescue innocent children in the womb from execution, as commanded in our Bible, Proverbs 24:11-12: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this’, does not He who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not He who guards your life know it? Will He not repay everyone for what they have done?”

This brief begins by asking for more than just to outlaw abortions after 15 weeks: “The Mississippi law in this case seeks to protect the God-given right to life for babies of 15 weeks gestation and beyond. Yet, most significant developmental milestones occur during the first eight weeks following conception. A baby’s heart beats at 22 days, and her brainwaves can be measured at 6 weeks. At 9 weeks all internal organs are present and the baby is sensitive to touch. As early as 8 weeks, the ‘infant’ feels real physical pain during an abortion.”

“.... Jeremiah 22:3 admonishes us to avoid causing pain and death to the powerless: Do what is right and just; rescue the wronged from their oppressors; do nothing wrong or violent to the stranger, orphan or widow; don’t shed innocent blood in this place.’”

The brief asks nothing less than overturning of Roe, Doe, and Casey. Not explicitly asked for but strongly implied is also protection of the unborn, meaning not allowing any state to keep abortion legal: “Amici implore the Court to study our arguments in this filing and thereby find the moral authority and conviction to overturn Roe, Doe and Casey. Indeed, to apply the protective elements of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to all children.”

The brief makes a claim for Judiasm which is even more so a claim for its Bible, which of course is shared with Christians. It is a claim about what the Bible did first. But stating what the Bible pioneered actually understates its uniqueness, because to this day no other religion, except to the extent it was influenced by the Bible, supports these rights and freedoms:

“Judaism Is The Original Pro-Life Religion. It Was The First Religion In Human History To Sanctify Human Life From Conception To Natural Death And To Prohibit Child Sacrifice.

“Judaism has a strong legal tradition of protecting human life and prohibiting the murder of innocents. Jewish law and tradition emphasize and support the moral right to life for all human beings at every stage of development based on the understanding that all people are created in the image of God; therefore, each of us has intrinsic value and worth with a destiny to fulfill God’s vision for humanity on Earth.

“Psalm 139:13-16 reveals this: ‘For you created my inmost being: you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made . . .My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to me.’”

…. “All of us who are able to do so have the duty to enforce this right of the child in the womb: Leviticus 19:16: ‘Do not stand idly by when your neighbor’s life is at stake.’”

…. “The Almighty gives clear instructions on the life issue in Deuteronomy 30:19: ‘This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.’”

…. “Maimonides, declared in his compilation of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah: ‘The definition of murder according to the Noahide Laws includes a person “who kills even one unborn in the womb of its mother,” and adds that such a person is liable for the death penalty.’”

“The Talmud (Sanhedrin 57b) says that an unborn child is included in the Noahide prohibition of bloodshed that is learned from Genesis 9:6-7: (from a direct translation of the original text), ‘He who spills the blood of man within man shall have his blood spilt for in the image of God made He man. And you, be fruitful, and multiply; swarm in the earth, and multiply therein.’ The Talmud interprets ‘the blood of man in man” to include a fetus, which is the blood of man in man.’”

…. “Clearly, the Jewish religion prohibits child sacrifice, the modern day version being abortion, as stated in the Torah: Leviticus 18:21: ‘Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.’ Psalm 106:35-38: ‘They mingled with the nations and adopted their customs. They worshiped their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to false gods. They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was desecrated by their blood.’”

Rabbinical opinion prohibits even helping non-Jews abort – even for “physical abnormalities”.

Rabbi Chananya Weissman: “It should not need to be debated that unborn children have the right to be born, and the lives of the elderly and infirm are no less precious than the lives of society’s most fortunate. The rich and powerful do not have the right to decide the value of anyone’s life, nor when someone has ‘already lived their life’ and it’s time for them to go. That is strictly the purview of God, who forbids us to make such distinctions or calculations, even for the alleged ‘greater good.’ It is always for the greater evil. It is always to displace God. The Torah teaches that every life is a unique world, and every moment of every life is infused with the potential to achieve great spiritual heights.”

Rabbi Pinchas Teitz: (Commenting on Deuteronomy 21:7): “Shedding innocent blood in Jewish life is so reprehensible that at times even those not responsible for the act of murder who hear of such an incident must dissociate themselves from it. This is expressed by the recitation of the elders of the city in whose proximity a dead man is found. In the eglo arufo ceremony that the Torah mandates, they must wash their hands, saying: ‘Our hands did not shed this blood,’ even though there is no reason to assume that they were directly involved in the death. How, then, are we to respond with less than shock to the killing of 100,000 fetuses through abortion in Israel, year after year? This is certainly a sin against Torah . . . It is a crime against Jewry, against mankind, and even against the Land itself—for the Torah clearly warns that the Land, in its sensitivity to corruption, can tolerate no bloodshed.”

In Jewish law the only time abortion is permitted is to save the life of the mother. The brief doesn’t give a reference from the Bible, but a footnote explains, “One who is ‘pursuing’ another to murder him or her. According to Jewish law, such a person must be killed by any bystander after being warned to stop and refusing.” This describes a kind of self defense or defense of others. Scriptures I think of are: 2 Samuel 2:18-23, where Abner begged Asahel not to attack him, but Asahel refused so Abner killed him. Or Exodus 22:2 which excuses a homeowner for killing a thief who breaks in at night.

I particularly appreciate the brief’s analysis of Exodus 21:22-25, the ONLY citation of the Bible included in Roe v. Wade, in a footnote. The brief says: “A note about Exodus 21:22-25, the mistranslation of which has led many to conclude that Judaism condones the mass slaughter of infant life.

“This conclusion is entirely false. The verse describes a case in which fighting men in close proximity to a pregnant woman inadvertently cause a miscarriage. The Torah specifies that the guilty party would be prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter only if the pregnant woman herself dies. If the infant in the womb dies, they must pay only a monetary fine.

“Long used by abortion advocates to reframe abortion as legal in Judaism, this text is not a license to abort infant life; rather, it is a reference to involuntary manslaughter requiring an adjudicated fine. It is not a capital crime.

“...This verse must be carefully understood. Many translations read ‘and a miscarriage occurs’ rather than as ‘a premature birth results’ as I have it here. The passage, in my opinion, is to ‘a premature birth’ when the context is considered. The text actually says that if the child ‘departs’ [“yasa”] the womb and no other damage ensues from the event. In other words, if because of the struggle the baby is born early but is otherwise fine, then the men may be required to pay damages for their carelessness but no more. ‘But if other damage ensues,’ i.e. the baby is born with some deformity or born dead, then the standard penalties will apply, ‘an eye for eye, tooth for tooth’. If the child dies as a result, the men are guilty of the murder, a life for a life. The text makes no sense any other way. The Hebrew term shachol references an abortion or miscarriage. That word is not used here. There is conclusive evidence that both Torah and Rabbinic halacha regarding the pre-birth child as fully human and subject to the same protections and respect as all other people.”

(I will further note that the penalty is to be decided by a jury. I take this as so the jury can take into account eyewitness testimony about how deliberately the woman was struck. Did a man deliberately aim his fist at her? Did she insert herself into the dispute so much as to make her injury unavoidable?)

More Scripture: “Our tradition teaches us to advocate for vulnerable and victimized targets of abuse and murder. Proverbs 31:8 demands, ‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves.’ We acknowledge the harms done by abortion and speak out to prevent them.”

The brief is the only one to note fornication as another deadly (spiritually and physically) consequence of abortion: “Abortion has become an accepted means of birth control, encouraging irresponsible, dangerous sexual activity leading to an explosion of sexually transmitted disease. Women die from legal abortion.”

Scripture is cited in sympathy for the loss to men of abortion: “It is now confirmed that men grieve lost fatherhood, resulting in broken relationships and dysfunctional family life. We heed Jeremiah 29:6, emphasizing the importance of the family even in difficult times: ‘Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.’”

“Judaism’s biblical tradition identifies the child in the womb as precious, valuable and unique. Isaiah 49:1: ‘Before I was born the Lord called me; from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.’ And Jeremiah 1:5: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart, I appointed you as a prophet of nations.’”

Evidence of the regard for unborn human life in Jewish law: “when human life is endangered, a Jew is required to violate any Sabbath law that stands in the way of saving that person. The concept of life being in danger is interpreted broadly; for example, it is mandated that one violate the Sabbath to take a woman in active labor to a hospital. Jewish law also not merely permits, but demands, that the Sabbath be violated in order to save infant life in the womb. As lifesaving activity is the only situation in which a Sabbath violation is permitted, were the infant child not deemed alive by the Torah, this behavior would be entirely prohibited.”

“Abortion industry practices dramatically contrast with Jewish ethics and moral guidelines in business, cleanliness, sexual propriety, responsibility to protect friends and neighbors from harm, honesty, and women’s safety.

“Exodus 23:7 admonishes us: ‘Keep away from fraud, and do not cause the death of the innocent and righteous; for I will not justify the wicked.’

“Abortion providers have long been exempted from standard medical practices and regulatory oversight. They perpetuate sex crimes by routinely failing to report evidence of sexual assault and sex trafficking. They fail to provide informed consent to patients and fail to counsel patients on alternatives to the abortion procedure or possible immediate and long-term negative consequences of the procedure.”

…. “Judaism prohibits desecrating the human body, but abortion destroys a human body, and the harvesting of baby parts for profit defies Jewish respect for the dead.”

“Today, the Justices have all the information needed to fully understand and acknowledge the status of the infant life, and have done so in Gonzales, at 159, 160. From conception onward, children in their mother’s womb manifest humanity to such an extent that only a decision that protects their lives and futures is humane and just.”

The rest of the brief reports striking parallels between the Jew-dehumanizing rhetoric of Nazi Germany and the baby-dehumanizing rhetoric of American abortionists. Except that “only” 6 million Jews were slaughtered in Germany, compared with 60 million babies in America.

I didn’t know the abortion pill, RU486, is actually the same chemical Hitler used to gas Jews, when it was called Zyklon B! “The Population Council brought the abortion pill to the United States in 1994. Originally called Zyklon B, Nazi scientists developed it in gaseous form to kill Jews in concentration camp ‘showers.’62 RU 486 is now used in 40% of all abortions due to inflated pricing and low overhead costs.” https://www.lifenews.com/2014/02/23/company-that-madezyklon-b-for-nazi-holocaust-made-ru-486-for-abortions/

“In a 1999 speech in Washington, D.C., Mr. Ellie Wiesel stressed our obligation to defend the defenseless. ‘We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.’”

The conclusion is the most magnificent I have read, which it would not have been without quoting God: “We must end abortion, an appalling crime against humanity. To begin the process of reconciliation with our Creator, to restore the dignity of those who have perished, and to return our country to a life affirming nation. Amici ask the Court to rise above political concerns and to contemplate the Divine promise bestowed upon every human being as pledged in Jeremiah 29:11: ‘For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”


(My online account is out of red ink, but the entire section from here to the end is included in Statement of Fact #4, Footnote #2)


     Jewish Prolife Foundation [1]

This tragic human rights violation must be remedied. The Mississippi law in this case seeks to protect the God-given right to life for babies of 15 weeks gestation and beyond. Yet, most significant developmental milestones occur during the first eight weeks following conception. A baby’s heart beats at 22 days, and her brainwaves can be measured at 6 weeks. At 9 weeks all internal organs are present and the baby is sensitive to touch.4 As early as 8 weeks, the “infant”5 feels real physical pain during an abortion.6 This is much sooner than the 15-week issue before the Court, a gestational age when the pain felt by the baby must surely be considered. Jeremiah 22:3 admonishes us to avoid causing pain and death to the powerless: “Do what is right and just; rescue the wronged from their oppressors; do nothing wrong or violent to the stranger, orphan or widow; don’t shed innocent blood in this place.”


     Footnotes:
     4 Endowment for Human Development. Prenatal Summary. https://www.ehd.org/prenatal-summary.php
     5 Gonzales 159, 160
     6 5 Gonzales 159, 160.
     6 Expert Tells Congress Unborn Babies Can Feel Pain Starting at 8 Weeks. Ertelt, Steven. May 23, 2013. LifeNews. https://www.lifenews.com/2013/05/23/expert-tells-congress-unborn-babies#can-feel-pain-starting-at-8-weeks/
     Center for Medical Progress and David Daleide www.supremecourt.gov /DocketPDF/19/19-1392/185155/20210728163153060_Amici%20Brief%20of%20CMP-Daleiden.pdf]

1. By 15 weeks’ gestation, the human infant in the womb unmistakably manifests “the human form” identical to any other member of our community. Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 160 (2007). Ironically, it is precisely from this point when the fetus becomes most recognizably a fellow human being, that the fetuses vulnerable to abortion become most useful as an experimental biologic “resource.” Even though four-month-old infants in the womb move, kick, suck their thumbs, hiccup, and demonstrate a readily discernable heartbeat and brainwaves, App. 65a,4 and even though the Constitution guarantees that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall exist in America nor that any person be deprived of life without due process of law, U.S. Const., amends. XIII § 1, XIV § 1, these same children can be routinely killed through livedismemberment abortions or trafficked and sold for experimental use. (Page 3)


     Footnote: 4 Katrina Furth, Fetal EEGs: Signals from the Dawn of Life, ON POINT SERIES 28 (Nov. 2018), https://lozierinstitute.org/fetal#eegs-signals-from-the-dawn-of-life/; Winslow J. Borkowski & Richard L. Bernstine, Electroencephalography of the Fetus, 5(5) NEUROLOGY 362–65 (May 1, 1955)
     National Catholic Bioethics Center, et al. [www.supremecourt.gov/ DocketPDF/19/19-1392/185239/20210729121001402_19-1392%20tsac%20National%20Catholic%20Bioethics%20Center.pdf]

Mississippi’s law is partially based on legislative findings pertaining to the advanced development and obvious humanity of pre-born children at the gestational age of fifteen to twenty weeks. Pet. at 7-9. At twenty-two days, the child’s heart begins to beat. https://www.ehd.org/your-life-before-birth-video/ (last visited July 15, 2020). At six weeks, the child begins moving. Id. At seven weeks, scientists can detect a child’s brainwaves, and the child can move his or her own head and hands. Id. The child also displays leg movements and the startle response by that time. Id. At eight weeks, the child’s brain exhibits complex development. Id. (p. 14)

12. Alabama Center for Law and Liberty

Filed July 23, 2021

“ACLL believes that life begins at the moment of fertilization and that unborn children are people entitled to equal protection of the law.” This statement falls short of claiming unborn “personhood” is an objective fact. It also falls short of proving it is an objective fact. This phrasing treats it as ACLL’s subjective “belief”.

Supposing ACLL’ “belief” to be true, then murdering the unborn violates the 14th Amendment: “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment believed that God gave every person the natural right to life and that unborn children were ‘people’ entitled to the Amendment’s protection. Consequently, laws that protect everyone from murder except unborn children violate the Equal Protection Clause.”

ACLL asks that abortions after 15 weeks be outlawed. That requires the Court to overturn Roe’s claim that a state can’t protect babies before “viability”.

ACLL therefore points out something illogical about the “viability” standard: “if a person’s right to life is dependent on his ability to survive without the help of others, then most people would not have a right to life. Most of us wake up each day in a dwelling that was built by someone else, eat food that was grown by someone else, drink water that was sent to our house by someone else, go to work in a car that was built by someone else, and provide goods or services to someone else in exchange for payment...”

ACLL notes “we know far more about prenatal life now than we did when Roe and Casey were decided”, but none of what we now know is offered as evidence proving the veracity of ACLL’s “belief” that “life begins at the moment of fertilization and that unborn children are people entitled to equal protection of the law.”

Inconsistency in law through abortion precedents is given as a reason to overturn Roe: “criminal law, tort law, guardianship law, health care law, property law, and family law often treat the unborn as persons, leaving abortion as an outlier.”

ACLL asks more than any other brief: not just that Roe be overturned, but that all unborn babies be protected, which means no state could keep abortion legal: “C. The Court Should Not Only Overrule Roe but Also Hold That the Constitution Protects the Child’s Right to Life.”

Why should the Court do that? ACLL offers another “if...then” argument: “Roe itself conceded that if an unborn child is a person, the case for abortion collapses, because the child’s right to life would be specifically guaranteed by the Amendment. Roe, 410 U.S. at 156-57. The Court was correct in that regard.”

Well, yes, Roe was right, but Roe didn’t, 50 years ago, think an unborn child being a “person” was “established”. Is it established now? Surely it is now that every court-recognized fact-finder that has taken a position has ruled unanimously, but ACLL didn’t mention that evidence, or any other evidence over the past 50 years.

ACLL continues: “The Fourteenth Amendment states, in relevant part: “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.” U.S. Const., amend. XIV, § 1 (emphasis added).”

But ACLL offers no evidence because “other amicus briefs are developing this point in more detail” so ACLL will only observe that the question has “gained considerable attention” and “has also been debated in conservative academic circles.” Well, that’s news, isn’t it? Many cites are given, but no quotes or conclusions.

One cite that I appreciate is “Charles I. Lugosi, Conforming to the Rule of Law: When Person and Human Being Finally Mean the Same Thing in Fourteenth Amendment Jurisprudence, 4 Geo. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 360 (2007).”

My book, “How States can Outlaw Abortion in a Way that Survives Courts”, points out that one definition of “persons” in Roe itself is “recognizably human”. No case law supports the strange notion that there are human beings who are not “persons”.

An appeal is made to the beliefs about the unborn of our ancestors: “Blackstone said, ‘Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us.’ 1 Blackstone, Commentaries *123. ‘The principle of Blackstone’s rule was that “where life can be shown to exist, legal personhood exists.’” Craddock, supra, at 554-55.12 Given that the dominant view at the Fourteenth Amendment’s passage was that life begins at conception, there is a strong case that the Fourteenth Amendment applies to unborn children.”

This is a strong attack on Roe’s logic that “the unborn have never been treated by our laws as persons in the whole sense”, and this approach invokes the legal principle that what the Constitution meant when it was enacted is what we should follow now until Americans choose to change it.

Of course, whatever any culture of any past century thought about it, unborn babies are, and always have been, in fact, fully human beings. But this evidence of court-recognize fact finders from past centuries merits inclusion with the consensus of court-recognized fact finders over Roe's 49 bloody years, including juries, expert witnesses, state legislatures, Congress, and individual judges who took a position on "when life begins".

After its history lesson, ACLL concludes with another “if...then” argument: “Thus, if all people are endowed with their Creator with the unalienable gift of life, and if unborn children are people, then the States may not deny equal protection of the laws to them.”

“If”? “If”?

“Therefore, this Court should not only overrule Roe and its progeny but also hold that the Fourteenth Amendment protects unborn children from abortion. If this is too far for the Court to go in the present case, then it should at the very least refrain from foreclosing that question from being presented in the future.”

ACLL deserves credit for its strong, clear request for protection of the unborn: It is a “fact that Americans viewed unborn children as people when they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. As Roe itself conceded, establishing the suggestion of personhood would make the case for abortion collapse. Roe, 410 U.S. at 156-57.”

13. National Right to Life Committee and Louisiana Right to Life Federation

Filed July 23, 2021

“b. States may assert an interest in protecting preborn, individual human life, including against pain, during all periods of pregnancy.” That was a subheading. The subject was given 152 more words which did not say babies are “human life”, or present supporting evidence, or point out that legal abortion must end when that is acknowledged.

14. Jewish Coalition For Religious Liberty

Filed July 26, 2021

“Given the arguments made in prior cases, JCRL is concerned that proponents of a constitutional right to abortion will assert a novel “religious-veto” view of religious liberty that, if accepted, would make it more difficult for sincere religious adherents to obtain accommodations in future cases.”

Religious proponents of a constitutional right to abortion have previously offered a novel view under which their religious views would dictate what laws may govern every American, even those with different faiths or no faith at all. This Court should reject that novel “religious-veto” view as it would ultimately diminish religious liberty for everyone.

2 Letter From George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 18 August 1790, FOUNDERS ONLINE, (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135) (last visited July 13, 2020) (“[T]he Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” In this country, “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”). 3 Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 313 (1952) (“We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and that lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma.”). from targeting religious activity,4 require state actors to treat religious conduct as favorably as comparable secular conduct,5 or prevent the government from substantially burdening religious activity unless doing so is necessary to further a compelling government interest.6 These traditional Free Exercise protections require that the state accommodate religious exercise, but they do not prevent government entities from enforcing laws against Americans who lack religious objections.7

4 Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993).

5 Tandon v. Newsom, 141 S. Ct. 1294 (2021).

6 Holt v. Hobbs, 574 U.S. 352 (2015).

7 Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 236 (1972) (creating a religious accommodation to exempt Amish parents from having to send their children to formal high-school while confirming that, “[n]othing we hold is intended to undermine the general applicability of the State's compulsory school-attendance statutes … .”).

Such protections help ensure that religious adherents can fully participate in civil society without having to abandon their faith.8 Importantly, they protect religious adherents without requiring that the rest of society follow their faith.9

8 Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398, 404 (1963) (finding it unconstitutional for the government to force a religious adherent to “choose between following the precepts of her religion and forfeiting benefits, on the one hand, and abandoning one of the precepts of her religion in order to accept work, on the other hand.”); Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S. 599, 616 (1961) (Stewart, J. dissenting) (“Pennsylvania has passed a law which compels an Orthodox Jew to choose between his religious faith and his economic survival. That is a cruel choice. It is a choice which I think no State can constitutionally demand.”)

9 Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, Pa., No. 19-123, 2021 WL 2459253, at *9 (U.S. June 17, 2021) (“CSS seeks only an accommodation that will allow it to continue serving the children of Philadelphia in a manner consistent with its religious beliefs; it does not seek to impose those beliefs on anyone else”); id. at *20 (Alito, J. concurring) (“the text of the Free Exercise Clause gives a specific group of people (those who wish to engage in the ‘exercise of religion’) the right to do so without hindrance”). 10 See e.g., Brief for American Jewish Congress, et. al., as Amici Curiae at 4, Webster v. Reprod. Health Servs., No. 88-605, 492 U.S. 490 (1989) (“given the dramatically contrasting religious views about whether and when abortion is permitted or required, state statutes drastically curtailing access to abortion

In the past, religious supporters of a right to abortion have advocated for a novel conception of religious liberty that is incompatible with this traditional understanding. In their view, the fact that some religions may allow or even require women to obtain abortions should cause this Court to recognize a general constitutional right to abortion. See Brief for 178 Organizations as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents at app. a, Planned Parenthood of Se. Pa. v. Casey, Nos. 91-744, 91-902, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) (“in the face of the great moral and religious diversity in American society over abortion and in the light of Jewish traditions which in some cases command abortion, and in many others permit it, the existing constitutional rules, set down by Roe v. Wade, should be maintained ... .”) (citation omitted). The “right” that such advocates propose would not be limited to protecting the religious exercise of objectors. Instead, it would prohibit states from pursuing their interest in protecting the lives of unborn children, even in instances that would not impact adherents’ exercise of their faith.10 The proponents of such a right thus do not seek to ensure that they can fully participate in society without compromising their religious exercise; they seek to yoke the rest of society to their theological preferences.

This novel “religious-veto” view of religious liberty is inconsistent with this Court’s precedents and, if given credence, would make it more difficult to protect religious liberty in the future.

At first glance, a doctrine that would allow religious adherents to entirely block the state from pursuing goals with which they disagree—extending beyond protecting their own free exercise—might seem appealing to religious liberty advocates. However, such a novel and imperious regime would quickly prove untenable, especially in a large and religiously diverse country.

Under the religious-veto view of the Free Exercise Clause, every decision in favor of a religious adherent would entirely foreclose the state from pursuing its chosen interests. Such paralysis is not desirable, nor should it be the goal of those who seek to foster a religiously free and diverse nation.

In the long term, the novel “religious-veto” view would diminish protections for religious exercise.

[In other words, PP was not just demanding “free exercise of religion” for believers, but “free exercise of religion” to murder unbelieving babies, undercutting the value of any “compelling government interest” in saving lives, and the fundamental right to life of human babies.]

In Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, this Court worried that applying the then existing system of religious accommodations might be “courting anarchy.” 494 U.S. 872, 888 (1990). Amicus vigorously disagrees that granting religious accommodations poses such a risk and believes the Court should overrule Smith. In fact, this Court has recently loosened Smith’s strictures, and has signaled that it may reconsider them entirely. However, the novel religious-veto rule proposed by supporters of a right to abortion would legitimize Smith’s concerns.

Granting every religious person in America an absolute veto over any law that burdens his faith might in fact be “courting anarchy.” In order to avoid the negative consequences that would predictably follow from accepting a religious-veto theory of religious liberty, courts would likely either double-down on Smith’s restrictive reading of the First Amendment or adopt a new and even less favorable framework for granting relief to religious adherents. Fortunately, religious vetoes are not what the First Amendment or this Court’s precedents require.

Even if courts continued to apply something resembling the current standards, religious liberty proponents would be less likely to prevail under the religious-veto approach than they are under the existing religious-accommodation approach.

Currently, the government can only burden an adherent’s religious exercise if it can show that “the asserted harm of granting specific exemptions to particular religious claimants” is of the highest magnitude.11 That analysis, which is favorable to religious objectors, only makes sense so long as the remedy is an individual exemption. Under the religious-veto approach, courts would have to analyze the harm of completely negating a law because exemptions would no longer be limited to the specific objectors. In other words, courts would have to determine whether the government has a compelling interest in enforcing a law at a societal rather than to any one person at an individual level. Such an analysis is far less favorable to religious adherents than the current test.

15. Catholic Medical Association, National Association of Catholic Nurses-USA, Idaho Chooses Life and Texas Alliance for Life

Filed July 26, 2021

This entire brief attacks the subjectivity of Roe’s “viability” standard. The lower courts had overruled Mississippi’s 15 week abortion ban on the ground that 15 weeks is before “viability”, and states have no legitimate interest in regulating abortion before viability.

The CMA conclusion: “...It is an illusory distinction without legal or practical significance. Roe has pretended to be what it is not for long enough. It should be overturned so that states once again may provide legal protection for unborn human life.”

No evidence is offered to prove the unborn are human to judges who profess not to be able to “speculate” about such deep subjects.

One point I found interesting: “The Court [in Roe] provided no explanation as to why the state’s interest in protecting human life should grow substantially as the unborn child grows and develops during the pregnancy. Nor did the Court attempt to explain why the state’s interest in protecting unborn human life just prior to viability should be nonexistent and then suddenly appear just after viability.” Respect for human life of course accords all human life “equal protection of the laws”. Without that uniquely American, uniquely Biblical respect, prejudice, dehumanization, and slavery face no restraint.

16. African-American, Hispanic, Roman Catholic and Protestant Religious and Civil Rights Organizations and Leaders

Filed July 26, 2021 by Mathew D. Staver, Liberty Counsel

This brief associates abortion, abortionists, and abortion-supporting courts, with the Eugenics movement “THAT ELIMINATES “LESS DESIRABLE” RACES AND CERTAIN CLASSES OF PEOPLE TO EVOLVE A SUPERIOR HUMAN POPULATION.” It starts off with a shot at the district judge who insulted Mississippi’s motives as part of a long string of racist denials of rights; this Liberty Counsel brief accuses the whole abortion movement, including Roe, Doe, Casey, etc. as the gold standard of racism.

“The sinister goal of the eugenics movement was to eliminate ‘unfit’ and ‘undesirable’ people—those with mental and physical disabilities as well as certain races.”

LC points out the rest of the title of Darwin’s racist “Origin of Species” which today’s atheists normally leave out of their proud citations: “or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”! Many quotes are given from Darwin’s 1871 book, “The Descent of Man”, which must be terribly embarrassing for any atheist or evolutionist. He makes a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard look like a paragon of intelligence and tolerance.

You’ve just got to go to this link and read it. This guy’s tirades are a sight to behold!

Then it’s Margaret Sanger’s turn. Wow! The district judge had derided Mississippi which “sterilized six out of ten black women” at a local county hospital “against their will.” Well, LC points out that was the doings of Margaret Sanger, the heroine of that district judge.

Then it was the Supreme Court’s turn!

“In Buck, the Court approved the compulsory sterilization of an allegedly ‘feeble minded’ woman who had been falsely adjudged ‘the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring.’ Buck, 274 U.S. at 205, 207. In a short opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., joined by seven other Justices, ‘offered a full-throated defense of forced sterilization...as a means to ‘prevent’ society from being ‘swamped with incompetence’”

6 out of 10 sterilized at one hospital, the district judge says? That’s nothing: “between 1907 and 1983, more than 60,000 people were involuntarily sterilized” with a boost from the Supreme Court’s 1927 ruling!

What an admission from Justice Ginsberg: “And as the late Justice Ginsburg once observed: ‘[A]t the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding of abortion.’”

Now the tie-in to abortion today: The racism, the extermination of blacks especially, is not just in the past. It’s now. “In Mississippi, 3,005 abortions were reported in 2018. Of those abortions, 72% were performed on black women, compared to just 24% on White women and 4% on women of other races.” There are pages of stats like that. “The racial disparity in abortions is largely intentional: A study based on 2010 Census data shows that nearly eight out of ten Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are within walking distance of predominantly Black or Hispanic neighborhoods. More specifically, Planned Parenthood intentionally located 86 percent of its abortion facilities in or near minority neighborhoods in the 25 U.S. counties with the most abortions. These 25 counties contain 19 percent of the U.S. population, including 28 percent of the Black population and 37 percent of the Hispanic/Latino population.”

The relevance to the case before us: “states have a compelling interesting in ‘preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.’ Id. at 1783. And that interest far outweighs this Court’s judicially fashioned distortion of the Constitution.”

So LC concludes, “The Court should condemn the district court’s disparaging rhetoric, reverse the decision below, and finally overrule Roe v. Wade and its progeny.”

17. Senators Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz

Filed July 26, 2021

Roe should be overturned, not because it legalizes murder of baby human beings, but because it is “unworkable”. That is, states have no idea what to expect of courts before they pass a law.

No evidence is offered that babies of people are people. No medical evidence, no mention of the unanimous establishment that “life begins” at the beginning, by every court-recognized fact-finder that has taken a position: juries, expert witnesses, state legislatures, congress, individual judges. The protection of babies, by legal recognition that they are fully human so no state can keep abortion legal, is not requested or, apparently, even thought of.

However, it may be that this brief, more than any other, strummed the heart-strings of the Dobbs justices to overturn Roe, because its focus was not on the cruelty towards unseen, unheard babies, but to the inconvenience for lawyers, lawmakers, and judges.

The reversal of Roe is sought. Of course if that is all that happens, without court recognition that babies are people, then abortion will still remain legal in many states.

Some excerpts:

“Justice Scalia called the undue burden standard ‘ultimately standardless’ and ‘inherently manipulable,’ with the result that it ‘will prove hopelessly unworkable in practice.’”

“Asking whether a state interest in protecting fetal life or ensuring informed decisions about abortion outweighs any burdens on the abortion decision is like asking ‘whether a particular line is longer than a particular rock is heavy.’”

“When the lower courts cannot consistently apply—or even understand—a standard after nearly thirty years of development, something is wrong.”

“Casey’s failure to provide adequate guidance for state legislatures has led national abortion rights organizations to immediately file for an injunction any time a law protecting prenatal life is enacted—if only to ‘give it a try.’ See, e.g., Women’s Med. Prof’l Corp. v. Voinovich, 130 F.3d 187, 218–19 (6th Cir. 1997) (Boggs, J., dissenting) (“The post-Casey history of abortion litigation in the lower courts is reminiscent of the classic recurring football drama of Charlie Brown and Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip.”

18. Trinity Legal Center

Filed July 26, 2021

TLC clearly states that babies are “human life”, which is clear from ultrasound, and is affirmed by Justice Scalia. Instead of offering evidence, an appeal is made to common knowledge. TLC’s affirmation does not affect what it asks of the Court: that is, an end to all legal abortion, since they are all murder, is not requested. Not even an end to Roe is asked. Only that Mississippi’s 15 week ban be allowed to stand.

Here is TLC’s affirmation of unborn life: “At the time these opinions were announced, the Justices repeatedly referred to the unborn child as ‘potential life.’ Because of advancement in medical science and technology, it is [now] known that life begins at conception. Thus, Justices O’Connor, White, and Scalia’s argument that the State has a compelling interest throughout pregnancy becomes more profound because the baby is not just a potential life, but it is the life of a whole, separate human being.

“Furthermore, from a medical perspective, the unborn child is treated as a separate patient.

“Justice Scalia further emphasized that the unborn child is not just potential life but human life. Thus, the State is protecting the human life of the unborn child and not just potential life. He stated: But ‘reasoned judgment’ does not begin by begging the question, as Roe and subsequent cases unquestionably did by assuming that what the State is protecting is the mere ‘potentiality of human life.’ The whole argument of abortion opponents is that what the Court calls the fetus and what others call the unborn child is a human life.”

Unfortunately, even Scalia’s statement falls short of a position. He reports it only as an “argument” which courts ought to address.

TLC says “The fourth factor focuses on changes in the facts. Since Roe, there have been many scientific and medical developments. Probably the most significant developments have been in ultrasound technology and fetal surgery. Ultrasound technology demonstrates that the unborn child is human life that is actually alive and shows the development of the baby.

"This undermines Roe’s claim that the unborn child is only potential life.”

The following statement seems to walk back an implication that all unborn babies are fully “human life”, but rather only those who survive to birth: “The presence of a heartbeat is a strong indicator that the child will survive to birth, therefore, debunking the idea that the unborn child is merely potential life.”

19. Thomas More Society

Filed July 26, 2021

This brief makes the argument that abortion is not a right “deeply rooted in the nation’s history, legal tradition, and practices” so it does not merit “special protection”. Therefore Roe should be overruled.

The Thomas Moore brief documents the regard for unborn human life over the centuries, but not to prove that the unborn are fully human so their lives must be protected by every state. The point of its history is rather to prove that Roe should be overruled because it was largely based on claims that unborn babies were never treated by our laws as “persons in the whole sense”.

It is a history of abortion law going back to the common law of England. It also reviews the laws of 30 states to show that in Unborn Victims of Violence Laws, where killing a pregnant woman is counted as a double murder, there is no distinction based on “viability”, so therefore the reliance of Roe and Casey on viability is unsupported in American law.

There were “scores of cases” between 1850 and 1870 where courts treated abortion as against laws “enacted with an intent to protect unborn human life.”

Since I am from Iowa, it is cool to see a holding from an Iowa court from that time: “In 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court, interpreting an 1858 statute, condemned abortion as ‘an act highly dangerous to the mother, and generally fatal, and frequently designed to be fatal, to the child.’ State v. Moore, 25 Iowa 128, 136 (1868).” A 1934 Idaho Supreme Court said its law was “to discourage abortions because thereby the life of a human being, the unborn child, is taken.”

To summarize, “more than sixty decisions from forty-two states have recognized that their nineteenth-century abortion statutes were enacted with an intent to protect unborn human life. Given this wealth of case authority, the Court’s conclusion in Roe that state court decisions ‘focused on the State’s interest in protecting the woman’s health rather than in preserving the embryo and fetus’...is unsupportable.”

Also, contrary to Roe’s claim, there was not an exemption for mothers from prosecution: “at least nineteen states criminalized the woman’s participation in her own abortion.” In the remaining states, women were not prosecuted either because they were considered co-victims, or because the woman’s testimony against the abortionist was needed but could not be compelled if she were treated as an accomplice, and because “in most states a criminal conviction cannot be based on the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice.”

The Moore brief spends its final section attacking Roe’s “viability” rule. The brief concludes, “The court in Casey stated that ‘a decision to overrule should rest on some special reason over and above the belief that a prior case was wrongly decided.’...If so, Amicus submits that there are more than 60 million special reasons to do so. Roe v. Wade should be overruled.”

Not asked for is a ruling that babies of people are people, making abortion murder, whose legality no state may permit.

20. Melinda Thybault Moral Outcry

Filed July 26

An interesting way to establish “standing” for a petition (defined not as a legal “petition”, or brief, before a court, but the popular sense of a short statement signed by a multitude) before the Supreme Court:

“Melinda Thybault and The Signers, as do all citizens, have the right to petition the United States government for redress of grievances. U.S. Constitution Amendment I. With all due respect, Amici believe the Supreme Court is the specific branch of their government which has committed this crime against humanity by forcing all states to legalize abortion. Therefore, Amici must bring their arguments to this Court, not Congress or the States.”

View the petition at https://themoraloutcry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/the-moral-outcry-petition.pdf

Quoting a law school and a U.N. document, she summarizes: “A crime against humanity occurs when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings resulting in severe deprivation of rights, up to and including death.” (See Crime Against Humanity at https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/crime_against_humanity and see U.N. Office, Genocide Prevention, Crimes Against Humanity https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-humanity.shtml; Treaty of Rome (1957). See also Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War )

She “adopted” children at the frozen embryo stage, and had them conceived through vitro fertilization, not just proving but demonstrating “living evidence that, with today’s science, viability begins at fertilization.” Unborn children literally are “viable” even from the embryo stage!!! Their sex can be determined six days after fertilization!

Her ground for reversing Roe? She cites a “Law of Judicial Precedent” authored by Justices Garner, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Breyer, which says one ground for reversing precedent is “The decision has been met with general dissatisfaction, protest or severe criticism.” So she got a petition signed by over half a million citizens calling abortion a “crime against humanity”, and points out:

“Through The Moral Outcry Petition, over 500,000 Americans have correctly identified legalized abortion as ‘a crime against humanity’ which is very, very ‘severe criticism.’ With due respect to the Court, every single signature on the Moral Outcry Petition is, by itself, evidence under The Law of Judicial Precedent12 because each person calling abortion a crime against humanity is “severely” criticizing this Court’s abortion jurisprudence.”

This only adds to “continued ‘severe criticism’ for 48 years. Most reasonable observers would agree that Roe has been met with general dissatisfaction and major protest since its inception. The Court has an ethical and moral duty to never forget past crimes against humanity, to never stand by silently while one is occurring today, and to rescue the perishing.”

She updates Casey’s premise that abortion prevents “unwanted children” by pointing out that today’s “safe haven” laws have eliminated “unwanted children”. She makes the point without conceding that Casey’s excuse was ever justified: “Because of Safe Haven laws in all fifty states, [which permit mothers to easily give away their babies without being charged for neglect or abandonment] women can now have the “freedom” of Roe, and make their own decision about the ultimate direction of their life, without the crime against humanity of killing the child and injuring themselves.”

Under Safe Haven laws, a mother “can transfer responsibility to the state with no questions asked, no legal procedure, and unlike abortion, at no cost.”

The evidence that babies are people? She quotes a phrase from Gonzales: “Infant life” to prove “that this Court has already recognized exists in the womb when it is aborted.”

(The Gonzales context of the “infant life” quote: “Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child....Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision. ...it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”)

More evidence that babies are people: “new science, including but not limited to DNA testing, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and sonograms, which were not available to this Court in 1973, now show what the Roe Court did not know, or even the Casey Court, that life begins at conception.” But she doesn’t populate this claim with any details or evidence, thinking the Supreme Court already concedes that babies are people: “But the Court has now correctly found in Gonzales that abortion terminates an “infant life,” at 159 at the moment of the abortion.”

Roe v. Wade isn’t the Supreme Court’s first “crime against humanity”. “Abortion is a crime against humanity. Like Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), which purported to enshrine slavery in the Constitution forever. It is unjust. Dred Scott also decided unjustly that African Americans ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to respect’, at 400. The Dred Scott decision prevented national compromise from occurring and many commentators feel it eventually led to the Civil War. A crime against humanity occurs when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings, as this Court did in Scott.

“...the Court has not yet fully reversed Roe, Doe, and Casey. No American citizen should have to live under, nor as history tragically demonstrates, should they stand by silently, while their government sanctions and even promotes crimes against humanity.” Another low point in the Supreme Court’s grasp of 14th Amendment equal rights, she mentions, was Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) which, like Roe and Dred Scott, “denied legal protection to a class of human beings” and “ignored the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment”. “Plessy accepted the gloss that ‘separate but equal’ was ‘equal’.”

She repeats, “When the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings, it is the classic definition of a crime against humanity.”

All nine justices know better, she demonstrates, by quoting them all calling the decision to abort “painful” and “difficult”. Five of the nine added “moral”. What could make such an allegedly “safe” “procedure”, which isn’t even expensive compared with most surgeries, either “painful” or “difficult”? Nothing can account for it, if babies are mere tumors or animals. Take it out! It doesn’t belong there! The only thing that can make the decision “painful” or “difficult” is that it is a decision to murder a healthy beautiful baby. That also makes it a “moral” decision. Removing a tumor or an animal is not a “moral” decision. By these words, all nine justices prove they know unborn babies of people are people.

And yet before this year, no state has asked the Court to outlaw abortion because it murders people.

“The Supreme Court in Gonzales unanimously came to the conclusion that abortion is a ‘difficult and painful decision,’ at 159. Gonzales stated, ‘Whether or not to have an abortion is a difficult and painful moral decision.’ The five-person majority consisted of Justices Kennedy, Roberts, Thomas, Alito and Scalia. The four Justices in dissent, Justices Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer, also said: ‘The Court is surely correct that, for most women, abortion is a painfully difficult decision.’ The dissent left out the word ‘moral’ as part of the difficulty. Gonzales, FN 7, at 183, per Ginsburg, dissenting. Thus, all nine justices agreed that abortion is ‘difficult’ and ‘painful.’ Why? Because at some level, most people ‘know’ or ‘sense’ that abortion kills a human life.”

Even abortionists admit they know better: “Planned Parenthood has recently admitted through its chief physician in Missouri, that: “Sometimes the choice to end a pregnancy, even when it is a highly desired one, is a really difficult one for people”, Dr. Eisenberg, Planned Parenthood St. Louis Clinic Director.23 Abortionist Lisa Harris states: “I know that for every woman whose abortion I perform, I stop a developing human from being born . . . Abortion feels morally complicated because it stops a developing human being from being born, which, of course, it does.”24 (23 NBC News, nbcnews.com by Ericka Edwards and Ali Galarte, May 28, 2019. 24 “My Day as An Abortion Care Provider,” Oct. 22, 2019, New York Times OP/ED.)

Mothers know better, although not necessarily in time. What “devastating psychological consequences” for mothers could follow successful removal of cancer?!! But Casey acknowledges they often follow an abortion, Melinda points out. “Many, many women are morally conflicted as this Court has recognized. Many women feel they have murdered their own child, with devastating consequences.” (The full sentence from Casey: “In attempting to ensure that a woman apprehend the full consequences of her decision, the State furthers the legitimate purpose of reducing the risk that a woman may elect an abortion, only to discover later, with devastating psychological consequences, that her decision was not fully informed.”)

Even the “Roe” of “Roe v. Wade” came to know better: “The affidavit of Norma McCorvey, the ‘Roe’ of Roe v. Wade describing her experience working in the abortion industry, which changed her mind about abortion and caused her to seek reversal of her case, is still on file in McCorvey v. Hill, 385 F. 3d 846 (5th Cir. 2004) (cert. denied) (Supreme Court Docket No. 04-967).” (“Cert. denied” is the Supreme Court’s way of saying they were too busy to deal with her.)

“Safe Haven” laws let a mother give her baby, no cost, no guilt, to any medical facility or fire station. Even small towns have fire stations. In Mississippi a mother has three days to do that. Rules vary with the states; in North Dakota, mothers have up to a year after birth. Mothers have nine months to decide. Mississippi Medicaid covers all prenatal costs for low income mothers. Contrasted with the high pressure abortion decisions, the high cost of abortion, the limited availability of killing centers, and the guilt.

Safe Haven babies don’t languish in foster care for years. A footnote to a news article: “Thousands line up to adopt Safe Haven baby”.

Why are Safe Haven laws a reason to reverse Roe?

“The burden of an ‘unwanted’ child was a large factor in the Court’s analysis in Roe itself and Casey. ‘Maternity or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it.’ Roe, 410 U.S. 113 at 153.”

Viola, these needs are now met by Safe Haven laws, without cost, the inconvenience of long distance travel, guilt, or murder. There are no unwanted children. “This is a major, substantial change in circumstances that has never existed before in American history.”

“As a fourth major ‘change in circumstances,’ at least two million Americans every year are now waiting to adopt newborn children. Far more people are waiting to adopt newborns than the number of aborted children per year.37 This development satisfies Casey’s stare decisis reliance test because there is no longer a need for abortion to give freedom from unwanted children to women.”

(37 www.AmericanAdoptions.com/pregnant/waiting_adoptive_families)

“Fifth, Today Science Clearly Demonstrates That Life Begins At Conception. New Scientific Advances Justify Changing Prior Precedent Under Stare Decisis.”

“Supreme Court opinions [that are based on old science] should change when science advances. No society or court should be stuck in 1970’s science. One simple example is that DNA testing was not even used in the courts until the mid-1980’s. Anonymous DNA testing of the “infant life” in the womb and a DNA sample from the mother now shows that two separate humans exist. Sonograms, another example which started after Roe, convinced Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the founder of NARAL, as it should this Court, that he was wrong to kill innocent human life.”

Court recognition of Life: “The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has already upheld South Dakota’s law requiring abortionists (against their will and financial self-interest) to tell a woman that ‘abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being,’ defined as a member of the human species (Homo sapiens). Planned Parenthood v. Rounds, 530 F. 3d 724 (8th Cir. 2008) (en banc). The Eighth Circuit reviewed the voluminous evidence and determined there was adequate scientific evidence to uphold the law, which was “act based, not opinion or ideology, just as this Court has courageously done in recognizing the child in the womb as ‘infant life’ in Gonzales.

Several quotes from federal appeals courts about the need to reconsider Roe concluded with this zinger: “In sum, if courts were to delve into the facts underlying Roe’s balancing scheme with present day knowledge, they might conclude that the woman’s ‘choice’ is far more risky and less beneficial, and the child’s sentience far more advanced than the Roe Court knew.’ McCorvey v. Hill 385 F.3d 846 page 11 (5th Cir. 2004) (cert. denied)”

What an understatement: “In the case of a crime against humanity, it is the duty of the Court to correct its own error. All judges should be open in appropriate cases, to considering evidence that killing ‘infant life’ in the womb is wrong, and that changes in circumstances have produced sound and necessary reasons for reversal.”

Although Melinda’s evidence and argument supports asking the Court to outlaw all abortion across America, her conclusion only asks that Mississippi be allowed to keep its 15 week ban, and that Roe be overruled (leaving individual states to decide whether to keep abortion legal).


21. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Filed July 27, 2021

Becket's question for SCOTUS: "Whether the Roe/Casey framework should be replaced in order to reduce the number and intensity of religious liberty conflicts".

Examples of "religious liberty conflicts": "Surely the federal government has many ways to distribute contraceptives to American women without dragooning the Little Sisters of the Poor [an adoption agency] or other religious nonprofits....And surely state governments have many ways to ensure access to abortion without involving churches. But the shadow of Roe and Casey prompted these governments to deny exemptions to religious groups, or to eliminate religious exemptions that had existed for decades.

"Another area where abortion proponents have attacked religious exercise is pharmacy regulations. In some states, government officials have sought to force pharmacists to dispense Plan B and Ella despite—or even because of—their religious objections. For example, Washington State, acting at the behest of abortion advocates, required religious objectors to dispense Plan B and Ella despite the fact that the State allowed pharmacies not to stock or dispense these drugs for “‘an almost unlimited variety of secular reasons[.]’”

After reviewing these conflicts, Becket said these conflicts would go away if SCOTUS would simply pull back its nose out of America's consciences: "But it does not have to be this way. It is possible to address abortion through ordinary politics, free from the systemic deformations and misincentives generated by the Roe/Casey regime. This is the American experience related to abortion before the Court departed from the Constitution’s text, structure, history and tradition in Roe/Casey. And it is the American experience with a variety of other contested issues related to human life and religious liberty, and the experience of many European countries today."

22. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Other Religious Organization

Filed July 27, 2021

Neither Constitutional Text Nor History Supports a Right to Take the Life of an Unborn Child at Any Stage of Pregnancy. Neither Constitutional Text Nor History Supports a Right to Take the Life of an Unborn Child at Any Stage of Pregnancy

Conclusion: Ultimately these cases, with all the problems they entail for lower courts, land on this Court’s doorstep. And under the current jurisprudence, it will never stop. This should not be. The way to prevent it is to return the issue to the states, where it properly belongs. (paragraph preceding “conclusion”)

Circuit judges have been skeptical that preenforcement challenges should be allowed at all in the abortion context because such challenges do not allow the plaintiff’s predictions about the challenged law’s effect to be tested. Some appellate courts have concluded outright that it is an abuse of discretion for a trial judge to issue a pre-enforcement injunction since the effect of such an abortion law is open to debate.27 This Court too has indicated that as-applied challenges are to be favored over facial challenges in abortion cases. Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 167 (stating that a facial challenge in that case “should not have been entertained in the first instance”). And yet, the practice of bringing pre-enforcement facial challenges to abortion legislation continues, leading inevitably to (a) judgments based on speculative evidence, (b) a blurring of the distinction between facial and as applied challenges, and (c) court decisions based often on factors for which the government itself is not even responsible (such as the number and location of abortion clinics in a given state). This impossible state of affairs would correct itself if the Court were to follow Justice Scalia’s suggestion to, in his words, “get out of this area, where we have no right to be, and where we do neither ourselves nor the country any good by remaining.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 1002 (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment in part, dissenting in part).

Roe also attempted, based on prior decisions of this Court that had declared protection under the Due Process Clause for rights deeply rooted in the Nation’s 6 history and tradition, to locate an abortion right in history. The attempt was seriously flawed. “[S]ubsequent scholarship has demonstrated conclusively that acceptance of abortion is not in any sense deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. The opposite is true: it is the prohibition of abortion that has deep roots in English and American history.” Institutional Integrity and Respect for Precedent, supra at 553-54. An exhaustive study of the issue concludes that “[t]he tradition of treating abortion as a crime was unbroken through nearly 800 years of English and American history until the ‘reform’ movement of the later twentieth century.” Joseph W. Dellapenna, DISPELLING THE MYTHS OF ABORTION HISTORY xii (2006).2

See Michael Stokes Paulsen, The Worst Constitutional Decision of All Time, 78 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 995, 1007 (2003) (“I know of no serious scholar, judge, or lawyer who attempts to defend Roe’s analysis on textual or historical grounds.”); Richard S. Myers, Lower Court “Dissent” from Roe and Casey, 18 AVE MARIA L. REV. 1, 6 (2020) (noting that “no one defends the Court’s opinion in Roe”). ...

D. Multiple State Interests Justify Prohibitions on Abortion Before Viability. There is an unfortunate tendency in abortion cases to become lost in minutiae. The factual record in individual cases can be lengthy and complex, the case law complicated and difficult to apply. But these case-specific features cannot disguise the tragedy that is the common denominator in these cases: the intentional destruction, on an unprecedented scale, of the most innocent and defenseless of the human family. In the truest sense, they are our family, our brothers and sisters. Like all members of the human family, they should be treasured and loved. Nothing in the Constitution requires states to stand idly by while their lives are deliberately taken.

21 The Declaration of Independence places the right to life first in the list of inalienable rights. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments list the right to life first among those rights of which the government cannot deprive a person without due process of law. Thomas Jefferson’s March 31, 1809 letter to the Republican Citizens of Washington County, Maryland, stated: “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” 8 THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 165 (H.A. Washington, ed.) (1871).

...“The States—indeed, all civilized nations—demonstrate their commitment to life by treating homicide as a serious crime.” Id. The same can be said for state prohibitions on assisted suicide,

23. LONANG Institute

Filed July 27, 2021

[Every word in this section is from Lonang's brief, except what is in these brackets, and colored blue. They are blue, because even though I have copied so much of their brief because I see in it potential for getting baby murder outlawed in every state, Lonang argues at one point that courts should NOT do that, but should remain "neutral" about whether states can support murder.]

The Declaration Of Independence Affirms That The States Enjoy Police Power Which Carries With It The Power To Prohibit Abortion ... The Fourteenth Amendment Requires Only Procedural Due Process, not Substantive Due Process ...Courts Are The Mere Instruments Of The Law, And Can Will Nothing ...... According to The Law Of Nature, Judicial Power Extends To Issuing Orders In Cases And Controversies, Not To Making Rules Of General Applicability..... Judicial Decisions Articulating Substantive Due Process Rights Are Without Constitutional Textual Support ..... ONLY THE STATES AND THE PEOPLE ENJOY THE LAWFUL AUTHORITY, TO CONSTITUTIONALIZE FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS “IMPLICIT IN LIBERTY”, OR “DEEPLY ROOTED”, OR “INHERENT IN INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY.” ..... [CONTINUED IN FIRST SECTION]

The Federal Courts Possess No Article III Power To Discover Or Constitutionalize Textually Unsupported Rights Or Impose A Duty To Enforce Those Rights On The States........ the law of nature provides that a government’s judicial branches are limited to declaring what is the law, not its codification. The concept of judicial review affirms that the province of a judge is to declare the law, not to make it

The Supreme Court is routinely presented with the legal arguments that certain statutory or constitutional words or phrases have no fixed meaning. The Court is then called upon to supply a new meaning other than the one stated in the text. This process adjusts the words or phrases chosen by the lawgiver, to establish as precedent the Court’s desired meaning.

Denying the textual meaning of legal words is not a novel invention of the Court. Instead, it has historical precedent going back to the first recorded case in human history. At issue in that case, In Re: Adam, Eve & the Devil, 3 Genesis 1 (0001), was the intent and meaning of a statute prohibiting consumption of fruit from a specific tree in a Garden in Eden. A statute prohibiting such consumption was at issue. Two of the parties violated the statute and entered a guilty plea. A second statute prohibited various forms of fraud and deception. A third party was charged under this statute alleging he used deception to induce co-defendants to consume the prohibited fruit.

At trial, he argued that he was not liable on the theory that the first statute did not actually prohibit consumption—that the words in the statute did not mean what the text declared. [Plausible but not recorded interaction between God and Satan.] As such he argued that he did not engage in deceit in his statements to the other parties. The Court was unpersuaded. It rejected the argument, finding that the prohibition was clear and unambiguous, reflected the drafter’s original intent and was, therefore, enforceable as written.3

This Court’s fourteenth amendment substantive due process jurisprudence is based on the same argument first made in Eden—the words of the law do not mean what they say. The Court has maintained the amendment itself contains a substantive due process clause into which the Court is empowered to pour un-enumerated fundamental rights of its own divination. The Court’s atextual adjustments, purportedly limited by the outcomeflexible concept of “judicial restraint,” have been internally justified by its moral appeals to novel high-sounding phrases such as “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,”4 or the “concept of personal liberty,”5 or “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition,”6 or “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.”7 Alas, none of these phrases have textual support in the amendment itself. Nor has the Court been granted any state legislative power in Article III to define ordered or personal liberty, individual []) 4 Judicial decisions finding that a state statute violates fundamental values discovered as “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” are without textual support. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 500 (1965) (Harlan. J., concurring) (quoting Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U. S. 319, 325 (1937) (Cardozo, J.) overruled on other grounds, Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784 (1969)).

5 Judicial decisions finding that a state statute violates a woman’s right to abortion discovered in the “concept of personal liberty” are without textual support. See Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 153 (1973).

6 Judicial decisions finding that a state statute violates rights discovered as “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” are without textual support. See Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997) “The Due Process Clause specially protects those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition.” Palko, 302 U.S. 325. The Court looks to principles of justice “so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental’) (quoting Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U. S. 97, 105 (1934) overruled in part on other grounds by Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1 (1964)).

7 Judicial decisions finding that a state statute violates a fundamental right which is “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy” without regard to history or tradition is without textual support. See Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 US 644; 135 S. Ct. at 2629 (2015)

autonomy, or traipse through history and tradition to discover and append any un-enumerated substantive individual rights into the amendment’s textually non-existent “substantive” due process clause. Nor does the law of nature of judicial review empower this Court to write new Constitutional text. The authority of a judge is to declare what written law already exists. The standard legal maxim is, Jus dicere, et non jus dare, also known as judicis est jus dicere non dare. The province of a judge is to declare the law, not to make it.8 At what point in time and on whose authority did that rule, binding on judges in England and America for centuries, become nonbinding? Even if fundamental rights are so demonstrably “implicit, inherent and rooted” as the Court maintains, the power of judicial review, nevertheless, does not carry with it the power to insert those rights into the fourteenth amendment. Amending the Constitution is governed by Article V in which the Court plays no part.

8 “When an act of Congress is appropriately challenged in the courts as not conforming to the constitutional mandate, the judicial branch of the government has only one duty; to lay the article of the Constitution which is invoked beside the statute which is challenged and to decide whether the latter squares with the former. All the court does, or can do, is to announce its considered judgment upon the question. The only power it has, if such it may be called, is the power of judgment. This court neither approves nor condemns any legislative policy. Its delicate and difficult office is to ascertain and declare whether the legislation is in accordance with, or in contravention of, the provisions of the Constitution; and, having done that, its duty ends.” United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 62-63 (1936).

Even assuming arguendo that the Court’s “implicit, inherent and rooted” approach to discovering un-enumerated fundamental rights is superior to legislative debate and enactment, or preferable to the Constitution’s chosen method of amendment, or that the Court’s wisdom and judgment in divining such rights is the manifestation of jurisprudential perfection, the fact remains that such an approach is without textual Constitutional support. Whether or not un-enumerated fundamental rights are or are not “implicit, inherent and rooted” in the Constitution’s fourteenth amendment, they are not found in the text itself. As such their discovery and incorporation into the law of the land is for the States and the People to decide.9

The case now before the Court provides an opportunity to restore judicial review to declaring what the text says. It provides an opportunity to resist anew the temptation first argued at Eden to opine to the contrary. The restoration will leave the State of Mississippi free to adopt laws protecting a pregnant woman by prohibiting conduct inducing a miscarriage or procuring an abortion. Such a determination would not merely return the law of abortion to its pre-1973 status. It would return judicial review itself to pre-substantive due process status

9 See U.S. Const. amend. IX, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” See also U.S. Const. amend. X, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

A. The Declaration Of Independence Affirms That The States Enjoy Police Power Which Carries With It The Power To Prohibit Abortion.

The question posed by the Court pertains to the power of a state, in this case Mississippi. The Declaration of Independence not only declared the States to be free and independent, but also declared the legal basis and extent of their power. No understanding of state power is complete without consideration of the Declaration. The Declaration grounded civil power itself on the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

That is what it says. It further declared this law of nature affirmed that every person may lawfully enjoy those rights which God has given. The laws of nature and its God pledges to guarantee to each person:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among 8 these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .

Remember that under the Declaration, the “governments instituted among men,” whose job it is to secure the rights of the people, exclusively referred to the several state governments, as no federal or national government then existed. Accordingly, the duty to declare and secure the rights of the people belongs to the States themselves, not to any branch, department or agency of the federal government later created.

Even if this Court’s search for new fundamental un-enumerated substantive due process rights was constitutionally legitimate, it has neglected to look carefully at the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” as a source of those rights. Any legitimate search even for rights “deeply rooted” in American history and tradition would consider unalienable rights granted by the Creator as asserted in such a quintessential founding American document. In other words, the first place to look for any rights of the people would be to examine those rights granted by the Creator, not any purported rights invented by people. And if the Creator has not deemed it necessary or advisable to confer a particular right, then the logical conclusion would be that such a right does not exist.

Nevertheless the state governments’ purpose is to secure these natural and unalienable rights and 9 as we have seen, any un-enumerated rights are reserved to the People (not the judicial branch) to find, identify, and assert, and their States to enact. The People created their state governments for this purpose and their national government for a much more limited purpose. The People did not establish a national government with a judicial branch given any power to make law or discover un-enumerated rights.

As to the power of the States, the Declaration declared:

That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; . . . and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. (emphasis added).

The States in the union have all power to do all “Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” The Constitution of a state may further limit this power. The United States Constitution including the fourteenth amendment also limits the power of States. But neither the framers nor text of that amendment contain any substantive due process limitation on a state’s police power.

...Mississippi is such a state. It stands on equal footing with the original States. It enjoys the police power to adopt laws prohibiting abortion because the Declaration of Independence recognizes it may do such acts according to the law of nature. Nothing in the text of the Fourteenth amendment legitimately articulates a substantive due process limitation on that power.

Even if a right to privacy implicit in the concept of ordered liberty translates into a right to abortion, nothing in the text of Article III, or the power of judicial review, extends to this Court a power to interlineate that right into the


B. The Fourteenth Amendment Requires Only Procedural Due Process, not Substantive Due Process. The fourteenth amendment states in part: 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; . . . (emphasis added). U.S. Const., amend XIV. Due process pertains entirely to matters of procedure. “Procedural due process rules are meant to protect persons not from the deprivation, but from the mistaken or unjustified deprivation of life, liberty, or property.” Carey v. Piphus, 435 U.S. 247, 259 (1978). “[P]rocedural due process rules are shaped by the risk of error inherent in the truthfinding process as applied to the generality of cases.” Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 344 (1976) (emphasis added). The core of these requirements is notice and an opportunity to be heard (often a hearing) before an impartial tribunal. Due process may also require 13 an opportunity for confrontation and crossexamination, and for discovery; that a decision be made based on the record, and that a party be allowed to be represented by counsel.

A review of the text of the fourteenth amendment reflects no textual support for any “substantive due process” clause. Even the term is an oxymoron. If we took the words in their ordinary meaning, “due process” merely signifies a proper procedure. The word “substantive,” on the other hand, means rights and duties as opposed to the procedural rules by which such things are established or enforced. Thus, the term “substantive due process,” in plain English, means non-procedural proper procedure. Logically, “substantive due process” is a type of “A = Not A” statement, where something is procedural and not procedural simultaneously. But unlike philosophy or mathematics, An “A = Not A” statement in a legal context is just plain illogical. Either the Court, when invoking substantive due process, is talking about procedure or it is not. If yes, then due process as a legal doctrine stands on its own and there is no need to resort to substantive due process. If no, then due process does not affect the matter, for it does not relate to procedure. This brings us back to Eden where the argument was first made that the words of the law do not mean what they say. While we acknowledge the argument has the weight of time behind it, originating in great antiquity, we respectfully urge the Court not to follow that ancient precedent.

C. Courts Are The Mere Instruments Of The Law, And Can Will Nothing. Applying a dialectical interpretation to words is not an element of judicial power. Nothing in the case or controversy jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in Article III, sec. 2, extends any power to the Court to identify un-enumerated fundamental rights “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” or in the “concept of personal liberty,” or “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition,” or “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.”13

Alexander Hamilton affirmed this view, writing in Federalist No. 78, that the judicial branch of government is the least dangerous because it has neither force nor will, only judgment. Chief Justice Marshall agreed, noting that: Judicial power, as contradistinguished from the powers of the law, has no existence. Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing. Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 738, 866 (1824) (Chief Justice Marshall).14 In other words, the Court

14 See also United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 78-79 (1936) (“The power of courts to declare a statute unconstitutional is subject to two guiding principles of decision which ought never to be absent from judicial consciousness. One is that courts are concerned only with the power to enact statutes, not with their wisdom. The other is that while unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive and legislative branches of the government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint. For the removal of unwise laws from the statute books appeal lies not to the courts, but to the ballot and to the processes of democratic government.”) The instant case calls for self-restraint.


cannot will un-enumerated fundamental rights into Constitutional existence. It has no judicial power to will rights “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” or in the “concept of personal liberty,” or “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition,” or “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy” into textual existence.

The high watermark of the Supreme Court misuse of judicial review came in Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958). In its opinion, the court remarked that Article VI of the Constitution makes the Constitution the “supreme Law of the Land.” So far, so good. In 1803, Chief Justice Marshall, speaking for a unanimous Court, calling the Constitution “the fundamental and paramount law of the nation,” declared in Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803) that “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” This is a description of the legitimate power of judicial review found in Article III, Section 2.

From this legitimate recognition of the power of judicial review, the Cooper v. Aaron Court stepped back to Eden. The Court first expanded its own opinion in Marbury asserting that Marbury actually “declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution.” 358 U.S. at 18 (emphasis added). Recall that Chief Justice Marshall said the judiciary has a duty to say what the law is. He said nothing, however, about the Court’s opinions as supreme. Cooper added the “supreme” element.

In its ruling, the Court in Cooper made the egregious error of misconstruing the Supremacy Clause of Art VI that “This constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof” shall be “the supreme law of the land.” The Court, without either textual or historical support, construed “the laws of the United States” to include judicial opinions of the Court, when clearly, historically and textually, it only referred to acts of Congress which became law when made in pursuance of the Constitution.

Further, the Constitution grants no “supreme” expository power to the Court. It is not found in Articles III or VI. It is not there. What is found in Article VI is that the Constitution, laws and treaties “shall be the supreme law of the land.” Nothing is said about Supreme Court opinions being supreme law, let alone being law at all. The Constitution extends no power to the Court to claim that even its legitimate constitutionally based opinions, are the sole and exclusive meaning of the Constitution itself.

The judicial power to review cases arising under the constitution, laws and treaties is stated in Article III, section 2, but that power is not the power to rewrite the Constitution itself. It is not the power to authorize the court to sit as a perpetual constitutional convention. It is not the power for the court to write into the Constitution whatever it wants, or the power to strike from the Constitution has a duty to say what the law is. He said nothing, however, about the Court’s opinions as supreme. Cooper added the “supreme” element. In its ruling, the Court in Cooper made the egregious error of misconstruing the Supremacy Clause of Art VI that “This constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof” shall be “the supreme law of the land.” The Court, without either textual or historical support, construed “the laws of the United States” to include judicial opinions of the Court, when clearly, historically and textually, it only referred to acts of Congress which became law when made in pursuance of the Constitution.

Further, the Constitution grants no “supreme” expository power to the Court. It is not found in Articles III or VI. It is not there. What is found in Article VI is that the Constitution, laws and treaties “shall be the supreme law of the land.” Nothing is said about Supreme Court opinions being supreme law, let alone being law at all. The Constitution extends no power to the Court to claim that even its legitimate constitutionally based opinions, are the sole and exclusive meaning of the Constitution itself.

The judicial power to review cases arising under the constitution, laws and treaties is stated in Article III, section 2, but that power is not the power to rewrite the Constitution itself. It is not the power to authorize the court to sit as a perpetual constitutional convention. It is not the power for the court to write into the Constitution whatever it wants, or the power to strike from the Constitution whatever it does not want. Constitutional insertions and deletions are a power retained by the People. This textual judicial power renders the Court’s opinion in Roe without support in the fourteenth amendment.

D. According to The Law Of Nature, Judicial Power Extends To Issuing Orders In Cases And Controversies, Not To Making Rules Of General Applicability. This exercise of judicial power is reflected in the difference between a “rule” and an “order.” A court cannot issue a rule under the law of nature, because the nature of any rule is that it is an action of general application. Rules apply not only to parties in a case, but to everyone. The court’s judgment on the other hand must be confined to an order for its contempt power to be exercised lawfully. Otherwise, a court could hold anyone in contempt for simply disagreeing with its opinion. This distinguishes judicial power from legislative power. Only the legislative power can make laws; the judiciary can merely apply pre-existing laws to the facts in a given case.

Not only is the law of nature of judicial power responsive rather than initiative, and limited to giving orders to parties rather than rules to all persons, the law of nature of judicial power is restricted to judgment, not will. All the judge has is judgment to make known the statute or Constitution’s text. This distinguishes judicial power from executive power.

It follows that if judges do not make law, which by definition is a “rule,” then judges cannot issue “rules,” and may only issue orders. A rule binds the people generally, and is by nature legislative, whereas an order binds only the person to whom it is directed. Thus, Article III extends the judicial power of the courts of the United States only to “cases” and “controversies.” If a judge could issue a rule which governed such disputes, the judicial power would not be limited to actual cases and controversies. [I]f the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers....15 15 Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.

This Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence is an example of rulemaking simply because it purports to add new text to the Constitution itself. For this reason, it is contrary to the law of nature of judicial power. The opinion in Roe v. Wade can also be examined to determine whether it was in the nature of an order or a rule. Remarkably, the Court did not issue an instruction to Texas declaring its statute unconstitutional and unenforceable. Rather, it specified a trimester formula was essentially a legislative rule purporting to bind all future statute governing abortion in every state. Yet only Texas was a party to the case. Hence, the Court’s opinion again lacked an essential element of the exercise of judicial power, that is, the issuance of an order, not a rule.16 [16 For a more extensive review of the law of nature regarding judicial power and judicial review, see Herbert W. Titus & Gerald R. Thompson, America’s Heritage: Constitutional Liberty, Judicial Power And Judicial Review, The LONANG Institute (2006).]

Besides the lack of concrete, textual constitutional language, the limited nature of judicial power and its lack of authority to make rules, the Court has felt constrained to adjust rather than abandon its substantive due process practice of atextual fundamental rights rulemaking. These cases reflect its “go to” linguistic justifications, all of which neither have textual support nor are found enumerated among the judicial powers in Article III. Judicial decisions finding that a state statute violates fundamental values “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” are without textual support. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 500 (1965) (Harlan. J., concurring) (quoting Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U. S. 319, 325 (1937) (Cardozo, J.) overruled on other grounds, Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784 (1969)). A judicial decision finding that a state statute violates a woman’s right to abortion discovered in the “concept of personal liberty” is without textual support. See Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 153 (1973).

Likewise, judicial decisions finding that a state statute violates rights “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” are without textual support. See Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997). “The Due Process Clause specially protects those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition.” Palko, 302 U.S. at 325. The Court looks to principles of justice “so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental”) (quoting Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U. S. 97, 105 (1934) overruled in part on other grounds by Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1 (1964)). So too, a judicial decision finding that a state statute violates a fundamental right which is “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy” without regard to history or tradition, is equally without textual support. See Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644; 135 S. Ct. at 2629 (2015).17

[17 Chief Justice Roberts, with whom Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas joined in dissent, further underscored the lack of any textual support for the court’s decision.

The majority purports to identify four “principles and traditions” in this Court’s due process precedents that support a fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry. Ante, at 12. In reality, however, the majority’s approach has no basis in principle or tradition, except for the unprincipled tradition of judicial policymaking] that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45. Stripped of its shiny rhetorical gloss, the majority’s argument is that the Due Process Clause gives same-sex couples a fundamental right to marry because it will be good for them and for society. If I were a legislator, I would certainly consider that view as a matter of social policy. But as a judge, I find the majority’s position indefensible as a matter of constitutional law.

The same reasoning applies with equal force and effect to Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 500 (1965); Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U. S. 319, 325 (1937) (overruled on other grounds, Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784 (1969)); Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 153 (1973), Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997) and Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U. S. 97, 105 (1934) (overruled in part on other grounds by Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1 (1964))

Let us be clear here. What we mean when we say the Court is utilizing doctrines or rules of interpretation which have no textual support, is that the Court is just declaring its own majoritarian judicial will as the Supreme Law of the Land without regard to the Constitution’s text, form of government, separation of powers, or any known legal doctrine except the arbitrary will of a Despot. Rather than celebrating and continuing this “long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object, a design to reduce” the People “under absolute Despotism,” there is still a window of time in which to quash this judicial abuse and usurpation.

Finally, Amicus would be remiss in failing to address a future judicial decision which would discover a fundamental “right to life” “implicit in the Concept of ordered liberty”, or in the “concept of personal liberty,” or “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” or “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy,” or existing in any other linguistic contrivance yet to be animated from the spirit of the original argument in Eden (that the words do not mean what they say). Such a decision would also lack textual support in the non-existent substantive due process clause. Its advocates would perpetuate judicial Despotism and continue to wrongly nationalize, state jurisdiction.

[Wait a minute. I have copied so much of Lonang's brief because I perceive its usefulness towards the goal of outlawing abortion in EVERY state, as required by the Constitution, especially the 14th Amendment. Yet in this unfortunate paragraph, Lonang argues that courts should NOT outlaw genocide universally! It is this kind of argument that elevates the "scrupulous neutrality" about whether murder is good, of which Justice Kavanaugh brags!

[The error of Lonang and Kavanaugh, as I perceive it, is to miss the points raised by Justice Thomas about basing the definition of Constitutional Rights on what is specifically listed in the Constitution, which is the original meaning of "privileges and immunities" in the 14th Amendment. By that measure, "Life" is specifically protected by the Constitution, while "Murder" is not. This demands of courts that they outlaw baby murder in every state.]

A right to life needs no between-the-lines authorization. The Amendment plainly identifies what makes a state law unconstitutional.]

...Objecting to the Court’s holding in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644; 135 S. Ct. at 2629 (2015) Justice Scalia, with whom Justice Thomas joined in dissenting observed: “This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.” ....

...” The power and process of amending the national Constitution is well provided for in Article V. That Article assigns no place for the federal judiciary in its text.1

The powers reserved to the States and people include the power to decide if they shall constitutionalize or not, fundamental rights “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” or within the “concept of personal liberty,” or “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition,” or “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.”

[But not to the destruction of enumerated rights like Life.]

...., the Court trampled down the separation of powers. It also exceeded the law of nature of judicial power, because it does not declare the written law, but rather says what the law should be. That goes beyond judicial review. ....

Justice Curtis provided insight into the phenomenon when he observed: Political reasons have not the requisite certainty to afford rules of juridical interpretation. They are different in different men. They are different in the same men at different times. And when a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men who, for the time being, have power to declare what the Constitution is according to their own views of what it ought to mean.” [ Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 620-621 (1856) (J. Curtis, dissenting).

He concluded that: “When such a method of interpretation of the Constitution obtains, in place of a republican Government, with limited and defined powers, we have a Government which is merely an exponent of the will of Congress; or, what in my opinion, would not be preferable, an exponent of the individual political opinions of the members of this court.” Id]

24 Claremont Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence

Filed July 27, 2021

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects against deprivation “life, liberty, or property.” In the abortion rights cases, this Court has focused on “liberty.” [of moms.] The real issue, however, is life. [of babes.] Life is a natural right endowed by our Creator and is the first unalienable right recognized in the Declaration of Independence. ...The duty of government to protect life is at the center of the nation’s first legal document.

25 22 State Policy Organizations

Filed July 27, 2021

22 State Policy Organizations

The positivistic [materialistic – only physical things are real] reduction of persons represented by the Court’s abortion decisions has leavened the law in a way that curtails historic State policies grounded in deference to a given human nature and the common law rights that correspond to that nature.

By purporting to leave the question of the meaning of persons in the Fourteenth Amendment unanswered, this Court’s holdings requiring States to abandon common and natural law commitments have effectively ratified a diminished view of the human person in law. These holdings have foisted upon the States a denatured anthropological model that prohibits them from ascribing objective meaning, dignity, and value to vulnerable persons.

The severe distortion of the human person in constitutional caselaw invites systemic effects well beyond the troubled context of abortion. If constitutional precept commands States to treat nascent human life as vacant of meaning and value apart from subjective individual determination or Court authorization, concurrently placed in doubt is the historic understanding of law as constrained by a reality prior to and beyond its coercive impositions.

A national abortion-enablement policy is mournful in itself, but does not keep to itself. It corrodes the law altogether. Amici brief_FPC_ 7.23.21.pdf

26 Connie Weiskopf and Kristine L. Brown

Filed July 27, 2021

The sophistry at the heart of Roe is that the beginning of human life was ever a subject for speculation ...There was no doubt at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment as to whether the common definition of “person” included preborn persons. One-hundred and fifty years since, medical science has overwhelmingly confirmed this commonly understood inclusion of preborn persons in legal personhood. ...no other so-called constitutional right involves the “the purposeful termination of a potential life.” Yet even in Harris, we see the poison of Roe in the qualifier “potential.” ...By choosing Levy v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 68 (1968) as the test for legal personhood, this Court can reach a new milestone in the advancement of human rights. ...The Court started from the premise that “illegitimate children are not ‘nonpersons,’” insofar as they are “humans, live, and have their being.” Levy 391 U.S. at 70 (emphasis added). Thus all children who 1)are human, 2) are living, and 3) are in being, are “clearly” persons under the Equal Protection Clause.

As Justice Gorsuch wrote in his Ramos concurrence, “stare decisis isn’t supposed to be the art of methodically ignoring what everyone knows to be true.” Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U.S. __, __ (2020) (slip op. at 23). [2]

27 Professor Kurt T. Lash

Filed July 27, 2021 ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

In Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the Supreme Court ruled that...“We feel...This right of privacy...[is] founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action [while] the District Court determined [it is founded] in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people....” . In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 883 (1992), a plurality...once again cit[ed] the Fourteenth Amendment and the Ninth Amendment...s. The Ninth Amendment, both at the time of its adoption and now, preserves the people’s retained right to local self-government. It cannot properly be read as a source of authority to deny the rights of local self-government. The Fourteenth Amendment protects substantive rights against the states, but only those previously enumerated, thus leaving all unenumerated rights under the authority of the people of the several states as a matter of constitutional right. This includes the non-enumerated subject of abortion.

[Substantive definition: it exists independently, not subordinate to anything; for example not owing its existence to any law or constitution. Enumerated definition: rights named in the Constitution, like freedom of speech and religion.]

....In sum, at the threshold of the Civil War, moderate Republicans (who, according to Foner, “held the balance of power within the Republican Party,” Foner, FREE SOIL, at 205) had no intention of abandoning constitutional federalism or reinterpreting the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. These Republicans believed that the slave holding southern states had fallen away from the original federalist principles of the Constitution and had continuously violated the personal rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. See Michael Kent Curtis, FREE SPEECH, “THE PEOPLE’S DARLING PRIVILEGE”: STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN AMERICAN HISTORY 266-70 (2000). The Republicans who framed and advanced the Fourteenth Amendment sought only to enforce those original rights while maintaining the basic principles of constitutional federalism announced in provisions like the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

...II. The Fourteenth Amendment neither enforces unenumerated substantive rights against the states nor alters the federalist meaning of the Ninth Amendment. A. John Bingham, primary draftsman of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, sought to apply enumerated constitutional rights against the states while preserving the structural principles of constitutional federalism declared in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

...Consistent with his continued belief in the reserved rights of the states over all unenumerated subjects, Bingham proposed a constitutional amendment that would enforce the first eight amendments in the Bill of Rights against the states but leave the substance of all unenumerated rights under the control of the people in the States.

....None of Bingham’s Republican colleagues in the Thirty-Ninth Congress objected to the idea of enforcing the Bill of Rights against the states. Some members, however, worried that the wording in Bingham’s initial draft might empower Congress to define what counted as federally enforceable “privileges and immunities.”

Republican Giles Hotchkiss suggested he would support an amendment that clearly announced “a constitutional right that cannot be wrested from any class of citizens, or from the citizens of any State by mere legislation. But this amendment proposes to leave it to the caprice of Congress.”

....As Bingham explained three years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment: Mr. Speaker, that the scope and meaning of the limitations imposed by the first section, fourteenth amendment of the Constitution may be more fully understood, permit me to say that the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, as contradistinguished from citizens of a State, are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

...John Bingham’s fellow member on Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Michigan Senator Jacob Howard, also described Bingham’s Privileges or Immunities Clause in terms that involve only constitutionally enumerated rights. See Speech of Jacob Howard, May 23, 1866, in 2 Reconstruction Amendments, at 187-88.

In his speech introducing the Fourteenth Amendment to the Senate, Howard explained that the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States included the right of traveling citizens to receive equal treatment enumerated in Article IV’s Comity Clause (and described in antebellum cases like Corfield v. Coryell, 6 Fed. Cas. 546 (C.C.E.D. Pa. 1823)) as well as those rights “secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution.” Id. at 188. Every single privilege or immunity listed by Howard in his extended speech involved a guarantee enumerated in the original Constitution. Howard’s speech is important: It was so widely read and republished that during the ratification debates speakers often referred to the proposed Fourteenth Amendment as “the Howard Amendment.” See, e.g., North Carolina House of Representatives, July 2, 1868 (“Mr. Seymour introduced the following resolution, ratifying the fourteenth article of the Constitution of the United States, the article known as the Howard Amendment.”),

....C. The ratifying public was well informed of the speeches of John Bingham and Jacob Howard.

Unlike the secret proceedings of Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, the proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Congress were public. Newspapers reported on the speeches and debates, often with verbatim transcripts, on a daily basis. See Introduction to the Collection, 1 Reconstruction Amendments, at ix. Bingham’s speeches of February 1866 were published in the New York Times,11 The New York Herald,12 The Vermont Watchman and State Journal,13 The Philadelphia Inquirer,14 and Philadelphia’s Illustrated New Age.15 Bingham himself published his February 28, 1866 speech separately and distributed it as a campaign document.

....In the Thirty-Ninth Congress, Pennsylvania Democrat Benjamin M. Boyer quoted the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as evidence that Congress had no right to “disfranchise the majority of the citizens of any State on account of their past participation in the rebellion.”17 One finds similar Democrat references to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments throughout the Reconstruction debates. See, e.g., CONG. GLOBE, 41st Cong., 2d Sess. app. at 354 (1870) (remarks of Sen. William T. Hamilton) (quoting the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in support of a narrow reading of federal power).

....As noted above, both John Bingham and Jacob Howard omitted the Ninth and Tenth Amendments from their list of constitutional rights protected by the Privileges or Immunities Clause, and instead expressly named the rights enumerated in the first eight amendments. As Bingham explained, “these eight articles I have shown never were limitations upon the power of the States, until made so by the fourteenth amendment.”

....in the common Reconstruction-era understanding that the last two amendments in the Bill of Rights were distinguishable from the personal rights protected in the first eight. ....y, there is no historical evidence that between the time of the

18 Nor does it mean that states are not bound to respect the federalism principles of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. See, e.g., New York v. United States, 488 U.S. 1041 (1992) (rejecting the idea that states can waive the Constitution’s federalist separation of powers represented by the Tenth Amendment). 24 Founding and Reconstruction a new consensus understanding of the Ninth Amendment had emerged which viewed the provision as a font of unenumerated personal rights that could be applied against the states.

....McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 811, (2010) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (“the Court has determined that the Due Process Clause applies rights against the States that are not mentioned in the Constitution at all, even without seriously arguing that the Clause was originally understood to protect such rights. See, e.g., Lochner v. New York; Roe v. Wade.”) (cleaned up).

Nor could it. At the time of the Fourteenth Amendment, the term “due process of law” was “universally understood to guarantee individual rights of legal process that only courts could provide.”

....In 1859, for example, John Bingham “invit[ed] attention to the significant fact that natural or inherent rights, which belong to all men irrespective of all conventional regulations, are by this constitution guaranteed by the broad and comprehensive word ‘person,’ as contradistinguished from the limited term citizen— as in the fifth article of amendments, guarding those sacred rights which are as universal and indestructible as the human race, that ‘no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property but by due process of law.’” Bingham, 1 Reconstruction Amendments, at 153-54.

This made slavery the ultimate denial of Due Process as it deprived persons of life, liberty and property without any procedural protections whatsoever. .... McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 811 (2010) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (This Court created the right to abortion based on an amorphous, unwritten right to privacy, which it grounded in the “legal fiction” of substantive due process.”). The Due Process Clause requires states to provide all persons critically important procedural rights [equal rights in court], but nothing more. ....In The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873), the Supreme Court rejected a claim by Louisiana butchers that a state-enacted monopoly violated, among other things, the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment....Since the right to pursue a local trade was neither an enumerated federal responsibility or enumerated federal right, the subject remained under the regulatory control of the people in the several states.

In support of his reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Miller relied on the basic principles of constitutional federalism. According to Miller, interpreting the Privileges or Immunities Clause as somehow nationalizing the unenumerated subjects of municipal regulation, especially when combined with the congressional enforcement powers granted by Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment, would obliterate the federalist structure of the Constitution. Miller was unwilling to accept an interpretation that “radically changes the whole theory of the relations of the State and Federal governments to each other and of both these governments to the people . . . in the absence of language which expresses such a purpose too clearly to admit of doubt.” Slaughterhouse, 83 U.S. at 78.

In his 1871 Speech on the Enforcement Act, in words that anticipate Miller’s later opinion in Slaughterhouse, Bingham explained: Is it not clear that other and different privileges and immunities than those to which a citizen of a State was entitled are secured by the provision 30 of the fourteenth article, that no state shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, which are defined in the eight articles of amendment, and which were not limitations on the power of the States before the fourteenth amendment made them limitations? Bingham, March 31, 1871, in 2 Reconstruction Amendments at 626.

Justice Miller also was correct to insist that the Fourteenth Amendment be interpreted in a manner consistent with the traditional understanding of constitutional federalism. Bingham himself had no intention to obliterate constitutional federalism and he insisted that his proposal imposed no rights upon states which they were not already constitutionally oath-bound to protect. Like other moderate Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress, Bingham valued constitutional federalism, describing it as “our dual system of Government by which our own American nationality and liberty have been established and maintained. I have always believed that the protection in time of peace within the States of all the rights of person and citizen was of the powers reserved to the States. And so I still believe.” Bingham, March 9, 1866, in 2 Reconstruction Amendments at 140.

Finally, Miller was right to limit the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States to those rights actually enumerated in one form or another in the federal Constitution. It had long been settled law that no state was permitted to make or enforce any law that conflicted or interfered with a proper exercise of enumerated federal power. See McCulloch v. Maryland, 31

17 U.S. 316 (1819). The problem in the 1860s was the lack of federal power to enforce enumerated federal rights. As Bingham explained early in the debates of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, “it has been the want of the Republic that there was not an express grant of power in the Constitution to enable the whole people of every State, by congressional enactment, to enforce obedience to these requirements of the Constitution.” Bingham, February 26, 1866, in 2 Reconstruction Amendments at 100. Although Miller does not expressly declare that the Privileges or Immunities Clause applied the first eight amendments against the states, Miller does name enumerated First Amendment rights as protected “privileges or immunities.” Nothing in his opinion closes the door on incorporation of the Bill of Rights. See, Lash, THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT, at 252-65.

That door was erroneously closed in a later case, Cruikshank v. United States, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). Id. at 265; see also McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 808 (2010) (Thomas, J. concurring).

United States, by the consent of the people of the United States, with the power to enforce the bill of 32 rights as it stands in the Constitution today.” Bingham, in 2 Reconstruction Amendments at 109. No moderate Republican in or out of Congress in the 1860s would have approved of a constitutional amendment that bound the states to enforce an undefined set of substantive rights and gave Congress the power the nationalize the same. This includes the otherwise unenumerated “right to abortion.”

28 Robin Pierucci, M.D., and Life Legal Defense Foundation

Filed July 27, 2021

A very different “logical and biological” conclusion about constitutional rights could be drawn from the definition of viability: After viability, when a human being is capable of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb, the State must, consistent with its obligations under the Fourteenth Amendment, protect this human from being deliberately killed to the same extent it protects older human beings.

Such a conclusion is at least as, and likely more, plausible than Roe’s declaration that only after the unborn child could survive outside the womb, a state may, or may not, prohibit his or her deliberate destruction, subject to broad exceptions effectively gutting even this limited permission.

....These scholars recognize that establishing the principle of Fourteenth Amendment personhood for the unborn does not dictate a single, judicially#imposed result for all states, all statutes, or all pregnancies. Paulsen, at 70 (“That the word ‘person,’ as used in the Constitution in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, is broad enough to embrace living but unborn humans does not itself say anything specific about what the precise legal regime must be with respect to abortion”); Finnis, Born and Unborn: Answering Objections to Constitutional Personhood, First Things, April 9,

....Whatever abortion restrictions may (or may not) exist on paper, because of the flexibility of this Court’s jurisprudence, abortion providers across the country advertise their services for later abortions: beyond 20 weeks, beyond 24 weeks, beyond 28 weeks, beyond 32 weeks. See Appendix. The audience for these advertisements and websites is not doctors who have unexpectedly diagnosed a dangerous condition in a pregnant woman. These advertisements are direct-to-consumer marketing of Roe- and Casey-sanctioned abortions indistinguishable from infanticide.

e. Additionally, the viability threshold for a compelling state interest in preserving human life, created by this Court in 1973, should be abandoned in favor of the medically updated and philosophically consistent standard of an “unqualified” interest in protecting life that this Court upheld in the 1990 case of Cruzan

29 Priests for Life

Filed July 27, 2021

Indeed, Priests for Life urges the Court to use this opportunity to end the charade that Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. This fateful decision has no legitimate foundation in law, it continues to tear at the fabric of our nation, and it has corrupted our judicial system. It is time for it to go ....

In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, a majority of the States and numerous Territories had laws on the books that limited (and in many cases nearly prohibited) abortion. See id., at 175, n.1.

It would no doubt shock the public at that time to learn that one of the new constitutional Amendments contained hidden within the interstices of its text a right to abortion. The fact that it took this Court over a century to find that right all but proves that it was more than hidden—it simply was not (and is not) there. June Med. Servs. L.L.C. v. Russo, 140 S. Ct. 2103, 2142, 2151 (2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting).

When deciding Roe v. Wade, this Court infamously stated:

We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer. 5

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 159 (1973). Consistent with this veiled philosophical pronouncement—a pronouncement grounded in secular positivism—a majority of the justices concluded that the U.S. Constitution “does not define ‘person,’” leading the Court to ultimately conclude that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” Id. at 158.

Remarkably, the Court dismissed the life of the unborn based on its conclusion that there is no direct textual support to conclude that this “person” is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, this same Court created a right to abortion “out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text.”

The Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade is similar to how the Court had previously concluded in the infamous Dred Scott decision (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1857)) that people of color were not legal “persons” as a matter of federal constitutional law. Unfortunately, it took a civil war to correct this injustice.

[Actually Dred Scott called slaves a “class of persons”, but persons without rights. And although they are persons, they are not “people of the United States”: “The words "people of the United States" and "citizens" are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the "sovereign people," and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not,”

...6. The only two clauses in the Constitution which point to this race treat them as persons whom it was morally lawfully to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves.

...8. A State, by its laws passed since the adoption of the Constitution, may put a foreigner or any other description of persons upon a footing with its own citizens as to all the rights and privileges enjoyed by them within its dominion and by its laws. But that will not make him a citizen of the United States, nor entitle him to sue in its courts, nor to any of the privileges and immunities of a citizen in another State.

...It is very true that, in that portion of the Union where the labor of the negro race was found to be unsuited to the climate and unprofitable to the master, but few slaves were held at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution was adopted, it had entirely worn out in one of them, and measures had been taken for its gradual abolition in several others. But this change had not been produced by any change of opinion in relation to this race, but because it was discovered from experience that slave labor was unsuited to the climate and productions of these States, for some of the States where it had ceased or nearly ceased to exist were actively engaged in the slave trade, procuring cargoes on the coast of Africa and transporting them for sale to those parts of the Union where their labor was found to be profitable and suited to the climate and productions.]

30 Hannah S., John S. and Marlene S

Filed July 27, 2021

The story of this “adoption” and this Amici Curiae Brief will reveal that Roe’s measuring line for viability has now been moved all the way back to fertilization by the modern scientific advancement called in vitro fertilization. Roe, at 160, has this viability definition: “ ‘viable,’ . . . potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid.”

Advances in science have eliminated the distinction between previability and viability. Previability prohibitions on elective abortions should be constitutional because viability occurs at fertilization, as proven through in vitro fertilization techniques.

31 Center for Medical Progress and David Daleide

Filed July 28, 2021

Federal law recognizes human infants in utero, and premature infants born alive, as persons under the law at any gestational age. The federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act recognizes the “child in utero” as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb” whose death or injury in the course of a federal crime is subject to prosecution the same as that of any born child or adult individual. 18 U.S.C. § 1841(d), (a)(1).

The federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act establishes even more broadly that, for purposes of “any Act of Congress” and “any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States,” “the words ‘person’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, and ‘individual’, shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.” 1 U.S.C. § 8 (a).

Even prior to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, this Court acknowledged that the word “person” in law was a term designed to include all of humanity. In United States v. Palmer, 16 U.S. 610 (1818), Chief Justice Marshall explained that “every human being” and “the whole human race” was included in the words “person or persons” in federal law. Id. at 631–32. And in Levy v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 68 (1968), this Court articulated a simple test for ensuring equal protection for marginalized persons, reasoning that so-called “illegitimate” children were not “non-persons” as they were “humans, live, and have their being,” and therefore, “clearly ‘persons’ within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Id. at 70.

32 European Legal Scholars in support of neither party

8162714090_European%20Legal%20Scholars%20Amici%20Brief.pdf Filed July 28, 2021

The European Court allows States a wide margin of appreciation to determine the starting point of the right to life in their domestic law and to formulate their laws on abortion. Consistent with this, the European Court has held that the Convention does not confer a right to abortion and has recognized as compatible with a Member State’s obligations under the Convention even very restrictive abortion laws. However, in several cases the European Court has found violations of the Convention in respect of individual applicants as a result of procedural deficiencies in the way national abortion laws have been given effect.

.....The Court previously has considered European law when interpreting the Constitution. See, e.g., Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 575 (2005) (considering certain foreign law “instructive” when interpreting the Eighth Amendment); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 560 (2003) (discussing the European Court’s reasoning when interpreting the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment); Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 316 n.21 (2002) (resorting to other countries’ views on capital punishment for the mentally ill). To be sure, the propriety of doing so is disputed. See, e.g., Roper, 543 U.S. at 627–28 (Scalia, J., dissenting); Lawrence, 539 U.S. at 598 (Scalia, J., dissenting); Atkins, 536 U.S. at 322–28 (Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting). But the fact that the very same source of European law this Court previously invoked also allows prohibitions on abortion admits of no serious dispute. Roper, 543 U.S. at 563; Atkins, 536 U.S. at 313–14.

....Amici, accordingly, wish to highlight relevant abortion jurisprudence from the European Court that may prove helpful to this Court. Specifically, the European Court has a body of case law weighing abortion laws against human rights standards. This case law addresses issues comparable to those faced by the Court, including the scope of the right to privacy and the interests and rights that may legitimately be balanced against such a right by the state when regulating or restricting abortion.

1.Member States may protect human life before birth through national law. The European Court has identified several rights and interests justifying such laws. These include protecting the right to life of the unborn, the legitimate interest of society in limiting the number of abortions, and the interests of society to protect morals. 2.The European Court has held that the Convention does not confer a right to abortion. 3.The compatibility with the Convention of Member States’ laws on abortion is primarily assessed by reference to Article 2 (“Right to life”) and Article 8 (“Right to respect for private and family life”) of the Convention. 4.The European Court has not determined whether the unborn child is a person for the purposes of Article 2 of the Convention. The European Court has not interpreted Article 2 as prohibiting States from making abortion legal; it instead interprets Article 2 as allowing States a margin of appreciation to determine the starting point of the right to life in their domestic law. 5.Legislation regulating the termination of pregnancy touches upon the sphere of a woman’s private life and thus may come within the scope of Article 8. But the European Court has also consistently recognized that Member States have a wide margin of appreciation under the Convention with respect to the regulation of abortion.

6.Consistent with the foregoing, the European Court has recognized as compatible with a Member State’s obligations under the Convention even very restrictive abortion laws, including a national law prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy and for any reason other than where there was a risk to the life (including by way of suicide) of the expectant mother.

7.While acknowledging that it is the task of an individual Member State to frame its own abortion law, the European Court has found that it follows from its responsibility under Article 19 of the Convention to supervise whether any such law constitutes a proportionate balancing of the competing interests involved.

8.The European Court has not relied upon any concept of the viability of the “foetus”3 as a basis for assessing the compatibility of Member States’ abortion laws with the Convention. 9.In several cases, the European Court has found that Member States have violated the Article 8 rights of claimants seeking to access abortion services permitted under national law as a result of deficiencies in the way the national law has been given effect. These have included deficiencies in the arrangements for conscientious objection by healthcare providers or deficiencies in the processes for establishing whether the conditions under national 3 The European Court uses the terms “foetus” and “unborn child” interchangeably. See Vo v. France, 2004-VIII Eur. Ct. H.R. 67, 109; A, B & C v. Ireland, 2010-VI Eur. Ct. H.R. 185, 261. (“ABC”). 6 law for a lawful abortion have been satisfied by a claimant in a particular case.

33 396 State Legislators from 41 States

Filed July 28, 2021

[This brief tackles 2 issues: power of Congress to correct state slights to the people’s rights. Second, the power of states to protect rights. It addresses a Problem, when an unenumerated [not specified in the Constitution] right, abortion, is at the expense of an enumerated right, Life.

[This brief shows Section 5 authority embedded in natural law way before 1868. Not just Congress but states. Courts have zero jurisdiction to enforce unenumerated rights like abortion, but full authority and inescapable responsibility to enforce enumerated rights like Life. Couldn’t a red state sue a blue state for slaughtering its people?]

9 The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.[7] Wikipedia: addresses rights, retained by the people, that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.

10 The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.[6]


[Even if Section 5 of the 14th Amendment DIDN'T give Congress authority to define and enforce rights:]

State legislators have the constitutional duty, and therefore the power, to protect the fundamental, civil rights of persons. The fundamental law in which those fundamental rights are found is the common law, which consists of both natural duties and those ancient, customary rights and immunities that are foundational to ordered liberty. Thus, a state legislature must declare and secure to all persons within the protection of its laws the rights that those persons have by natural and customary law. Cf. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721-22 (1997) (upholding state legislation that prohibited assisted suicide and reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “Due Process Clause specially protects those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively, ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’.” (quoting Moore v. E. Cleveland, 431 U. S. 494, 503 (1977)).

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765): “Hence,” he said, “it follows, that the first and primary end of human laws is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals.” Id. Blackstone taught that the legislative power is to declare existing common-law rights and duties and to remedy any defects in the legal security for those rights. Id. at *42-43, 52-58, 86-87

The Founders echoed this view in the Declaration of Independence, declaring that governments are instituted among men in order to secure the inalienable rights with which human beings are endowed by nature and nature’s God. They also accused the crown and Parliament of infringing the rights of “our constitution,” which in 1776 could only have been a reference to the common-law constitution of British North America. This view predicated the Constitution of the United States, which expressly secures natural rights, such as life and religious liberty, and common-law rights, such as jury trials and freedom from the quartering of soldiers in one’s home, and expressly disclaims any intent to disparage the other rights of the fundamental law.

Indeed, the point of having legislatures, executives, and courts is to secure the rights that Americans already have. Neither state legislatures nor the Constitution of the United States create those rights. See District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 592 (2008) (stating that “it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a preexisting right,” that it “is not a right granted by the Constitution,” and is not “in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.”).

Some, but not all, of the rights of natural persons are enumerated [listed] in the Constitution of the United States and its amendments. U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8.; art. IV, §2; amends. I-VIII. Others are enumerated in state constitutions. See e.g., Soc’y for the Propagation of the Gospel v. Wheeler, 22 F. Cas. 756, 766 (No. 13,156) (C.C.D.N.H. 1814). Still others are declared in American constitutions but not enumerated. U.S. Const. amend. IX (“The enumeration of certain rights herein shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.”) (emphasis added). State legislatures have a duty to declare and secure all fundamental rights, both enumerated and unenumerated.

Fundamental rights are those that persons enjoy by fundamental law—natural law and common law— with or without any written constitution. Because the common law includes natural rights, to understand the fundamental rights declared and secured by the Constitution, it is sufficient to look to the common law, especially as explained by William Blackstone. Established common-law doctrines constitute the best evidence of the existence and meaning of both enumerated and unenumerated, fundamental rights. Jeffrey D. Jackson, Blackstone’s Ninth Amendment: A Historical Common Law Baseline for the Interpretation of Unenumerated Rights, 62 Okla. L. Rev. 167 (2010) (explaining why the unenumerated rights referred to in the Ninth Amendment should be understood with reference to a common law baseline, especially as specified in Blackstone’s Commentaries); Adam J. MacLeod, Our Universal and Particular Constitution, Public Discourse, https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/10/43788/ (October 4, 2018). “The interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is necessarily influenced by the fact that its provisions are framed in the language of the English common law, and are to be read in the light of its history.” Smith v. Alabama, 124 U.S. 465, 478 (1888). The terms and concepts of the common law provided the “the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar.” Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall) 162, 167 (1875). Accord James R. Stoner, Jr., Common-Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism 9-29 (2003).

American constitutional rights are not philosophical abstractions. They are described in detail in common law treatises, such as those by Coke and Hale, and especially Blackstone’s Commentaries. The framers crafted American constitutions—state and federal—in common law terms. And Blackstone was their teacher and lexicographer.

Morris L. Cohen, Thomas Jefferson Recommends a Course of Law Study, 1119 U. Pa. L. Rev. 823 (1971); Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture 11 (1984); Albert W. Alschuler, Rediscovering Blackstone, 145 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1 (1996); R.H. Helmholz, Natural Law in Court: A History of Legal Theory in Practice 131–41 (2015).

As this Court has rightly acknowledged, Blackstone’s “works constituted the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation.” Alden v. Maine, 527 U.S. 706, 715 (1999). Blackstone retained his influence through the adoption of the Civil War Amendments. James M. Ogden, Lincoln’s Early Impressions of the Law in Indiana, 7 Notre Dame L. Rev. 325, 328 (1932). And this Court continues to turn to Blackstone today.

[2 A few examples from recent years include Gamble v. United States, __ U.S. __, 139 S. Ct. 1960 (2019) (the Court’s opinion, the concurrence, and one dissent citing Blackstone multiple times to determine the meaning of the phrase “the same offense” in the Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause); Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, __ U.S. __, 140 S. Ct. 1959, 1969 (2020) (calling Blackstone’s Commentaries a “satisfactory exposition of the common law of England”); Ramos v. Louisiana, __ U.S. __, 140 S. Ct. 1390, 1395 (2020) (citing Blackstone in explanation of the holding that the requirement of juror unanimity is “a vital right protected by the common law” and therefore the Constitution’s jury trial guarantee); Torres v. Madrid, __ U.S. __, 141 S. Ct. 989, 996, 997, 998, 1000 (2021) (citing Blackstone multiple times to determine meaning of Fourth Amendment “seizure”). ]

...emphasis added). The legislature’s particular duty to declare and secure the natural and customary rights of America’s fundamental common law can be seen clearly by reading together the Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The Bill of Rights marks off certain rights as beyond the competence of Congress (and now, by incorporation, the states) to alter or abolish. It immunizes those rights by enumerating them and by stating in particular terms the official duties with which they correlate.

But as the Ninth Amendment makes clear, the enumeration of certain common-law rights does not deny or disparage all the other rights that the American people enjoy by virtue of natural law and their ancient customs. The Ninth Amendment expressly reserves to the people those civil and fundamental rights that they enjoyed prior to ratification, which are their natural rights, other common-law rights and liberties, and some privileges enumerated in state constitutions.

Because many states refused to remedy infringements of fundamental rights [for blacks] prior to the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was necessary to ensure to all persons due process of law and the equal protection of the laws, and to empower Congress to remedy infringements of those rights. It bears emphasis that the Fourteenth Amendment was necessary to recall state legislatures to their original task. Far from repealing the people’s retention of fundamental rights declared by the Ninth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment strengthened it. And far from abrogating the duty of state legislatures to declare and secure unenumerated rights, the Fourteenth Amendment reinforced that duty.

[That is, the rights retained by the people but not protected by their state, such as the right of Blacks to liberty, was strengthened – at the expense of the freedom of the legislature to torpedo those rights. And the 14th Amendment did not supplant the duty of legislatures to protect rights, by courts, but rather that duty became enforceable by Congress.]

Legislatures are equipped to deliberate about and secure the rights of all persons as they identify and specify the boundaries between rights.

See Grégoire Webber et al, Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation (2018). Many of the great civil rights achievements in American history have been legislative achievements. See, e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And these include state statutes that declare and secure common law rights against unreasonable discrimination. ....

This Court has never denied that state legislatures have the power and duty to declare and specify the boundaries of fundamental rights in the abortion context. To the contrary, this Court has ratified the legislative province to identify, specify, and secure the rights of our fundamental law. Often using the term “interests” or “state interests,” ....

In many respects, legislatures are better equipped for this task than courts, whose job is to secure the rights of the litigants who happen to appear in any case or controversy. The job of a court is to specify a right in a legal judgment resolving a dispute between two parties. To generalize that particular judgment, to make that right universal and absolute for all persons, carries the risk that the tribunal will unintentionally invite infringement of the rights of persons who are not parties to the litigation. Significantly, most constitutional abortion cases proceed without any involvement of the persons who are most interested in, and affected by, the outcome: expectant mothers, fathers, grandparents, physicians and other health care professionals who are called to deal with the fallout of abortions, and, critically, unborn human beings. By contrast, legislatures hear evidence and find facts about the rights of all interested persons

Furthermore, a lawmaker must fashion remedies and sanctions for rights infringements that are commensurate and responsive to the particular wrong. Because not all persons who contribute to a person’s death are equally culpable, legislatures justly distinguish between them. The sanction for reckless acts that cause death need not be as severe as the sanction for intentional homicide. Legislatures also reasonably take into account the circumstances of the person whose life is lost. For example, remedies for wrongful death may take into account a person’s stage of development and relationship to any dependents.

....For example, the right to life remains inviolable and absolute though a legislature may choose to sanction those who are most culpable for its deprivation and not others

Similarly, state legislatures have long recognized that abortionists are the true, culpable parties in an abortion. Mothers are often victims of coercion. And mothers suffer the consequences of the abortion procedure itself. For these and other reasons, legislatures may choose not to impose legal sanctions on them, notwithstanding that their unborn children have a right to live.

The Roe Court failed to understand this. The Court looked to state laws that impose criminal sanctions on abortionists, rather than on the mothers themselves, and then erroneously inferred that the law is indifferent to the lives of the unborn. Roe, 410 U.S. at 157 n.54. ...

[Many prolifers similarly misunderstood]

That a right is absolute means simply that it is vested—in jurisprudential terms, that it has built into it an immunity from retrospective or retroactive abrogation—so that governments are powerless to deprive any person of the right unless and until the person has been proven to have forfeited the right by committing some wrong, and that the wrong has been established in some proceeding that satisfies the requirements of due process, or until the person dies a natural death. Id. at *125, 128-30.

,,,,the right to life is a right not to be intentionally killed. It is not a guarantee against death ‘

34 141 International Legal Scholars

Filed July 28, 2021

Not even foreign legal authorities support any right to abortion. 141 International Legal Scholars submitted an amicus brief in the Dobbs v. Jackson case declaring that “Whatever role international law plays in evaluating abortion regulations in the United States, it offers no basis for the existence of a human right to abortion.” (http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-1392/185170/20210729071535904_19-1392%20Amicus%20Brief%20of%20141%20International%20Legal%20Scholars.pdf) “The minority of States that choose to allow elective abortion impose a standard gestational limit of twelve weeks, which is more restrictive than Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act.”

“If the Court chooses to consult international law in this case, it will find there is no treaty that recognizes a so-called human right to abortion, nor has such a right been established through customary law. To the contrary, the practice across all regions demonstrates a consistent State prerogative to protect unborn life. Nor has any international court declared the existence of an international right to abortion, even in regions with the most permissive abortion regimes. Thirdparty actors seeking to invent a new right to abortion err when interpreting key international instruments, such as the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Rome Statute, and the International Conference on Population and Development. The clear language in those documents defies any attempt to repurpose them to create an international human right to abortion.

“On the other hand, provisions recognizing the unborn child as a rights-holder can be found in many international human rights instruments, including the American Convention on Human Rights, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Most States choose to exercise the prerogative to protect unborn life by regulating abortion much more strictly than in the United States. Even in the minority of States that permit elective abortions, most specify a gestational limit of twelve weeks. That limit is more restrictive than Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, which allows elective abortion until fifteen weeks’ gestation, and then permits abortion only for medical emergencies or severe fetal abnormality.”


35 Prolife Center at the University of St. Thomas

Filed July 28, 2021

The Court should make clear that the States are not required to permit abortions for reasons relating to the mental or psychological health of the pregnant woman, or for undefined reasons of health, either of which would lead the Court, and the country, back to a regime of abortion–on–demand.

36 Mary Kay Bacallao Advocating for Unborn Children

Filed July 28, 2021

It is time to extend to unborn children the equal protection and due process rights they enjoyed in Mississippi until the Roe Court made an elementary grammar error, using a phrase that conferred citizenship in one clause to define personhood for other clauses. It is time to correct the Roe Court’s error in refusing to determine when life began and in the same stroke of the pen stripping the unborn of their personhood, citing the very amendment that codified the right of all persons, born and unborn, to equal protection and due process.

THE ROE COURT MISINTERPRETED THE MEANING OF THE WORD “PERSON” AS FOUND IN THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution3 includes the following three references to persons:

[1.] “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

[2.] “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;”

[3.] “nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Here, in looking at statutory construction cannons such as noscitur a sociis, which means, “it is known by its companions,” the meaning of the word “persons” can only be ascertained by its associates. In the first instance, “persons” is being modified by “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the

3 U.S. Const. amend. XIV (adopted July 9, 1868) Text: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. 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.

jurisdiction thereof…” Here, “persons” is a general term that is being limited at least by two conditions, either “born” or “naturalized.” In this instance, the Fourteenth Amendment limits the type of persons who can be citizens to those either born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

In the second instance, no “person” shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, where “person” is used generally, unmodified by “born” or “naturalized, etc.” Here “citizens” as defined in the first instance is separate and distinct from “person” found in the second part of the sentence. The second use of “person” is unmodified. These persons are not necessarily citizens, nor does it follow that they must necessarily be “born.”

In the third instance, “any person” is also unmodified by either “born” or “naturalized, etc.” In other words, “person” is not limited to a person “born” or “naturalized in the United States,” rather, the term “person” is again unmodified and used in the general sense. Thus, where the second use of the term “person” prohibits a State from depriving a person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, “person” is used generally rather than in the context of being “born.” Additionally, where the third use of the term “person” does not allow a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, again, “person” is unmodified. This does not limit protection to “persons born or naturalized in the United States…”

To assert that one word, such as “born,” that is used in a single line to limit a general term, such as “person,” in one provision also limits that same general term, in this case “person,” each time it occurs 5 is linguistically incorrect. It is the same as saying that because one line refers to a black cat, all other times the word cat appears it can only refer to cats that are black. This is not the way language works.

There is no evidence that the original meaning of person was limited to those who were born. Rather, the corpus evidence found in COHA, the Hansard Corpus, and the Corpus of U.S. Supreme Opinions point to the unborn as persons, legally able to inherit property and in need of protection.

The Roe court did not resolve the question of when life begins, “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”4 However, the Roe Court maintained that “… the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”5 The Roe Court used faulty linguistics in determining that someone unborn was not a ‘person’ as used in second and third parts of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the first use of person, ‘born’ modifies or limits the meaning of ‘person,’ not the other way around. The Roe Court did not use proper linguistic interpretation of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment when limiting its interpretation of the second and third references to persons as those who were born.

The second reference to person in the Fourteenth Amendment, stating that a State may not deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law applies to persons both born and unborn. The third reference to person in the Fourteenth Amendment, where a State may not deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws also applies to persons both born and unborn. Simple linguistics, applied to these provisions in the U.S. Constitution, where the word person is unmodified by the word “born” confirms that a person is a person no matter how small.

In the 1850’s, there is “love of an unborn child.”18 There is also mention of the absurdity of a “price for an unborn infant”19 and making “slaves of the unborn”20 in an argument against slavery in the New England Yale Review. In the “other” category there is a reference to the divine “I AM” as unborn21 in Rational Cosmology. In the 1860’s, a popular magazine called The Atlantic deals with the “crime, so common among church going ladies and others, of murdering their unborn offspring!”22 The same magazine asks a question about, “those who provide women with [th’] means of killing their unborn children, - a double crime, murder and suicide?”23 The Atlantic also mentions the “murder of unborn offspring” in the context of a “Church powerful enough to guard the issues of life.”24 In the 1870’s, the English Constitution mentions unborn children in the context of persons: “An Act of Parliament is at least as complex as a marriage settlement; and it is made much as a settlement would be if it were left to the vote and settled by the major part of persons concerned, including the unborn children. There is an advocate for every interest, and every interest clamours for every advantage.”25

37 Professor Randy Beck

Filed July 28, 2021

Professor Tribe’s Justification Falls Short Because a Pregnant Woman Cannot Transfer a Viable Fetus to Other Caretakers ... 20 V. Viability Is an Arbitrary Line for Measuring Abortion Rights ...................... 22 VI. Stare Decisis Should Not Preserve an Arbitrary Rule Without Constitutional Warrant ..

38 Christian Legal Society and Robertson Center for Constitutional Law

Filed July 28, 2021

The Court cannot serve the rule of law by preserving decisions that subvert the rule of law A Proper Conception Of Substantive Due Process Does Not Support Existing Abortion Jurisprudence ....

Some of this Court’s most ignominious decisions emerged from expansive and unchecked conceptions of substantive due process. The “most salient instance . . . was, of course, the case that the [Fourteenth] Amendment would in due course overturn, Dred Scott v. Sandford.” Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 758 (Souter, J., concurring in the judgment). A half-century later, Lochner v. New York inspired a line of “deviant economic due process cases” that “harbored the spirit of Dred Scott in their absolutist implementation of” substantive due process. Id. at 761. Roe fares no better under a proper constitutional analysis.

39 Center for Religious Expression

Filed July 28, 2021

The Roe Court demurred on the central inquiry. When the case was decided, the presence of a life inside a mother’s womb was a debatable topic, largely informed by religious and philosophical perspectives. 410 U.S. at 159-60 (passing on “the difficult question of when life begins,” referencing differing belief systems).2 Wary of decreeing the precise moment of life, whether at conception, birth, or some time in between, the Roe Court rejected life as a marker and settled on viability as way to denote the State’s interest.

40 Center for Family and Human Rights

Filed July 28, 2021

The 2018 Mississippi Gestational Age Act banning most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, when the child in utero is known to suffer pain from common abortion procedures, is fully consistent with International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ratified by the United States, which presumptively protects the right to life of children in the womb (hereinafter, the “Covenant”), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Dec. 16, 1966, S. EXEC. DOC. E, 95-2 (1978), 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force Mar. 23, 1976), as well as other human rights commitments and obligations of the United States.

A careful reading of the text and history of the Covenant reveals that children in the womb were never excluded from the right to life, and that, more broadly, international law does not establish a human right to abortion in any circumstance, either through treaty obligation or by custom....

Treaty law is the supreme Law of the Land and the Court has a constitutional responsibility to declare what the law is. The Court should make a finding of law that children in the womb are not excluded from the right to life under the Covenant, given the plain meaning of the text of the Covenant when it was ratified by the U.S., the interpretation of the Covenant by the Executive branch, and its implementation by other States who are party to the treaty, therefore, laws to protect children in the womb from being arbitrarily deprived of their right to life, regardless of viability, are consistent with the international human rights obligations of the United States.

The Court should nonetheless say something substantive on the topic of the status of the unborn in international human rights law without upsetting honest political debates that are legitimately carried out through democratic institutions. The Court should do this for prudential reasons, including that of shielding itself from accusations that it is avoiding foundational human rights questions and to preempt interference from international actors and foreign powers in U.S. domestic legal and political disputes.

41 Concerned Women for America

Filed July 28, 2021 Mississippi Should Be Free To Make Reasonable Determinations About Abortion Policy That Place A Higher Value On The Life Of Mothers And Their Unborn Children ............................................................ 4 II.

The Court Has Undervalued The State’s Interest In Women’s Health By Failing To Give Proper Weight To The Physical, Psychological, And Emotional Harms Abortion Can Have On Women’s Lives ..

e. The states should have broad discretion in addressing the interests at play in the abortion context. Neither viability nor any other framework should constrain the state’s ability to address the ever-changing concerns associated with abortion.

42 Foundation for Moral Law, Lutherans for Life

Filed July 28, 2021

neither abortion nor privacy are mentioned in the Constitution, but Justice Blackmun said the right is found in a "penumbra" formed from "emanations" from certain rights in the Bill of Rights. Thomas Jefferson's warning that "The Constitution ... is a 3 mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please"2 takes on special significance, because a jurisprudence of "penumbras" and "emanations" is entirely subjective and removes the Constitution from any kind of objective scholarship. It is also dangerous, because the same Court that can read into the Constitution rights that simply are not there, can also read out of the Constitution rights that are there, by reading into the Constitution powers that are not there....The viability test has no foundation in law, science, history, Biblical or church tradition.

When Justice Blackmun used the viability test in Roe, he presented very little historical, legal, or medical support for that position, because very little support for that position exists. ...

In fact, throughout history viability has seldom if ever been considered the beginning of human life. Much of our Western legal tradition has been shaped by the Bible. On October 4, 1982, Congress passed Public Law 97-280, declaring 1983 the “Year of the Bible,” and the President signed the bill into law. The opening clause of the bill is: “Whereas Biblical teachings inspired concepts of civil government that are contained in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States; . . .” Joshua Berman, Senior Editor at Bar-Ilan University, in his 2008 book Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, contends that the Pentateuch is the world's first model of a society in which politics and economics embrace egalitarian ideals. Berman states flatly: If there was one truth the ancients held to be self-evident it was that all men were not created equal. If we maintain today that, in fact, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, then it is because we have inherited as part of our cultural heritage notions of equality that were deeply entrenched in the ancient passages of the Pentateuch.6

6 Joshua Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford 2008) 175, See also John Marshall Gest, The Influence of Biblical Texts Upon English Law, an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma xi Societies of the University of Pennsylvania June 14, 1910, https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu quoting Sir Francis Bacon: “The law of England is not taken out of Amadis de Gaul, nor the Book of Palmerin, but out of the Scripture, of the laws of the Romans and the Grecians.”

A. The Bible on Pre-born Children

The Bible treats the preborn child as a living human being. When Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, came into the presence of Mary who was carrying Jesus in her womb, Elizabeth declared that “the babe leaped in my womb for joy” (Luke 1:44). That doesn’t sound like a fetus or fertilized egg; that sounds like a child! It reminds us of Rebekah, of whom we read, “And the children struggled within her . . . .” (Genesis 25:21-26). These preborn children displayed traits that would follow them most of their lives.

The original languages used in these accounts make no distinction between born and preborn children. Of all of the Greek words used for child, brephos connotes a baby or very small child. That’s the word attributed to Elizabeth: “The brephos leaped in my womb for joy.” We see the same word in the next chapter: “Ye shall find the brephos wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” And in II Timothy 3:15 Paul uses the same word: “From a brephos thou hast known the holy Scriptures . . . .” The same word is used for a child in the womb, a child newly born, and a child sometime after birth.

Another Greek word used for “son” is huios. In Luke 1:36 the angel tells Mary, “And, behold, thy cousin, Elizabeth, she hath also conceived a huios.” And the angel tells Mary in Luke 1:31, “Thou shat conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a huios.” Two verbs, “conceive” and “bring forth,” with the same direct object, a “son” or huios. And years later, when Jesus is a young man, God the Father says to Him, “Thou art my beloved huios” (Luke 5:22). Again, the same Greek word used for a preborn child, a newborn child, and a young man.

The same is true of the Old Testament Hebrew. The same word used for the preborn children in Rebekah’s womb, bne, is also used for Ishmael when he is 13 years old (Genesis 17:25) and for Noah’s adult sons (Genesis 9:19). And Job says in his anguish, “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child (gehver) conceived” (Job 3:3). The Old Testament uses gehver 65 times, and usually it is simply translated “man.” Job 3:3 could be accurately translated, “There is a man conceived.”

The biblical authors identify themselves with the preborn child. In Psalm 139:13 David says, “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.” Isaiah says, “The Lord hath called me from the womb” (49:1), and in Jeremiah 1:5 we read, “before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” They don’t say “the fetus that became me;” that person in the womb is “me.”

Job wishes he could have died before he was born: “Wherefore then hast thou brought me forth out of the womb? Oh that I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me!” (10:18) How can the preborn child die if he or she is not alive?

And David says, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” (Psalm 51:5) There was nothing sinful about the act of David’s conception; this passage establishes that the preborn child has a sinful nature. How can a non-person have a sinful nature? And while other verses establish the child’s personhood before birth, this passage shows his or her humanity all the way back to conception!

Clearly the Bible, especially in its original languages, treats the preborn child the same as a child already born. The Bible knows nothing about “potential human beings;” to the authors of Scripture, there are only human beings with potential.

Some will argue that, because Genesis 2:7 says, “God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” man doesn’t really become human until he takes that first breath. Amici believe this is a mistaken interpretation of Scripture.

(1) Genesis 2:7 is not normative about how and when human life begins. Adam was never a preborn child; he was formed out of the dust of the ground as a mature adult human being. No one else was formed out of the dust of the ground; even Eve was formed out of Adam’s rib, and we never read that God breathed the breath of life into her nostrils or those of anyone else.

(2) Even if we were to conclude that without the “breath of life” we are not fully human, the preborn child takes in oxygen through a placenta. Birth constitutes a dramatic change of environment coupled with the ability to breathe for oneself; other than that birth is simply one more step on the road to maturity.

So the Bible, taken as a whole, teaches that the preborn child is a living human being. Viability does not even enter the picture in determining the beginning of personhood.

B. . Church Tradition on Pre-Born Children

Church tradition has also been instrumental in the formation of Western law.7 For this reason, and because Justice Blackmun in Roe, 410 U.S. at 130, and Justice Stevens in his Webster dissent, 492 U.S. at 567-69, cited Catholic Church teaching to justify Roe v. Wade, Amici will briefly survey church history and its effect on Western law.

The Didache, or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, a manual of instruction dating possibly as early as 50 A.D. or possibly in the second or third centuries,8 commanded, "You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born."9 The Church Father Tertullian, writing around 197 A.D., cited

7 Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1983); John Eidsmoe, Historical and Theological Foundations of Law, 3 Vols. (Nordskog 2017) 8 Early Christian Writings, "Didache," www.earlychristianwritings. com/ didache.html. 9 Id., Roberts-Donaldson English Translation.

extensively from Old Testament and New Testament Scriptures.10 He also noted that Hippocrates, Asciepiades, Erasistratus, Herophius, and Soranos, "all of them certain that a living being had been conceived and so deploring the most unhappy infancy of one of this kind who had first to be killed list a live woman being rent apart.”11 St. Hippolytus, writing around 228 A.D., condemned those who resorted to drugs " so to expel what was being conceived on account of their not wishing to have a child," declaring them guilty of "adultery and murder at the same time."12 And St. Basil wrote in his First Canonical Letter,

The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. With us there is no nice enquiry as to its being formed or unformed. In this case it is not only the being about to be born who is vindicated, but the woman in her attack upon herself, because in most cases women who make such attempts die. the destruction of the embryo is an additional crime, a second murder, at all events, if we regard it as done with intent.13

10 Scriptures cited by Tertullian include Jeremiah 1:5; Psalm 139:15; Luke 1:41-42. 11 He declared firmly, “It is not permissible for us to destroy the seed by means of illicit manslaughter once it has been conceived in the womb, so long as blood remains in the person.” 12 Hyppolytus, circa 228. A.D.; quoted in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, ed. Alexander Roberts, Sir James Donaldson, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903) V:131. 13 10 Basil (c. 330-379 A.D.), reprinted in A Select Library of Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1895) VIII:225.

The Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church provides , "A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae [automatic] excommunication."14 The Canon Law developed in the early centuries of the Christian Church out of early Church documents such as the Didache and was based on and interacted with the Scriptures, Roman and Greek Law, Byzantine Law, the Justinian Code, the decrees of emperors, and other sacred and secular legal documents.15 The above citation from the Didache is evidence that the prohibition against abortion was part of the Canon Law from the beginning and consistently thereafter.

No wonder Orthodox scholar Fr. Alexander F.C. Webster wrote that abortion “is one of only several moral issues on which not one dissenting opinion has ever been expressed by the Church Fathers.”16

14 Code of Canon Law, Title VI, Delicts Against Human Life and Freedom, Canon 1398, www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_P57.HTM. 15 Kenneth Pennington, A Short History of the Canon Law from Apostolic Times to 1917, http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington /Canon%20Law/ ShortHistoryCanonLaw.htm, pp. 2, 3, 7, 10, 16, 19, 21, 25-26, 32, 33-37, 41, 44, 59, 61. Although, as Pennington notes at 74, Martin Luther initially rejected the Canon Law, as his thinking developed he came to appreciate the value of Roman Catholic Canon Law legal scholarship and concluded that that scholarship should be applied to the civil law and the common law; see John Witte, Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation 55-85 (Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Eidsmoe, Historical & Theological Foundations of Law (American Vision 2012) III:983-84. 16 Dr. James Lamb, Abortion and the Message of the Church: Sin or Salvation? June 30, 2004, http://www.lutheransforlife.org/article/ abortion-and-the#message-of-the-church-sin-or-salvation/ (quoting “An Orthodox Word on Abortion” at 8-9 (Paper delivered at the Consultation on The Church and Abortion, Princeton, 1992)).

Nor was this view limited to the Church Fathers or to the Roman Catholic Tradition. Martin Luther stated his position forcefully: “For those who have no regard for pregnant women and who do not spare the tender fruit are murderers and infanticides.”17 John Calvin was just as clear: “If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy the unborn in the womb before it has come to light.”18 And Pennington notes that when King Henry VIII (1491 - 1547 A.D.) separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, he proclaimed that "he, not the pope, was the source of all canon law henceforward."19 Pennington adds, "Consequently, the Anglican Church preserved the entire body of medieval canon law and converted it into a national legal system."20

C. Common Law on Preborn Children As the common law developed, "quickening" became the test for homicide prosecutions.

17 Lamb, supra note 11 (quoting What Luther Says: An anthology, compiled by Ewald M. Plass (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1959), Vol. 2, NO. 2826 at 905). 18 Lamb, supra note 11 (quoting Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses at 41-42 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1950)). 19 Pennington, supra note 12, at 64. 20 Id. Quickening is different from viability; quickening is the time when the mother first feels the child move within her. One could be convicted of homicide for the killing of an unborn child, only if quickening had already taken place.

But this common law rule did not mean that the child became a person only at quickening or that there was a right to abortion before quickening. Rather, it was a procedural matter of proof. One can be guilty of homicide only if the homicide victim was alive at the time of the alleged killing, and at that stage in the development of the common law, medical science had no way of proving the child was alive until the mother had felt the child move within her.21

For nearly half a century, this nation has been saddled with an abortion jurisprudence that has no foundation in the Constitution, no foundation in medical science, and no foundation in American or Biblical history and tradition, a jurisprudence that has resulted in an estimated 62,994,587 abortions since 1973

See www.abortioncounters.com and Steven Ertelt 62,502,904 Babies Have Been Killed by Abortion Since Roe v. Wade in 1973 (2021) available at https://www.lifenews.com/2021/01/22/62502904

43 Americans United for Life

Filed July 29, 2021

(Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are not "settled precedents" worthy of being retained under the doctrine of "Stare Decisis".)

Roe is radically unsettled for additional reasons. It has not received the acquiescence of Justices or lower court judges. Roe was wrongly decided and poorly reasoned. Numerous adjudicative errors during the original deliberations—especially the absence of any evidentiary record—have contributed to making Roe unworkable. It has been the subject of persistent judicial and scholarly criticism. There is a constant search for a constitutional rationale for Roe, and the Court has yet to give a reasoned justification for the viability rule. See Randy Beck, Gonzales, Casey and the Viability Rule, 103 Nw. U. L. Rev. 249 (2009). 3

Casey is unsettled by its failure to ground the abortion right in the Constitution, by an ambiguous standard of review that is unworkable, by conflicting precedents that have “defied consistent application” by the lower courts, and by persistent judicial and scholarly criticism. Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 828–830 (1991). Politics aside, reconsidering Roe and Casey does not involve uprooting a stable, settled feature of the legal landscape. Because they are radically unsettled, Roe and Casey contradict the stare decisis values of consistency, dependability, and predictability and are entitled to minimal stare decisis respect.

44 Ethics and Public Policy Center

Filed July 29, 2021

C. Factual Developments Have Also Undermined Roe and Casey’s Reasoning. Apart from these legal developments, “facts have so changed, or come to be seen so differently” since Roe and Casey were decided as to have significantly sapped those decisions of whatever residual force they might be thought to have. Casey, 505 U.S. at 855. Roe recognized that whether “life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy” was of pivotal importance, but it asserted that “at this point 19 in the development of man’s knowledge” medical science had been “unable to arrive at any consensus” on the issue. 410 U.S. at 159. Roe thus proceeded on the assumption that life “as we recognize it” “does not begin until live birth.” Id. at 160-61.

This “unsupported empirical assumption” has been significantly undermined by subsequent developments. See Janus, 138 S. Ct. at 2483. It is now clear that an unborn fetus is not merely “potential life,” but is a “a living organism while within the womb, whether or not it is viable outside the womb.” Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 147. As a recent, exhaustive review of the scientific literature concludes, “[t]he scientific evidence clearly indicates that a one-cell human organism, the zygote, forms immediately at fusion of sperm and egg. From a scientific perspective, this single cell is inarguably a complete and living organism; i.e. a member of the human species at the earliest stage of natural development.” Maureen L. Condic, When Does Human Life Begin? The Scientific Evidence and Terminology Revisited, 8 U. ST. THOMAS J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 44, 70 (2013); see also Hana R. Marsden et al., Model systems for membrane fusion, 40 CHEM. SOC’Y REV. 1572, 1572 (2011) (“The fusion of sperm and egg membranes initiates the life of a sexually reproducing organism.”); Enrica Bianchi et al., Juno is the egg Izumo receptor and is essential for mammalian fertilization, 24 NATURE 483, 483 (2014) (“Fertilization occurs when sperm and egg recognize each other and fuse to form a new, genetically distinct organism.”).

Further, in 1973—and, to some extent, even in 1992—it was widely assumed that an unborn human being had no ability to sense and experience pain. Stuart W.G. Derbyshire & John C. Bockmann, Reconsidering fetal pain, 46 J. MED. ETHICS 3, 3 (2020). Today, by contrast, there is a growing scientific consensus that the unborn can feel pain as early as 12 weeks gestation. Id. at 6; see also American College of Pediatricians, Fetal Pain: What is the Scientific Evidence? at 1, 7 (2021), https://acpeds.org/assets/Fetal-Pain-Position-Statement-(2).pdf (concluding that “a large body of scientific evidence demonstrates that painful or noxious stimulation adversely affects immature human beings, both before and after birth,” “as early as 12 weeks gestation (and possibly earlier)”). These scientific advances further undermine Roe’s underpinnings.

45 Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation

Filed July 29, 2021

Some of the subjects covered: I. THERE ARE TWO PATIENTS THAT MUST BE CARED FOR IN MODERN OBSTETRICAL PRACTICE, AND IT IS RARE THAT AN ABORTION WOULD BE NEEDED TO MANAGE A PREGNANCY SUCCESSFULLY

II. II. CLAIMS THAT ELECTIVE ABORTIONS MUST BE ALLOWED BECAUSE ABORTION IS STATISTICALLY SAFER THAN CHILDBIRTH SHOULD BE REJECTED

III. A. The Risk of Dying from Abortion or Childbirth Is Negligible

IV. B. Although Abortion Is a Medical Procedure, It Is Rarely a Medical Decision

V. C. Discussing Maternal Mortality Rates in Relation to Elective Abortion Has No Practical Relevance

In modern obstetrical practice, the physician treats two patients—the mother and her unborn baby—and strives to maximize and protect the health and well-being of both. Good medical practice requires this. It is rare that the interests of one of these patients, from a medical standpoint, conflicts with the other. Even in those instances where the mother’s condition may place her physical health at greater risk, the pregnancy can generally be managed satisfactorily with a successful outcome for both the mother and baby. In those very rare circumstances when this cannot be done, laws like Mississippi’s allow pregnancy terminations to take place in order to protect the mother.

Claims that abortion must be allowed on demand because abortion is statistically safer than childbirth should be rejected. The relative risk of death is negligible in both abortion and childbirth. Moreover, although abortion is a medical procedure, it is rarely a medical decision. In the vast majority of cases, abortions are sought for socio-economic reasons; not for medical reasons. Therefore, discussing maternal mortality in relation to elective abortion simply is not relevant in any practical or meaningful sense.

Contrary to what some suggest, Roe was not a significant cause of reduced maternal mortality and morbidity from abortion. Such reductions correspond more closely with medical advances such as the development of effective antibiotics to manage infections and advances in medical technology allowing for blood transfusions and better administration of anesthesia.

These medical advances were unrelated to the legalization of abortion, having occurred well before Roe was handed down. So, overturning Roe will not 3 affect those advances, nor will it preclude the application of future medical advances in the treatment of pregnant women and an overall reduction in maternal mortality from all causes.

Roe was a radical decision that overrode the legislative judgments of all 50 states. It was based on a flawed understanding of the humanity of the unborn child and views of obstetrical practice that are outdated because they fail to treat unborn children as second patients in pregnancy. Additionally, it may have been based on false claims regarding the number of women supposedly dying from illegal abortion. It should be overturned.

The impression frequently was given (and still is) that childbirth is extremely risky and that women need abortion because it is much safer than childbirth. Likewise, based on made up and grossly inflated numbers of maternal deaths prior to Roe, it has been erroneously suggested that Roe was the reason for a dramatic reduction in maternal mortality from abortion, and that its overturn would return the country to a time when “thousands” of women died from “back-alley” abortions. None of this is true.

I. THERE ARE TWO PATIENTS THAT MUST BE CARED FOR IN MODERN OBSTETRICAL PRACTICE, AND IT IS RARE THAT AN ABORTION WOULD BE NEEDED TO MANAGE A PREGNANCY SUCCESSFULLY.

1. Basic medical texts, for decades, have made it clear that there are two patients that must be cared for in modern obstetrical practice. For example, in explaining the need for significant revisions to the 1980 edition of Williams Obstetrics, the authors stated:

Happily, we have entered an era in which the fetus can be rightfully considered and treated as our second patient. . . Fetal diagnosis and therapy have now emerged as legitimate tools the obstetrician must possess. Moreover, the number of tools the obstetrician can employ to address the needs of the fetus increases each year.

Jack A. Pritchard & Paul C. MacDonald, Williams Obstetrics, vii (16th Ed. 1980) (emphasis supplied).

A later edition made it even more obvious that obstetricians must be cognizant of the unborn baby as a separate entity when managing a pregnancy. It stated: Obstetrics is an unusual specialty of medicine. Practitioners of this art and science must be concerned simultaneously with the lives and well-being of two persons; indeed, the lives of two who are interwoven. F. Gary Cunningham, et al., Williams Obstetrics, vii (18th ed. 1989). In a chapter entitled “Techniques to Evaluate Fetal Health,” it was stated:

Until relatively recently, the intrauterine sanctuary of the fetus was held to be inviolate. The mother was the patient to be cared for; the fetus was but another albeit transient, maternal organ. . . Indeed, the fetus is no longer regarded as a maternal appendage. . . . Instead, the fetus has achieved the status of the second patient, a patient who usually faces much greater risks of serious morbidity and mortality than does the mother.

The many advances in diagnosis and treatment that now clearly establish the fetus as a patient have also contributed remarkably to legal considerations involving the fetus. Fetal legal rights are emerging; for example, in some courts, the fetus has been allowed to file suit. Id at 277.

Obstetric ultrasound technology was in its infancy at the time of Roe, and was not widely used in the United States until well into the 1970’s. Malcolm Nicolson & John E.E. Fleming, Imaging and Imagining the Fetus 233 (2013). It has since given rise to whole new fields of medicine and top pediatric hospitals across the country regularly perform surgery on this second patient.2

Abortion proponents disregard these basic facts when they ignore the existence of the second patient within the womb and suggest that unborn children are just appendages of the mother to be discarded upon her request. In so doing, they suggest a return to an outmoded and discredited approach to pregnancy and obstetrical practice.

2. It is rare that the interests of one of these patients, from a medical standpoint, conflicts with the other. And, on those rare occasions when it does, the pregnancy can generally be successfully managed. So, medically speaking, abortion is almost never needed to manage a pregnancy. Honest abortion proponents long ago admitted to the overall safety of pregnancy and the lack of a need for abortion for medical reasons.

In 1956, when maternal mortality rates were much higher than today,3 the namesake of Planned

2 See e.g., the website of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia: “Today, fetal therapy is recognized as one of the most promising fields in pediatric medicine, and prenatal surgery is becoming an option for a growing number of babies with birth defects.” Fetal Surgery, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia., https://www.chop.edu/treatments/fetal-surgery (last visited July 26, 2021). 3 The maternal death rate in 1946 was 11.6/10,000 (or 116/100,000) and, by 1956, had declined to 4.0/10,000 (or

Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute highlighted the overall safety of pregnancy and childbirth. He stated that in more than 30 years of obstetrical practice, during which he had delivered about 6,000 babies, he had seen only 3 patients die—two from cancer and one from a blood clot. He stated that “[p]regnancy and labor have little to do with any of the three.” A.F. Guttmacher, Pregnancy and Birth 271 (1956).

Likewise, in a paper published in 1960, Dr. Mary Calderone, then Medical Director of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, admitted: “medically speaking, that is, from the point of view of diseases of the various systems, cardiac, genitourinary, and so on, it is hardly ever necessary today to consider the life a mother as threatened by pregnancy.” Mary S. Calderone, Illegal Abortion as a Public Health Problem, 50 Am. J. Pub. Health 948 (1960) (“Illegal Abortion”).

Obstetrics texts from the seventies also confirm the safety of pregnancy and childbirth and the ability to manage it successfully without abortion. One such textbook states: “abortion for purely medical reasons, i.e., vascular, renal or heart disease and so forth is rarely indicated in current medical practice.” Duncan E. Reid, et al., Principles in

40/100,000). Milton C. Klein & Jacob Clahr, Factors in the Decline of Maternal Mortality, 168 JAMA 237 (1958) (“Factors”).

Management of Human Reproduction 274 (1972). See also, J.P. Greenhill & Emanuel A. Friedman, Biological Principles in Modern Practice of Obstetrics 385 (1974) (noting that the number of induced abortions “on demand” had been rising astronomically, “while medical reasons appear to be almost vanishing” due to improved medical therapies).

A. The Risk of Dying from Abortion or Childbirth Is Negligible. Claiming that abortion is statistically safer than childbirth makes a point. But, it is a point that has no practical significance. Assuming, arguendo, that the data upon which these claims rely is accurate, the risk of dying from either abortion or childbirth is still negligible. For example, comparing the worst-case scenario for childbirth (about 20/100,0000) and the best-case scenario for abortion (about 1/100,000), the risk of dying in childbirth is (.00020 or (.02%)) and the risk of dying in abortion is (.00001 or (.001%). In other words, your chance of surviving childbirth is 99.99980% and your chance of surviving abortion is 99.99999%. In either case, it is just the difference of a fraction of a fraction of 1 percent and is akin to comparing a 0% risk of dying with a 0% risk of dying.

….Since very few women decide to have abortions because they wish to avoid risks to their physical health, it is disingenuous to suggest that abortion must be kept available on demand because it is statistically “safer” for women. This simply is not a consideration that informs their decisions. Nor should it be, given the exceedingly low rate of mortality from either course of action.

….Roe was a radical decision that overrode the considered judgments of the legislatures in all 50 states. It was based on outmoded views of the humanity of the unborn child, outdated views of obstetrical practice (which failed to treat the baby within the womb as a second patient) and, arguably, on false claims regarding the number of women supposedly dying from illegal abortion.

46 Family Research Council

Filed July 29, 2021

The viability rule also removes states’ ability to adapt abortion regulations to advances in science and medicine. See MKB Mgmt. Corp. v. Stenehjem, 795 F.3d 768, 774 (8th Cir. 2015) (Shepherd, J.) (“By taking this decision away from the states, the Court has also removed the states’ ability to account for advances in medical and scientific technology [that] have greatly expanded our knowledge of prenatal life.”) (internal citations omitted). Courts are not “suited to make the necessary factual judgments” about viability and the “medical” practice of abortion. Akron I, 462 U.S. at 458 (O’Connor, J., dissenting).

That is because “science … progress[es] even though [this] Court averts its eyes,” and legislatures are most capable of debating and responding to that progress. McCorvey v. Hill, 385 F.3d 846, 853-54 (2004) (Jones, J., concurring). The viability rule, however, forces courts to “pretend to act as science review boards,” removing the regulation of abortion from the democratic process. Akron I, 462 U.S. at 458 (O’Connor, J., dissenting). This rule has “rendered basic abortion policy beyond the power of our … representative government [which] may not meaningfully debate” abortion-related scientific and medical advances. McCorvey, 385 F.3d at 852. The “perverse result” of the “constitutional adjudication of] this fundamental social policy … is that … facts no longer matter.” Id. That cannot be the rule.

Similarly, in tort law, courts in thirty states have either “expressly or impliedly rejected viability as an appropriate cutoff point for determining liability for nonfatal prenatal injuries.” Linton, supra, 146. For wrongful death, forty-three states “now allow recovery … for prenatal injuries resulting in stillbirth … [and] the modern trend, supported by legislative reform, is toward abolishing any viability (or other gestational) requirement.” Id. at 323-24.

See also W. Page Keeton et al., Prosser and Keeton on the Law of Torts § 55, at 369 (5th ed. 1984) (stating viability is “arbitrary” because it “of course does not affect the question of the legal existence of the unborn, and therefore of the defendant’s duty, and it is a most unsatisfactory criterion, since it is a relative matter.”).

Paul Benjamin Linton, The Legal Status of the Unborn Child Under State Law, 6 U. St. Thomas J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 323-24 (2011)

Petitioners ask the Court to overrule Roe and Casey because it cannot reconcile those cases with more recent precedent and with scientific advancements showing a compelling state interest in fetal life far earlier than those cases suggest

The viability line therefore tends to afford greater protection to unborn children of the wealthy. See Beck, Gonzales at 259. Those unborn children whose parents are either closer to advanced medical technology or can afford to travel to receive high�quality medical care would be protected from abortion sooner than those children from poorer families. If, however, viability is based on the best technology currently in use, but unavailable to any particular woman, then “the [viability] rule is unprincipled for a different reason[,]” namely “caus[ing] the constitutional status of some fetuses to turn on unattainable hypothetical conditions, rather than real-world prospects for survival.” Id. Neither is a workable line.

Finally, viability varies based on the competence and optimism of the doctor responsible for the evaluation. An incompetent doctor may place viability too late (or early). An overly pessimistic or otherwise ideological doctor may set the threshold too high. The 32 average patient hardly has the ability to question these determinations. Moreover, this deference to “disputable medical judgments becomes particularly problematic when the doctor has financial, legal, or ideological interests at stake in the determination.” Id. at 260.

These factors cannot be “the sole criterion for deciding whether [a] child will live or die.” Box, 139 S. Ct. at 1783 (Thomas, J., concurring).

In short, the viability rule is and always has been arbitrary and unworkable. The Court should no longer retain it

47 Human Coalition Action and Students for Life of America

Filed July 29, 2021

The Supreme Court’s venerable duty to faithfully uphold the Constitution requires abrogating errant precedents, rather than reaffirming or extending them

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey categorically fall under the weakest echelon of stare decisis.

Developments have eroded the Court’s assumptions and the decisions which rested on them—the considerable cost to following them far outweighs the benefit.

Scientific and technological developments in the last 50 years reveal Roe and Casey’s fundamental error, warranting full reconsideration.

Roe and Casey initiated considerable undesirable consequences in all facets of society, unmasking the decisions as egregiously wrong.

Abortion’s human death toll causes unsustainable population decline.

Abortion continues to fulfill eugenicists’ goals by eliminating disproportional amounts of minority populations

Abortion is fraught with abuse by criminal actors.

The unregulated abortion industry benefits from exemptions not provided to others, leading to continual scandal, malpractice, and abuse.

Abortion commodifies humans—pregnant mothers and their unborn children.

Continued fidelity to Roe and Casey is extraordinarily disruptive to a functioning and healthy society.

Purported reliance interests on abortion are unnecessary

The ever-increasing knowledge we have about the development of the child in the womb, its humanity, and life affirm Roe/Casey were decided on erroneous grounds. Abortion is always fraught with moral and ethical concerns as it always ends a vulnerable innocent human life, at any phase of development.33 The following scientific facts were equally true in 1973 and 1992 as in 2021 but were unknown or ignored by the Court.

Since Roe and Casey, medical and technological developments, including the developments of the sonogram and in vitro fertilization, reinforced the conclusion that the life of an individual human being begins at conception.34 The widespread clinical use of ultrasound, a technological development that the Roe Court could not anticipate, came to the commercial market after Roe and substantially affected medical practice and public opinion.35 Recently, biologists reached the consensus that human life begins at conception—95% of biologists agree.36

We now know that from the moment of conception, unborn children possess the seven characteristics that define life: responsiveness to the environment, growth and change, the ability to reproduce, a regulated metabolism and oxygen flow, maintaining homeostasis (the ability to regulate internal bodily functions in response to external changes), composed of cells, and the capacity to pass traits onto offspring—in this case, human offspring.37 The Department of Genetics at Mayo Clinic confirmed, “[b]y all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”38


     35 Id. at 213; Malcolm Nicolson & John Fleming, Imaging and Imagining The Fetus: The Development of Obstetric Ultrasound 1–7 (2013) (“Ultrasonic imaging has also had a momentous social impact because it can visualize the fetus. Fifty years ago, the unborn human being was hidden, enveloped within the female abdomen, away from the medical gaze . . . . [T]he scanner had become widely deployed within the British hospital system by 1975 . . . . By the late 1970s, the ultrasound scanner had become a medical white good, a standardized commodity in a mass marketplace.”).
     36 Jacobs, S. A., Biologists’ Consensus on ‘When Life Begins’, U. OF C. DEP’T OF COMP. HUMAN DEVELOP. (2018).
     37 Wilkin, Douglas, and Niamh Gray-Wilson, Characteristics of Life, CK-12 Foundation.
     38 Liberty University, The Genetic Code; Principles and Choices, When Does Human Life Begin?, available at www.principlesandchoices.com/quick-code-library/pcs344 (current as of July 27, 2021).

Similarly, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 1999 treats injury or death to an unborn child caused by a third party while committing a federal offense against the mother as a separate federal crime.44

These developments are emblematic of what the Court failed to acknowledge 48 years ago, a fetus in the womb is a distinct living human person—simply a very small one.

The Court relied on central medical and scientific fallacies when rendering Roe and Casey. Texas’ brief presented medically accurate and detailed information about the developing child in the womb, including the humanity and rights of the unborn child.45 But Roe’s decision ignored Texas’ arguments, refusing to “resolve the difficult question of when life begins.”46 Instead, the Roe and Casey Courts inaccurately referred to unborn in the womb as “a fetus that may become a child,” and “potential life”.47


     44 National Conference of State Legislatures, State Laws on Fetal Homicide and Penalty-Enhancement for Crimes Against Pregnant Women, available at www.ncsl.org/research/health/fetal-homicide-state-laws.aspx (current as of July 27, 2021).
     45 Roe v. Henry Wade Dist. Atty. of Dallas Co., Texas, 1971 WL 134281 (U.S.), 29 (U.S., 2004)(arguing “The fetus implanted in the uterine wall deserves respect as a human life….It is alive because it has the ability to reproduce dying cells. It is human because it can be distinguished from other non-human species, and once implanted in the uterine wall it requires only nutrition and time to develop into one of us.”).

     46 Roe, 410 U.S. at 159.
     47 Id. at 113; Casey, 505 U.S. at 875 and 876

Both principal holdings hinged on refusing to acknowledge the significance of the interests of human life in the womb.48 This was an egregious error. The matter of when life begins is no longer a philosophic discussion “depending on one’s beliefs”49 but is instead a scientific fact.50

Significant developments about the humanity of the child in the womb warrant reconsideration of fateful abortion decisions and their underpinnings. Unlike Roe and Casey, Dobbs presents this Court with the opportunity to consider the full scientific and factual spectrum about the most overlooked abortion participant—the human child.


     48 Shah, Mamta K., Inconsistencies in the Legal Status of an Unborn Child: Recognition of a Fetus as Potential Life, 29 HOFSTRA LAW REVIEW 3, 93.1-93.2 (2001).
     49 Casey, 505 U.S. at 852.
     50 See Jacobs, Biologists’ Consensus on ‘When Life Begins’.

iii. Abortion is fraught with abuse by criminal actors.

Further, abortion is fraught with abuse by criminal actors. The human trafficking industry requires abortion to carry out its horrific activities and hold hundreds of thousands of victims enslaved and working.67 Women report being coerced through emotional and physical duress to have abortions 64% of the time.68

Another undesirable consequence of this Court’s abortion doctrine is the negative impact on women’s physical security in childbearing. Pregnant women experience an increased rate of assault and battery from unmarried partners.69 Women who pursue


     64Congressional Findings, available at https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU10/20171101/106562/HH RG-115-JU10-Wstate-ParkerS-20171101-SD001.pdf (current as of July 27, 2021).
     65 Id.
     66 Id.
     67 Laura J. Lederer and Christopher A. Wetzel, The Health Consequences of Sex Trafficking and Their Implications for Identifying Victims in Healthcare Facilities, 23 THE ANNALS OF HEALTH LAW 1 (2014).
     68 The Elliot Institute, Forced Abortion in America (2014).
     69 Clarke D. Forsythe & Stephen B. Presser, The Tragic Failure of Roe v. Wade: Why Abortion Should Be Returned to the States, 10 TEX. REV. L. & POL’Y at 100 (2005). 21

surrogacy have been subjected to contracts that require them to abort and, or to demands to abort.70 A growing body of international medical data from dozens of countries established long-term risks to women from abortion.71

48 Lee J. Strang

Filed July 29, 2021

[This excerpt is included in my book as presented below, with my explanations and summary, even though I am not highlighting any of it in red; almost all of it, except for my own text, would be red.]

The 14th Amendment: “...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....”

Lee J. Strang, in the Amicus Brief he filed in Dobbs v. Jackson, explains how the correct meaning of “person” in the 14th Amendment is the “natural” one. That is, the meaning that all of us non-lawyers attach to the word. A human being.

A baby.

Plural: people.

The normal meaning.

He explains how Justice Blackmun, author of Roe v. Wade, was wrong to assume a legalistic meaning that doesn’t necessarily include unborn people. But not just that Blackmun was wrong, but how he got wrong.

And not just Blackmun, but even Justice Scalia, the hero of conservatives.

And even Judge Bork, the famous “originalist” nominated to the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1987 but crucified by the Democrat-controlled Senate to the degree that his name was added to dictionaries. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bork transitive verb - US politics, informal: to attack or defeat (a nominee or candidate for public office) unfairly through an organized campaign of harsh public criticism or vilification. “In any event, seeing one of their own being borked may itself energize the conservative base, even beyond what a conservative nomination would do.” —

Mark Tushnet. “In 1987, conservative judge Robert Bork endured such virulent criticism … that to this day, a nominee sidelined by activists is said to have been ‘borked.’ ”— Claire Suddath )

You ask, “What other definition matters, but this ‘natural’ meaning?” If you have to ask, you obviously are not a lawyer.

Lawyers understand that when Roe v. Wade said “if Texas’ suggestion of personhood is ever established”, Roe meant, not established by evidence of the fact that babies of humans are humans by modern medicine or by court-recognized fact-finders, but evidence that the meaning of the word “persons” in the 14th Amendment, as understood by those who ratified it, was the way we “naturally” (normally) define “people” as opposed to treating “persons” as a technical legal term for lawyers to load with their own special courtroom meanings.

According to this thinking, whether we adopt the “natural” or the legalistic meaning depends on which meaning was adopted by lawyers and legislatures when the 14th Amendment was ratified. The fact that some states – including the states that ratified the 14th Amendment – didn’t outlaw abortion from conception until several years after they ratified the Amendment is taken by this thinking to prove they understood it used the word “person” to mean only those whom voters chose to treat as human.

Lee Strang points out logical inconsistencies with this approach, and shows how the “natural” meaning of “persons”, among states back then, better fits the historical record. He says the delay of states in outlawing abortion from conception is accounted for by the delay of the medical profession in understanding early pregnancy, and in explaining its discoveries to the general public.

My own argument in this book assumes what Strang calls the “natural” meaning of “person”. I point out that any meaning but “all humans” leaves the Amendment with zero effect. If voters can decide not to include a whole class of people as “persons”, voters in the South would have restored slavery. This “legalistic” interpretation would thus lead to an “absurd result”, a sensible courtroom reason to reject an idiotic interpretation.

I also point out that Roe treated “”if Texas’ suggestion of personhood is ever established” as a fact inquiry, since Roe later said if doctors and preachers can’t agree, “the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is unable to speculate” about “when life begins”. By elevating doctors and preachers above themselves as experts on the meaning of “when life begins”, and by anticipating the possibility of later correction by “the development of man’s knowledge”, Roe rejected treating “when life begins” “as a matter of law” or of special technical courtroom applications, and treated the question as a fact question.

Although Roe treated the question as a technical legalistic inquiry by exploring how past legislatures treated abortion, Roe treated it as a fact question by deferring to the superior expertise of doctors and preachers.

In case you are screaming “stop talking about Roe! It’s been overturned!” I must remind you that Roe’s ignorance-necessitated neutrality about “when life begins” is elevated to “scrupulous neutrality” in Dobbs. At least Roe acknowledged the existence of the question and said it mattered; in fact, that it is dispositive.

Strang’s study is hardly irrelevant with the passage of Dobbs. We need it now more than ever. We need voters to realize if they think they can vote on who gets to be counted as human, the very right to vote is the least of the rights they will lose!

Strang’s study is valuable for its ability to reach well meaning legal scholars struggling to honor the Constitution by establishing its “original meaning” but who are confused about what “original meaning” means.

With that summary, we now go to Strang’s study:

QUESTION PRESENTED Whether the original meaning of “person” in the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment includes unborn human beings My view has long been that the strongest originalist reason that supported Justice Blackmun’s conclusion that unborn human beings are not constitutional persons was the historical evidence that some states in 1868 allowed abortion in some instances, because that would mean that state law authorized actions fundamentally inconsistent with the full constitutional personhood of unborn human beings at the same time the [very same] states adopted the Fourteenth Amendment.
Indeed, this reason was cited by Justice Scalia to support his view that all abortion decisions remained with the states. “[S]ome states prohibited [abortion], some states didn’t . . . . It was one of those many things . . . left to democratic choice.”.... See, e.g., Bork, supra (“It is impossible to suppose that the states ratified an Amendment they understood to outlaw all abortions but simultaneously left in place their laws permitting some abortions.”).
Below I describe an alternative view of this historical evidence...the progressive changes in abortion law toward fully protecting unborn human beings were in response to new medical information that caused lawmakers to continually re-align state law to better fit with their (explicit and implicit) natural kind original meaning of “person.” ….This account also explains how abortion law in 1868, which limited but did not eliminate abortion, fits the natural kind meaning of “person” because lawmakers’ knowledge of the status of unborn human beings had not yet informed (all of) them that unborn humans are, in fact, human from conception.

Strang gives a history of “originalism”, which means “a legal philosophy that the words in documents and especially the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted as they were understood at the time they were written...the constitution does not ‘evolve’. ”

[The whole rest of this footnote is quotes from Strang’s Amicus, although I am not indenting it.] ...

Strang says “Originalism in its modern theoretical form first appeared in the early 1970s. At this stage, originalism unselfconsciously focused on the intended meaning and goals of the Constitution’s framers....Many jurists and scholars criticized this early version of originalism. Three criticisms relevant to my argument, which many originalists took on board, include the claims that the framers intent is not the law, [Anton Scalia]..., there was not a single intended framer meaning, [Ronald Dworkin...], and that it was impractical for the legal system to try to uncover intended framer meaning (even if it, in theory, existed). [Paul Brest]....

In response, most originalist scholars re-articulated originalism as public meaning originalism. [What the provisions of the Constitution meant to the public] Public meaning was a real fact of the world….and the evidence for it was relatively widely available. ... One [way to interpret words] is general public meaning and another is legal meaning. General public meaning is the meaning of the Constitution’s text that is widely available to and utilized by Americans at the time of ratification. …. Legal meaning...arises out of legal practice. Lawyers and legal practice are a linguistic subcommunity, and words and phrases have particular meanings and nuances of meaning within legal practice....

….By contrast with the fundamentally conventional general and legal public meanings just discussed, natural kind meaning corresponds to natural reality, independent of human convention. It is the view that linguistic meaning is attached to something factually true. [In other words, the application of the word “person” to babies changes only as we better understand babies.]

B. The original meaning of “person” in the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses was the natural kind of human being.

….both the status quo of abortion law in 1868 and continual changes to that law support the natural kind interpretation. ….

The Constitution’s text suggests that “person” was the natural kind of human being. [The Constitution used the word “person” as normal people normally define the word.] The text of the Fourteenth Amendment describes a being who [1] can be a citizen, who [2] can have his or her life deprived by the government, and who [3] can be harmed by private violence. U.S. CONST., amend. XIV, § 1. Two of these characteristics occur to human beings both pre- and postnatally; but the important point is that all of these are characteristics of human beings, and unborn human beings are the kind of beings who possess the capacities for those characteristics and will possess the actual characteristics themselves at some point in their lives (assuming normal development).

The intended meaning of framers and ratifiers of constitutional text is also evidence of the Constitution’s original meaning. This is especially true when the framers and ratifiers publicly state their intentions so that they become aspects of the publicly available context. As many scholars have noted, there is no direct legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters and ratifiers discussing the Amendment’s relationship with abortion. ...However, [they made] numerous statements that the Amendment protects all human beings, regardless of their characteristics, and this supports the natural kind original meaning of “person.”

For example, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Lyman Trumbull, spoke to the Senate about the Thirteenth Amendment and legislation for the Freedmen’s Bureau that he planned to introduce, and tied the Constitution’s protection to all human beings: “any legislation or any public sentiment which deprives any human being in the land of those great rights of liberty will be in defiance of the Constitution.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 77 (Dec. 19, 1865) (Lymann Trumbull).

Similarly, a leading Senate sponsor of the Fourteenth Amendment, Jacob Howard, explained the broad scope of the Equal Protection Clause: “It establishes equality before the law, and it gives to the humblest, the poorest, the most despised of the [human] race the same rights and the same protection.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 2766 (May 23, 1866) (Jacob Howard).

The “Father” of the Fourteenth Amendment, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, stated in 1867 to the House regarding the word “person” in the Fifth Amendment (whose text he copied for the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause), that “[b]y that great law of ours it is not to be inquired whether a man is ‘free’ . . . ; it is only to be inquired is he a man, and therefore free by the law of that creative energy which breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul, endowed with the rights of life and liberty.” Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 1st Sess. 541 (July 9, 1867) (John Bingham). Like Trumbull and Howard, Bingham equated “person” with “human being.” It is worth noting before proceeding that there is no evidence from the framing and ratification process limiting “person” to born human beings.

Dictionaries of the time period defined person as the natural kind of human being. For instance, Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1864), defined person as “a living human being; a man, woman, or child; an individual of the human race.” 1 NOAH WEBSTER ET AL., AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 974 (1864).

...the strongest argument [against] unborn personhood was the history of abortion regulation, and in particular the fact that some states permitted abortion in some contexts in 1868. [But] Scholars today agree that abortion law changed over time from a position of less-protective to more�protective of unborn human beings.... the basic pattern is widely recognized....

The common law viewed unborn human beings as human beings and treated abortion upon quickening as a misdemeanor. Sir William Blackstone stated that “[l]ife is an immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual and it begins in contemplation of the law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.” 1 SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND *126 (1776); see also 1 id. *119 (“Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us.”). Blackstone’s description of unborn humans is as fully human. Blackstone explained that “[t]o kill a child in its mother’s womb, is now no murder, but a great misprison [a serious misdemeanor]: but if the child be born alive, and dieth by reason of the potion or bruises it received in the womb, it is murder.” 4 Id. *198. It is widely agreed by scholars that this protection after quickening in some instances, and after birth in others, was the product of evidentiary concerns over whether a woman was indeed pregnant and the unborn victim was indeed alive at the time of the crime.

…. Crucial to [proving that] the natural kind meaning of “person” [is its meaning in the 14th Amendment,] state lawmakers progressively restricted abortion because new medical knowledge enabled them with greater clarity to see that unborn human beings were indeed human beings and extended the law’s protection to them. DELLAPENNA, supra at 313. As summarized 19 by the leading historian, Professor Joseph Dellapenna, this period saw “dramatic changes in scientific theories about the nature of conception and the emergence of a new consensus on when a distinct human being began that were built upon the scientific discoveries of the early nineteenth century.” Id. at 282. contemplation of the law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.” 1 SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND *126 (1776); see also 1 id. *119 (“Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us.”)....

By 1868, ...Thirty of the thirty-�seven states in the Union had enacted statutes that restricted abortion. Witherspoon, supra at 33. Of these thirty, twenty-seven state statutes restricted abortion prior to the common law line of quickening. ... Evidence of this can be seen from many sources. State law itself reflected this understanding because twenty-eight of the thirty jurisdictions that statutorily restricted abortion placed their restrictions under the label “offenses against the person,” and twenty-three states labeled unborn human beings “children”. Witherspoon, supra at 48. States imposed significant punishments for abortion, reflecting the humanity of unborn human beings. Id. at 52-54. State judiciaries similarly modified the common law to expand protection for unborn humans, for instance, by moving earlier than the common law quickening line. Craddock, supra at 555.

The legal system’s shift was supported by and in response to information provided to lawmakers from the medical profession. DELLAPENNA, supra at 298. One of the most influential books on medical ethics leading up to this period, THOMAS PERCIVAL, MEDICAL ETHICS 135-36 (1827), by a noted English physician, stated that “to extinguish the first spark of life is a crime of the same nature, both against our maker and society, as to destroy an infant, a child, or a man.”

Percival treated abortion as ethically indistinguishable from killing born human beings because all human beings are the same type of being. Percival’s view was influential in the United States and was adopted by the American Medical Association, which stated in 1859 that unborn human beings should be protected because of the “independent and actual existence of the child before birth, as a living being.” The Report on Criminal Abortion, 12 TRANS. OF THE AM. MED. ASS’N 76 (1859).

The Report went on to advocate state legislative reform to better protect unborn human beings. Id. While the states were considering ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, New York’s influential Medical Society stated that all abortions are “murder.” Byrne, supra at 836.

Legislators changed both the common law and their own earlier statutes in response to this better information about the nature of unborn human beings. As legislators learned that quickening and other lines were irrelevant to the development of human beings, they discarded them and legislated greater protection.

This is exactly what Ohio did. See Witherspoon, supra at 61-64 (describing this process). The Ohio legislature modified Ohio’s 1834 abortion law in early 1867. The Ohio Senate Report relied on the fact that “[p]hysicians have now arrived at a unanimous opinion that the foetus in utero is alive from the very moment of conception.” 1867 Ohio S.J. App. 233. Informed by the new medical information, including Dr. Percival’s statements, the Report condemned the “class of quacks who make child-murder a trade.” Id. The legislature therefore changed the law and eliminated the quickening line to take better account of these newly known facts. “[N]o opinion could be more erroneous [than] that the life of the foetus commences only with quickening [and] to destroy the embryo before that period is not child-murder.” Id.

“[T]he legislative histories of the statutes of other states show that these statutes were often enacted pursuant to a request of state medical societies.” Witherspoon, supra at 65. For example, New York’s General Assembly, following the recommendation of its medical society that, “from the first moment of conception, there is a living creature in process of development to full maturity,” modified its 1845 abortion law to prohibit abortion throughout pregnancy. DELLAPENNA, supra at 323-28

C. The natural kind original meaning of “person” in the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses included unborn human beings

Still, ...by 1868, ...some state legislation was not fully protective of unborn human beings. Id. at 316-17. As I noted earlier, this is the most powerful originalist argument against the constitutional personhood of unborn human beings. ...under the conventional� legal meaning approach, [the approach in Dobbs that protectable rights are “those rooted in our nation’s history”] that would be evidence that the original meaning of “person” did not include unborn human beings, or at least not all of them. [Because] if unborn human beings were constitutional persons in 1868, then many of the states that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment were violating the Amendment they adopted. So argued Blackmun, Scalia, Bork, and many others.

[But] the reasons these states gave for changing their laws are precisely the reasons a rational legislator would give if the meaning of “person” was a natural kind [and in response to growing medical understanding of babies from conception].

[Roe v. Wade claimed that] the Constitution’s use of “person” showed that it was limited to born human beings. Roe, 410 U.S. at 157. ...But...it does not logically follow from the multiple born uses of “person” that the uses of “person” in the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses are similarly limited....[Roe says] “in nearly all these instances, the use of the word [in the Constitution] is such that it has application only postnatally. None indicates, with any assurance, that it has any possible prenatal application.” ...He admits that in some instances... “person” may apply to unborn human beings. Those instances clearly include the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses because there is nothing in their text to prohibit such application, unlike, for instance, the Citizenship Clause. Those instances also likely include Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 (“The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit . . . .”), Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 (“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another . . . .”), and the Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons . . . .”).

Many of the instances of solely post-natal application are so only because their context and function limit them. For instance, the presidency is limited to “No Person except a natural born Citizen.” U.S. CONST., art. II, § 1, cl. 5. The Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses lack such limiting text or function; the Clauses are not limited to born persons or even natural persons. Moreover, the fact that “person” in the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses is not limited to some classes of humans, such as “born” or “natural persons” or “such persons,” suggests that it includes all persons. See Gorby, supra (providing a variety of critiques of Justice Blackmun’s intratextualism). [In other words “person” doesn’t mean ALL born persons, any more than it means all UNborn persons; the context tells us which persons are meant. In the “citizenship clause”, the first clause of the 14th Amendment, we know only born babies can be citizens because the Clause explicitly says so. The remaining clauses do not say so, nor does reason or common sense require that limit, so when the Amendment says “no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”, we have no ground for making it mean something else. No one did then; no one should now.]

CONCLUSION: the original meaning of “person” in the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses was the natural kind of human being. This natural kind interpretation of “person” was able to account for the status quo of American abortion law in 1868 as well as the fact that abortion law was progressively becoming more protective of all human life.

49 Biologists in Support of Neither Party

Filed July 29, 2021

Amici curiae are biologists who work at colleges, universities, and other institutions in 15 countries around the world. On average, they have 10 years of undergraduate and graduate training, they have 27 years of experience working in academia, and overall they have dedicated 37 years to the study of life and to promoting science awareness. Their expertise bears directly on the question presented in this case. The Court will assess the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade’s viability standard, which was used as a proxy by the Court, in 1973, after it could not determine when a human’s life begins because it could not find a consensus view among experts. Today, amici provide the Court with evidence that shows most biologists affirm fertilization as the leading biological view.

….This viability standard, which the Court ultimately claimed had biological justifications4 , was established after the Court could not find a consensus of relevant experts who agreed on when a human’s life begins5 . The Court considered Texas’s fertilization standard, but after Texas’s assistant attorneys general created doubt on the fertilization view—in both the oral argument6 and the oral


6. After Justice Thurgood Marshall questioned Floyd about the scientific basis for Texas’s stance on when a human’s life begins, Floyd eventually relented: “Mr. Justice, there are un-answerable questions in this field.” Transcript of Oral Argument, Roe v. Wade, 1971, at 45.

reargument7 sessions—the Court rejected the standard by claiming that the fertilization view was merely “one theory of life”8 . The Court also claimed that the fertilization view had “[s]ubstantial problems”9 because embryological data had raised questions on whether fertilization was a process or event.

Despite the Court’s use of fetal viability as a proxy for when a human’s life begins, which it described as the point that a fetus “has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb”10, the majority opinion stated that the Court was “not in a position to speculate” on the “difficult question of when life begins… at [that] point in the development of man’s knowledge.”11 However, no current member of the Court would have to speculate, today. The fertilization view is widely recognized—in the literature and by biologists—as the leading biological view on when a human’s life begins

7. Justice Blackmun also questioned Floyd’s replacement, Texas Assistant Attorney General Robert C. Flowers, on when a human’s life begins during the Roe reargument session, but he also cast doubt on the fertilization view: “QUESTION:... Is it not true, or is it true that the medical profession itself is not in agreement as to when life begins?... MR. FLOWERS: I think that’s true, sir. But from a layman’s standpoint, medically speaking, we would say that at the moment of conception from the chromosomes, every potential that anybody in this room has is present, from the moment of conception…. QUESTION: But then you’re speaking of potential of life... MR. FLOWERS: Yes, sir.” Transcript of Oral Reargument of Roe v. Wade, 1972, at 23.

The fertilization view was first discovered in the early 1800s. (See infra at Argument III.A). However, it was such a self-evident fact that little work was done to study or communicate that consensus since it was difficult for scientists to imagine that it could ever be challenged or if there would ever be a time the view would not be common knowledge.12 Since the Roe Court issued its decision in 1973, the scientific consensus13 on the fertilization view has been established. p. 4

Recent surveys have shown that biologists are viewed as objective experts in the study of life and as the experts most qualified to determine when a human’s life begins (See infra at Argument I). The fertilization view on when a human’s life begins has been shown to be the leading biological view, and it can only be supplanted by an alternative view if there are paradigmatic shifts to axiomatic concepts within biology (See infra at Argument II). This is made clear by a review of: (1) the biological and life sciences literature, as peer-reviewed articles represent the fertilization view as a fact of biology that requires no explanation or citation (See infra at Argument III.B), (2) legislative testimony from scientists that suggests there is no alternative view in the scientific literature (See infra at Argument III.C), (3) an international survey of academic biologists’ views on when a human’s life begins that reported 96% of 5,577 participants affirmed the fertilization view (See infra at Argument III.D), and (4) statements by prominent abortion doctors and abortion advocates who affirm the fertilization view (See infra at Argument III.E) . Thus, amici respectfully offer the Court this brief to provide information on the biological perspective on when a human’s life begins: fertilization, generally, marks the beginning of a sexually reproducing organism’s life and, specifically, marks the beginning of a human’s life, as it is the point at which a human first comes into physical existence as an organism that is biologically classified as a member of the Homo sapiens species

In the oral reargument session for Roe, Justice Potter Stewart signaled the importance of resolving who should determine when a human’s life begins: “Now, how should that question be decided, is it a legal question, a constitutional question, a medical question, a philosophical question, or a religious question, or what is it?”16 The majority opinion in Roe similarly suggested there are multiple dimensions to the question: “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”1


Some support the view that a human’s life begins at birth or first breath. 12% of biologists (343 out of 2794) represented the birth view in response to an essay question on when a human’s life begins [Were law bent to this view] t it would make obsolete any biological basis for providing independent care to a fetus, as a patient, or performing fetal surgery27; it would also remove the biological basis of fetal homicide laws28, as a state could not rightfully convict someone for the homicide of a fetus since one would no longer be properly classified as a human.2

10% of biologists (284 out of 2794) represented the viability view in response to an essay question on when a human’s life begins. [Were law bent to this view] A human’s life could be biologically determined to begin at a different point for a fetus in Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York than in a medical clinic in a rural area, as the leading physicians of the former might be able to help a 22-week premature infant survive while physicians at the latter might not be able to. Further, one would have to say that a 27-week-old fetus in 1973 was not a human—as 28 weeks was the viability line at the time since that was when technology was capable of supporting life outside of the womb—but that a younger 24-week-old fetus, today, is a human. This standard could even one day be set at fertilization if an artificial womb is developed.31 Finally, it is important to note that, today, human embryos survive outside of the womb for years32 before being transferred and implanted. In fact, a human zygote is viable for a short period after fertilization, then loses the ability to survive outside of the womb and regains it sometime soon after the 20th week of his or her life.33

If this is used as an ability-based standard, by which human organisms without this ability are not classified as humans, it could also create a case in which a human who is temporarily on life support would cease to be biologically classified as a human since he or she is not then capable of meaningful life

Some support the view that a human’s life begins at the first heartbeat, brainwave, or moment of pain capability. 10% of biologists (268 out of 2794) represented one of these views in response to an essay question on when a human’s life begins. [Were law bent to this view]

If these ability-based standards are used as requirements for one to be biologically classified as a human, it would mean that those who were born without the capacity to feel pain, those whose hearts temporarily stop, and those who might one day undergo a brain transplant are not biological humans.

Most biologists affirm that a human’s life begins at the start of the human life cycle. 68% of biologists (1898 out of 2794) represented the fertilization view in response to an essay question on when a human’s life begins.40 A review of recent discoveries and the development of scientific literature since Roe reveals a strong consensus that agrees fertilization—a process which starts with sperm-egg binding and is completed by sperm-egg pronuclear fusion41—is the starting point

a human zygote is, from a biological perspective, a human organism43 classified as a member of the Homo sapiens in the same way44 as an infant, a teenager,45 or an adult; a human zygote is simply a human being in the first stage of a human’s development, whether fertilization be deemed a process or an event.4

THE FERTILIZATION VIEW IS THE LEADING BIOLOGICAL VIEW ON WHEN A HUMAN’S LIFE BEGINS AND HAS BEEN SINCE THE 19TH CENTURY. A. The discovery of fertilization took place over a century ago.

In 1827, Karl Ernst von Baer was the first scientist to record an observation of a mammalian egg;

The early discoveries on the fertilization process, by which spermatozoa enter eggs, took place between 1843 until 1880:

y, in 1876, Oscar Hertwig has been said to have first established the fertilization view when he described the fusion of the nuclei of a male’s spermatozoa and a female’s ovum

Peer-reviewed journals present the fertilization view on when a human’s life begins as a fact that requires no explanation or citation

During hearings conducted by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Senate Bill 158, the “Human Life Bill,” numerous scientific experts testified on the question of when a human’s life begins. After hours of testimony by scientists and medical doctors, the Official Senate Report reached the following conclusion: “Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being—of a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.”


This view is not merely shared by academics in the literature; it is also the view that college and medical students are taught in their biological and medical textbooks.

French geneticist Dr. Jerome Lejeune testified that “[l]ife has a very, very long history, but each individual has a very neat beginning––the moment of its conception” because “[t]o accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or of opinion . . . it is plain experimental evidence.”72 Dr. Hymie Gordon, professor of medical genetics and physician at the Mayo Clinic, testified that “now we can say, unequivocally, that the question of when life begins––is no longer a question for theological or philosophical dispute. It is an established scientific fact. Theologians and philosophers may go on to debate the meaning of life or the purpose of life, but it is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception.”73 Experts also testified that there are no alternative theories on when a human’s life begins in the scientific literature

Dr. Gordon claimed: “I have never encountered in my reading of the scientific literature—long before I became concerned with abortion, euthanasia, and so on—anyone who has argued that life did not begin at the moment of conception, or that it was not a human conception if it resulted from the fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm. As far as I know, there has been no argument about these matters.”74 This lack of any alternative biological views in the literature was also attested to by Dr. Micheline Matthew-Roth, who worked as a principal


96% of 5,577 biologists from 1,058 academic institutions affirmed that a human’s life begins at fertilization. 1. The survey questions solely focused on the biological perspective on when a human’s life begins


96% of 5,577 biologists from 1,058 academic institutions affirmed that a human’s life begins at fertilization. 1. The survey questions solely focused on the biological perspective on when a human’s life begins

Participation in the survey was sought from members of biology departments around the world. Of the participants who provided analyzable data, 5,577 biologists from 1,058 institutions provided analyzable data on operative questions. Most of the biologists in the sample identified as male (63%), non-religious (63%) and the majority held a Ph.D. (95%). Ideologically, most of the sample identified as liberal (89%) and pro-choice (85%). The sample was comprised of biologists from 86 countries. See supra n.17 at 239. 2

fertilization view. Participants were asked to affirm or reject the statements, and they were then presented an open-ended essay question on the biological perspective on when a human’s life begins (Q6)85: Question 1: The end product of mammalian fertilization is a fertilized egg (‘zygote’), a new mammalian organism in the first stage of its species’ life cycle with its species’ genome. Question 2: The development of a mammal begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote. Question 3: A mammal’s life begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete unites with a female gamete to form a single cell called a zygote. Question 4: In developmental biology, fertilization marks the beginning of a human’s life since that process produces an organism with a human genome that has begun to develop in the first stage of the human life cycle. Question 5: From a biological perspective, a zygote that has a human genome is a human because it is a human organism developing in the earliest stage of the human life cycle.


Question 6: From a biological perspective, how would you answer the question “When does a human’s life begin?”

The statement in Q1 was affirmed by 91% of participants (4555 out of 4993). The statement in Q2 was affirmed by 88% of participants (3984 out of 4510). The statement in Q3 was affirmed by 77% of participants (3153 out of 4078). The statement in Q4 was affirmed by 75% of participants (2500 out of 3334). The statement in Q5 was affirmed by 69% of participants (2744 out of 3980).86 Of those who assessed at least one of the five statements, 96% of participants affirmed at least one (5337 out of 5577) and 4% did not (240 out of 5577).

Similarly, of those who assessed multiple statements, 96% affirmed at least one (4463 out of 4650) while 4% affirmed none (187 of 4650), and 85% affirmed at least half of the statements they assessed (3936 out of 4650).87 Consistent with their affirmation rates of the fertilization view in Q1-Q5, 68% of biologists represented the fertilization view (1898 out of 2794) in response to the open-ended essay question on when a human’s life begins (Q6). 10% represented some point between fertilization and the moment a fetus is viable (268 out of 2794), 10% represented the viability view (284 out of 2794), and 12% represented the view that a human’s life begins at birth (343 out of 2794).88 The strictest measure of biologists’ views assessed the responses of participants who answered each question consistently—those who either affirmed each statement (Q1-Q5) and represented the fertilization view in response to the essay question (Q6) or rejected each statement and represented some later point. There was a greater number of participants who consistently affirmed the fertilization view (97%; 1011 out of 1044) than the number of participants who consistently did not affirm the fertilization view (3%; 33 out of 1044).89

Abortion advocates and abortion doctors affirm that a human’s life begins at fertilization. Ethicist Peter Singer supports abortion rights and has promoted the fertilization view: “Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms,” because “there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.”90 (Yet he argues for aborting up to 2 years old)

The fertilization view is as subject to change due to new information as is the number of hydrogen atoms in a molecule of water: the number might not be two if scientists abandon the modern understanding of hydrogen, oxygen, atoms, molecules, and water—just as a human’s life might no longer be deemed to begin at fertilization if scientists abandon the modern understanding of fertilization, the human life cycle, and the genetics-based method of biologically classifying organisms.

50 Professors Mary Ann Glendon and O. Carter Snead

Filed July 29, 2021

Abortion rulings have no support from the Constitution's text, history, or tradition.

Roe and Doe are unconstitutional.

Later precedents are even farther from the Constitution, offering nothing but confusion.

Stare Decisis principles support overturning them.

The Court’s Abortion Jurisprudence Grafts On to American Law a Constitutionally Unwarranted, False, and Destructive Account of Human Identity and Flourishing.

The current law of abortion . . . frames the public question as a zero-sum conflict between isolated strangers, one of whom is recognized as a person, with the other deemed a sub-personal being whose moral and legal status is contingent upon the private judgment of others. It offers no com�prehensive support for the vulnerable persons in�volved, including especially the unborn child and her mother. . . .

In response to the bodily, psychic, and financial burdens of unwanted pregnancy and parenthood, American abortion jurisprudence offers nothing more than the license to terminate the developing human life in utero . . . . These are the rights and privileges suited to atomized individual wills who inhabit a world of strife. They are limited weapons and tools of rational mastery fit for a lonely, disembodied self to defend and pursue its interests.

American abortion jurisprudence offers nothing more than the license to terminate the developing human life in utero . . . . They are not well-designed to address the complex needs and wants of a community of embodied, vulnerable, and interdependent human persons.

...it biases the Court’s analysis to craft a solution for the abortion issue that is more suitable for an individual seeking to repel a stranger from intruding into her interests, namely, by conferring a right to use lethal violence. This may be suitable for adversarial strangers in a world of strife. Not for a mother and a child in crisis.

...The Court has no business in this space....

51 Monique Wubbenhorst, M.D., M.P.H., Grazie Christie, M.D., Colleen Malloy, M.D., and the Catholic Association Foundation

Filed July 29, 2021

Roe and Casey’s Viability Standard Is Incomplete and Outdated According to Current Science. “Viability” no longer means what it did at the time of Roe and Casey. Ultrasound technology has dramatically improved and provides a clear window into the womb to witness the humanity of the unborn child. Improved imaging has provided greater information about fetal development.

Advancements in technology have led to recognition of the fetus as a patient by mainstream medicine. Current science shows that the fetus is pain-capable much earlier than previously thought.

Casey Is Unworkable and Should Be Overruled. Casey does not allow for restrictions based on increased knowledge of how the brutal abortion procedure affects the unborn child.

Casey is inconsistent with the Court’s recognition of other State interests that justify abortion restrictions. Casey’s standard is arbitrary and has had damaging effects.


The dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure currently used after 15 weeks’ gestation was not used for second-trimester abortions at the time of Roe. City of Akron v. Akron Ctr. for Reprod. Health, Inc., 462 U.S. 416, 436 & n.23 (1983); ...The Supreme Court described the D&E procedure in gruesome “technical detail” in Stenberg v. Carhart, acknowledging that its description “may seem clinically cold or callous to some, perhaps horrifying to others.”

As the Supreme Court explained, abortion doctors use D&E in the second trimester because at that stage of fetal development, “the fetus is larger”—“particularly the head”—and the “bones are more rigid,” meaning “dismemberment or other destructive procedures” are required. . . . A physician extracts from the womb what moments before had been a living “unborn child”—using forceps, scissors, or a sim�ilar instrument that “slices, crushes, or grasps” fetal body parts one at a time. Piece by piece. Arm by arm. Leg by leg. And as the abortion doctor “cut[s] or rip[s] the piece from the body”—a torso, a spine, a rib cage—he places each body part on a tray (or in a dish) to keep inventory and ensure that nothing is left behind. Sometimes the heart is still beating on the tray. The fetus dies just as an adult experiencing corporal dismemberment would—by bleeding to death as his or her body is torn apart.

Whole Woman’s Health, 978 F.3d at 913 (Willett, J., dissenting) (emphasis added) (citations omitted).88 “As one bioethicist testified, it’s ‘self-evident that it’s brutal and inhumane to tear a living organism limb from limb alive.’” Id. at 930. And “[n]o one would dispute that, for many, D&E is a procedure itself laden with the power to devalue human life.” Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 158.

...the D&E procedure is inherently brutal and inhumane regardless of whether the fetus can feel it. We would never countenance dismembering a person (or even an animal) as a means of causing death, even if the person were anesthetized first.

...“[t]he notion that anything in the Constitution prevents States from passing laws prohibiting the dismembering of a living child is implausible.” Harris v. W. Alabama Women’s Ctr., 139 S. Ct. 2606, 2607 (2019) (Thomas, J., concurring).

Casey is also out-of-step with the Court’s own recognition of other state interests justifying regulation of previability abortion. Some examples: preventing the coarsening of society to the humanity of newborns, Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 157; the integrity and ethics of the medical profession, who must simultaneously treat the unborn child as a patient in some contexts and as mere “tissue” in others,94 id.; protection of minors, Casey, 505 U.S. at 899–900; and maternal health, Roe, 410 U.S. at 154.

Box v. Planned Parenthood of Ind. & Ky., 139 S. Ct. 1780, 1784 (2019) (Thomas, J., concurring). Thus, there is a “compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.” Id. at 1783 & n.2 (Thomas, J., concurring). But Casey does not permit those interests to be considered in limiting abortion.

...The Court’s foray into medical regulation may not merely be stagnating the legal standard despite advancing science—it may be impeding science. Researchers fear that acknowledging science on fetal pain may lead to restriction on abortion. ACOG’s clinging to decade-old research illustrates this point. It also illustrates how ACOG’s views are based less on science and more on the politics of protecting Roe and Casey. It is unconscionable to think that the “medical” community shapes “the science” to fit its political goals. But this is the division the Court’s abortion jurisprudence inflames.

52 Commissioner Andy Gipson, Former Representative and Chair of Mississippi House Judiciary B Committee

Filed July 29, 2021

It is often overlooked that even in Roe, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the states “have an important and legitimate interest . . . in protecting the potentiality of human life.” 410 U.S. 113, 162 (1973). However, “the Court’s precedents after Roe … ‘undervalue[d] the State’s interest in potential life.” Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 157 (quoting Casey, 505 U.S. at 873 (plurality opinion)). Then, in Casey, the Court stated flatly “the State has legitimate interests from the outset of the pregnancy in protecting the health of the woman and the life of the fetus that may become a child,” 505 U.S. at 846, and Gonzales agreed that “[t]he government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman.” Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 157.

The Mississippi Legislature values life before and after birth, provides assistance for mothers and families from conception onward, provides support for children starting at birth, and has an interest in protecting unborn life, protecting women from the health risks associated with abortions after 15 weeks’ gestational age, and in protecting the integrity of the medical profession.

53 Care Net, a National Affiliation Organization of 1,200 Pregnancy Help Centers, and Alpha Center, a South Dakota Registered Pregnancy Help Center

Filed July 29, 2021

An Abortion is the Employment of a Medical Procedure to Achieve a Non-Medical Objective: The Termination of the Pregnant Mother’s Constitutionally Protected Relationship with Her Child, By Terminating the Life of a Whole, Separate, Unique, Living Human Being.

An Abortion is Not the Exercise of a Right; It is the Waiver, Surrender and Termination of One of the Most Important Fundamental Intrinsic Rights a Mother Has in All of Life; Roe and Casey Have Operated to Destroy that Right.

The Pregnant Mother has a Fundamental, Intrinsic Right to Maintain Her Relationship with Her Child. But Because Roe and Casey have Prohibited the States from Providing Meaningful Protections for the Pregnant Mother’s Right to Her Relationship, Mothers are Losing Their Children Against Their Will. Pregnant Mothers are Routinely Coerced and Pressured into Abortions, and the Derelict Practices of Abortion Clinics Exacerbate the Coercion. Mothers' Due Process and Equal Protection Rights Are Being Violated.

Pregnant mothers are routinely coerced or pressured into abortions they do not want. P.P. v. Noem, Declarations of B.H., ECF 206; Weston, ECF 207; Alyssa Carlson, ECF 209; S.C., 208; Amrutha Bindu Mekala, ECF 217; Ayers, ECF 218; Deere, ECF 353; Roden, ECF 219; Corbett, ECF 220; Watson, ECF 221; Miller, ECF 222; Bowlin, ECF 223; McAdams, ECF 224; Steen, ECF 225; Cota, ECF 226; Hurguy, ECF 227; Szmeit, ECF 228; Kiefer, ECF 239; and Florczak-Seeman, ECF 238.

Pregnant mothers are routinely coerced into abortions at abortion clinics, P.P. v. Noem; Bindu Mekala, ECF 217; Ayers, ECF 218; Roden, ECF 219; Corbett, ECF 220; Watson, ECF 221; Miller, ECF 222. Pregnant mothers are routinely pressured into abortions by the abortion clinic staff. P.P. v. Noem; Huffstetler, ECF 229; Holcomb Misely, ECF 268; Bowlin, ECF 223; McAdams, ECF 224; Ruch, ECF 230; Steen, ECF 225; Cota, ECF 226; Hartman ECF 231; Hurguy, ECF 227; Szmeit, ECF 228; Coleman, ECF 257, ¶32 ID 4203; Hartmann, ECF 269 ¶79, ID 5306.

Some pregnant mothers coerced into abortions are so traumatized they commit suicide. P.P. v. Noem, Declaration of George Zallie (who found his 21-year-old daughter hanging from her bedroom fan at the family’s home), ECF 233. Women pressured to have an abortion after a forcible rape, testify that the abortion was like a second rape, only far worse than the first. Id. Lisa Hartman, ECF 231, ¶10, ID 3504.

Studies show a leading cause of death among pregnant mothers is murder, and most of those murders are performed by their male partners. P.P. v. Noem, Coleman, ECF 257, ¶35, ID 4204-5; see, 79 documented cases of pregnant mothers murdered because they refused to have an abortion, Coleman, Exhibit D. In an exhaustive survey of 987 post-abortive women, over half stated their abortions were coerced or pressured, 34% stated that abortion clinic personnel pressured them to have an abortion, and 84.6% wished that just one person offered the support they needed to carry to term. P.P. v. Noem, Coleman, ECF 257 ¶61, ID 4218.

In 2013, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued Committee Opinion 554, “Reproductive and Sexual Coercion,” stating that “pregnancy coercion” is a serious cultural problem which includes threats or acts of violence to compel women to terminate a pregnancy. Declarations of Coleman, ECF 257,¶38, ID 4205-6; Hartmann, ECF 321, ¶114, ID 5326-7.

Coerced abortions are so widespread that in 2009 the Center Against Forced Abortions (“CAFA”) was created, and CAFA’s national network of attorneys provide pro bono legal services for pregnant mothers who seek help because they are being coerced into an abortion. CAFA has saved between 10,000 to 20,000 pregnant mothers from coerced abortions. Id., Parker, ECF 248, ¶¶2-12, ID 3922-3927

Pregnancy help centers throughout the nation counsel large numbers of women victimized by coerced abortions. Id., Declarations of Florczak-Seeman, ECF 238; Kiefer, ECF 239; Corbett, ECF 220; Cota, ECF 226; Collins, ECF 240; Hjemfelt, ECF 242; Martinez, ECF 241; Wollman, ECF 243; Unruh, 5/1/2020, ECF 264; Unruh, 7/1/2011, ECF 263; Erica Miller, ECF 237; Travis Lasseter, ECF 265.

Good Counsel, Inc., which provides free maternity housing, has counseled thousands of post-abortive women, a significant percentage of whom were coerced or pressured into abortions. Almost all of the mothers Good Counsel houses are homeless because they were forced out of their homes for refusing to have an abortion. Id. Bell, ECF 261,¶4, ID 4537-8. Many other shelters provide living arrangements for pregnant mothers because they are being coerced to have abortions. Id., Sandra Ramos, ECF 259.

Dorothy Wallis has worked with many hundreds of pregnancy help centers, where post-abortive women report that: they were coerced by threats of violence; abortion clinic personnel pressured them into an abortion; or no one would help them keep their babies. Id., Wallis, ECF 258, Ex. A, p.10-11, ID 4505-6.

In addition to the testimony of the women, former abortion clinic doctors and clinic managers have verified the negligence and dereliction of abortion clinics. Id., Declarations of Giebink, M.D., ECF 232; Thayer, ECF 210; Johnson, ECF 211; Lancaster, ECF 212;, Trevino, ECF 213; Padilla, ECF 214; Everett, ECF 215; Behrhorst, ECF 216. Surgery is scheduled over the phone, it is assumed that the mother decided to have an abortion before she arrives, consent is taken for surgery, payment is made without any counseling and no regard is given to the mother’s interest in her relationship with her child. Id., Declarations of Giebink, M.D., ECF 232; Thayer ECF210; Johnson, ECF 211; Lancaster, ECF 212; Trevino, ECF 213; Padilla, ECF 214; Everett ECF 215;Behrhorst ECF 216.

Thus there is no physician-patient relationship at abortion clinics (Id. Thayer, ECF 201, ¶14, ID 3305; Id.Giebink, M.D., ECF 232 ¶28, ID 3517) and clinics perform unethical itinerant surgery. Id. Ridder, M.D., ECF 246, ¶¶35-38, ID 3747-3749; Id. Hartmann, M.D., ECF 269,¶66, ID 5298-9.

In addition to the testimony of the women, former abortion clinic doctors and clinic managers have verified the negligence and dereliction of abortion clinics. Id., Declarations of Giebink, M.D., ECF 232; Thayer, ECF 210; Johnson, ECF 211; Lancaster, ECF 212;, Trevino, ECF 213; Padilla, ECF 214; Everett, ECF 215; Behrhorst, ECF 216. Surgery is scheduled over the phone, it is assumed that the mother decided to have an abortion before she arrives, consent is taken for surgery, payment is made without any counseling and no regard is given to the mother’s interest in her relationship with her child. Id., Declarations of Giebink, M.D., ECF 232; Thayer ECF 210; Johnson, ECF 211; Lancaster, ECF 212; Trevino, ECF 213; Padilla, ECF 214; Everett ECF 215;Behrhorst ECF 216.

Thus there is no physician-patient relationship at abortion clinics (Id. Thayer, ECF 201, ¶14, ID 3305; Id. Giebink, M.D., ECF 232 ¶28, ID 3517) and clinics perform unethical itinerant surgery. Id. Ridder, M.D., ECF 246, ¶¶35-38, ID 3747-3749; Id. Hartmann, M.D., ECF 269, ¶66, ID 5298-9.

Planned Parenthood and other clinics pressure their staffs to “sell” abortions, and steer, mislead, and pressure ambivalent pregnant mothers to have abortions. Id. Giebink, M.D., ECF 232 ¶¶22,23, ID 3515-16; Thayer ECF 210 ¶¶11-16, ID 3303-3306; Johnson, ECF 211 ¶¶16-24, ID 3326-3330; Lancaster, ECF 212, ¶¶12-16, ID 3336-38; Trevino, ECF 213, ¶¶5-15, ID 3341-46; Padilla, ECF 214, ¶¶16-19, ID 3352-32; Everett, ECF 215, ¶¶3-9, ID 3357-3373; Behrhorst, ECF 216, ¶¶7-11, ID 3411-3412. B.H., ECF 206; Weston, ECF 207; Ayers, ECF 218; S.C., ECF 208.

It is so common for abortion clinics to perform abortions on mothers who are ambivalent that pregnant mothers seek help to stop medical abortions after they are started. A national network of physicians arose to help these women stop medical abortions and to give birth to children they want. Id., Davenport, MD, ECF 260. Even when it is obvious that a pregnant mother is being pressured or coerced into an abortion, the clinics still push her to an abortion. Id., Declarations of Thayer, ECF 201, ¶24, ID 3309; Johnson, ECF 211, ¶¶16-22, ID 3326-3329; Lancaster, ECF 212 ¶¶13-15, ID 3336-3337;Weston, ECF 207; B.H, ECF 206.; Vixie Miller, ECF 222.

54 Reason for Life

Filed July 29, 2021

Roe errantly evaluated a state’s interest in “potential” life instead of “actual” life.

...Many good reasons exist to prohibit abortion. Protecting life is chief among them. Yet in proclaiming a newfound abortion right, Roe failed to consider the state’s interest in protecting human life.

For the Roe Court, the fact that “a new human life is present from the moment of conception” was nothing but a “theory.” Roe, 410 U.S. at 150. So rather than delve into a realm that it thought may implicate “theology” and “philosophy,” it chose to consider a state’s interest in “potential life” instead of actual life. Id. at 150, 159, 163.

Roe thought this approach was adequate because a state’s interest in mere “potential life” qualifies as a “legitimate state interest.” Id. at 150 (“[A] legitimate state interest . . . need not stand or fall on acceptance of the belief that life begins at conception . . . .”). However, a state’s interest is stronger when actual—not simply potential—life is involved. By concluding that it “need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins” and only evaluating the state’s interest in “potential life,” Roe overlooked the true magnitude of the state’s interest. Id. at 159, 163. That doomed Roe’s efforts to rule “consistent with the relative weights of the respective interests involved.” Id. at 165; see also S. Subcomm. on Separation of Powers Rep. on the Human Life B., at 5 (97th Cong., 1st Sess.) [hereinafter S. Rep.], The Human Life Bill (“Because it did not resolve whether unborn children are human beings, the Court could not make an informed decision . . . .”).

But determining when human life begins does not require theorizing. Science answers the question: “the life of a human being begins at conception, the time when the process of fertilization is complete.” S. Rep., supra, at 7; see also id. at 9 (quoting a genetics professor and Mayo Clinic physician’s testimony that “[t]heologians and philosophers may go on to debate the meaning of life or the purpose of life, but it is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception” (citation omitted)). Because of this scientific understanding, even federal law recognizes the humanity of unborn children and punishes those who murder them outside the abortion context. See 18 U.S.C. § 1841 (noting circumstances in which one who “intentionally kills or attempts to kill [an] unborn child” shall be punished “for intentionally killing or attempting to kill a human being”).

55 Illinois Right to Life

74. American College of Pediatricians

(This entire excerpt is copied into Footnote #2 of Statement #4)

Filed in Dobbs

2. What we know today—as uncontroverted scientific fact—is that the child develops much more quickly than the Court in Roe presumed. The Court then was told that “in early pregnancy . . . embryonic development has scarcely begun.” Brief for Appellant at 20, Roe, 410 U.S. 113 (No. 70-18), 1971 WL 128054. But that is wrong. From conception, the unborn child is a unique human being who rapidly develops the functions and form of a child long before viability. (page 2-3)
At five weeks’ gestation (just three weeks after conception),1 the unborn child’s heart starts beating. By six weeks, brain waves are detectable, and the nervous system is steadily developing. By seven weeks, the child can move and starts to develop sensory receptors. By nine weeks, the child’s eyes, ears, and teeth are visible. By ten weeks, multiple organs begin to function, and the child has the neural circuitry for spinal reflex, an early response to pain. By twelve weeks, the child can open and close fingers and sense stimulation from the outside world. By fifteen weeks—when Mississippi’s law limits abortions—the child can smile and is likely sensitive to pain. Medical interventions after this stage (other than abortion) use analgesia to prevent suffering. And by eighteen weeks, pain induces hormonal responses in the child. All this happens long before viability. Reflecting these advances in medical knowledge, ultrasound imagery available at the time of Roe looks much different from the imagery available today: (Image not shown here)
Page 11-12: During the fifth week, “[t]he cardiovascular system is the first major system to function in the embryo,” with the heart and vascular system appearing in the middle of the week.33 By the end of the fifth week, “blood is circulating and the heart begins to beat on the 21st or 22nd day” after conception.34
By six weeks, “[t]he embryonic heartbeat can be detected.”35 Technological advances permit not only imaging detection at this early stage, but also videography of the unborn child, including footage of the child’s heartbeat.36
After detection of a fetal heartbeat—and absent an abortion—the overwhelming majority of unborn children will now survive to birth.37 “[O]nce a fetus possesses cardiac activity, its chances of surviving to full term are between 95%–98%.”38
Also during the sixth week, the child’s nervous system is developing, with the brain already “patterned” at this early stage.39 The earliest neurons are generated in the region of the brain responsible for thinking, memory, and other higher functions.40 And


     Footnotes for Page 12:
     34 Id. at 2662.
     35 Id. at 2755.
     36 See, e.g., Endowment for Hum. Dev., The Heart in Action: 4 Weeks, 4 Days, available athttps://www.ehd.org/movies/21/The#Heart-in-Action [3] (last visited July 28, 2021) (showing footage of a heartbeat at six weeks); see also, e.g., Endowment for Hum. Dev., Your Life Before Birth (Mar. 18, 2019), available at https://vimeo.com/325006095 [4] (last visited July 28, 2021) (displaying video footage of a child’s development).
     37 Joe Leigh Simpson, Low Fetal Loss Rates After Ultrasound Proved-Viability in First Trimester, 258 J. Am. Med. Ass’n 2555, 2555–57 (1987).
     38 Forte, supra note 11, at 140 & nn.121–22 (footnote omitted) (collecting post-Casey medical research).
     39 Thomas W. Sadler, Langman’s Medical Embryology 72 (14th ed. 2019); see generally id. at 59–95.
     40 See, e.g., Irina Bystron et al., Tangential Networks of Precocious Neurons and Early Axonal Outgrowth in the Embryonic Human Forebrain, 25 J. Neuroscience 2781, 2788 (2005).

(Page 13) the child’s face is developing, with cheeks, chin, and jaw starting to form.41 At seven weeks, cutaneous sensory receptors, which permit prenatal pain perception, begin to develop.42 The unborn child also starts to move.43 During the seventh week, “the growth of the head exceeds that of other regions” largely because of “the rapid development of the brain” and facial features.44 At eight weeks, essential organs and systems have started to form, including the child’s kidneys, liver, and lungs.45 The upper lip and nose can be seen.46 At nine weeks, the child’s ears, eyes, teeth, and external genitalia are forming.47


     Footnotes for page 13:
     41 See Sadler, supra note 39, at 72–95.
     42 Kanwaljeet S. Anand & Paul R. Hickey, Special Article, Pain and Its Effects in the Human Neonate and Fetus, 317 New Eng. J. Med. 1321, 1322 (1987).
     43 Alessandra Pionetelli, Development of Normal Fetal Movements: The First 25 Weeks of Gestation 98, 110 (2010).
     44 Keith L. Moore et al., The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology 65–84.e1 (11th ed. 2020).
     45 See Sadler, supra note 39, at 72–95.
     46 Moore et al., supra note 44, 1–9.e1.
     47 See Sadler, supra note 39, at 72–95; see also App. 66a.
     48 Pionetelli, supra note 43, at 65 (2010).

Page 14: At ten weeks, vital organs begin to function, and the child’s hair and nails begin to form.49 By this point, the neural circuitry has formed for spinal reflex, or “nociception,” which is the fetus’s early response to pain.50 Starting around ten weeks, the earliest connections between neurons constituting the subcortical-frontal pathways—the circuitry of the brain that is involved in a wide range of psychological and emotional experiences, including pain perception—are established.51 At the time of Roe, “the medical consensus was that babies do not feel pain.”52 Only during the late 1980s and early 1990s did any of the initial scientific evidence for prenatal pain begin to emerge.53 Today, the “evidence for the subconscious incorporation of pain into neurological development and plasticity is incontrovertible.”54 Every modern review of prenatal


     Footnotes for page 14:
     49 See Sadler, supra note 39, at 106–127; Moore et al., supra note 44, at 65–84.e1; Johns Hopkins Med., The First Trimester, available at https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness#and-prevention/the-first-trimester[5] (last visited July 28, 2021); see also App. 66a.
     50 See, e.g., Int’l Ass’n for the Study of Pain, IASP Terminology (last updated Dec. 14, 2017), available at https://www.iasp#pain.org/Education/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1698#Nociception [6] (last visited July 28, 2021); see also App. 80a.
     51 Lana Vasung et al., Development of Axonal Pathways in the Human Fetal Fronto-Limbic Brain: Histochemical Characterization and Diffusion Tensor Imaging, 217 J. Anatomy 400, 400–03 (2010).
     52 Am. Coll. of Pediatricians, Fetal Pain: What is the Scientific Evidence? (Jan. 2021), available at https://acpeds.org/position#statements/fetal-pain [7] (last visited July 28, 2021).
     53 Ibid.
     54 Curtis L. Lowery et al., Neurodevelopmental Changes of Fetal Pain, 31 Seminars Perinatology 275, 275 (2007).

Page 15: pain consistently issues the same interpretation of the data: by ten to twelve weeks, a fetus develops neural circuitry capable of detecting and responding to pain.55 Even more sophisticated reactions occur as the unborn child develops further.56 And new developments have provided still more evidence strengthening the conclusion that fetuses are capable of experiencing pain in the womb.57


     Footnotes for page 15:
     55 See, e.g., Carlo V. Bellieni & Giuseppe Buonocore, Is Fetal Pain a Real Evidence?, 25 J. Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Med. 1203, 1203–08 (2012); Richard Rokyta, Fetal Pain, 29 Neuroendocrinology Letters 807, 807–14 (2008).
     56 See Royal Coll. of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, Fetal Awareness: Review of Research and Recommendations for Practice 5, 7 (Mar. 2010), available at https://www.rcog.org.uk/globalassets/documents/guidelines/rcogfetalawarenesswpr0610.pdf [8] (last visited July 28, 2021); Susan J. Lee et al., Fetal Pain: A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence, 294 J. Am. Med. Ass’n 947, 948–49 (2005); see also App. 76a, 84a–85a.
     57 See Lisandra Stein Bernardes et al., Acute Pain Facial Expressions in 23-Week Fetus, Ultrasound Obstetrics & Gynecology (June 2021), available at https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/uog.23709?af=R [9] (last visited July 28, 2021)

Page 17: Moreover, by twelve weeks, the parts of the central nervous system leading from peripheral nerves to the brain are sufficiently connected to permit the peripheral pain receptors to detect painful stimuli.68 Thus, the unborn “baby develops sensitivity to external stimuli and to pain much earlier than was believed” when Roe and Casey were decided. MKB Mgmt. Corp. v. Stenehjem, 795 F.3d 768, 774 (8th Cir. 2015) (cleaned up).


     Footnote for page 17:
     68 Sekulic et al., supra note 65, at 1034–35.

Page 21: By eighteen weeks, the child can hear his or her mother’s voice, and the child can yawn.87 The nervous system in the brain is also developing the circuitry for all the senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing.


     Footnote for page 21:
     87 Ibid.; see also Cleveland Clinic, Fetal Development: Stages of Growth (last updated Apr. 16, 2020), available at https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/7247-fetal#development-stages-of-growth [10] (last visited July 28, 2021).

Page 25: Around twenty-six weeks, the child’s eyes open, and he or she can fully see what is going on around him or her.106 Brain wave activity increases throughout this period.


     Footnote:
     106 Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hosp., A Week-by-Week Pregnancy Calendar: Week 26, available at https://www.hopkinsallchildrens.org/Patients-Families/Health-Library/HealthDocNew/Week-26?id=13484 [11] (last visited July 28, 2021).

79. World Faith Foundation and Institute for Faith and Family

(This entire excerpt is copied into Footnote #2 of Statement #4)

Filed in Dobbs

The viability line is arbitrary, lacks constitutional support, and conflicts with legal principles in other contexts. Developments in medical technology expose the reality of a child in the womb worthy of legal protection. “Emerging science never shows the unborn to be less than human; rather, each advancement further reveals the humanity of the developing child in all its wonder”—even at 15 weeks, the developing child has “fully formed eyebrows, noses, and lips,” and “the baby’s fully formed heart pumps about 26 quarts of blood per day.”3
Yet this Court has stubbornly maintained the viability line, reaffirming Roe’s “recognition of the right of the woman” to choose abortion “before viability . . . without undue interference from the State.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 846. Gonzales began by presuming the same principle and timeline (Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 146)—but on the next page described the unborn child as “a living organism within the womb, whether or not it is viable outside the womb” (id. at 147, emphasis added).


      Footnote:
      https://lozierinstitute.org/cli-experts-urge-scotus-to-catch-up-to#science-in-mississippi-abortion-case/; https://lozierinstitute.org/new-paper-coauthored-by-cli-scholars-examines-treating-the-patient#within-the-patient/. These articles described in further detail the baby’s fetal development at 15 weeks.

Page 13: Another critical development is the ability to detect a child’s heartbeat in the womb. Several years ago, the Eighth Circuit considered whether the state could prohibit abortions of “unborn children who possess detectable heartbeats.” MKB, 795 F.3d at 770. Experts testified that “fetal cardiac activity is detectable by about 6 weeks” although viability does not occur “until about 24 weeks.” Id. at 771. Sadly, the court concluded that Roe dictated the outcome but suggested that “good reasons exist for [this] Court to reevaluate its jurisprudence.” Id. at 774.


     Ironically, no discussion or evidence of infant heartbeats is given in the amicus by Heartbeat International. /DocketPDF/19/19-1392/185354/20210729164709878_Dobbs%20Amicus%20Brief%20-%20FINAL.pdf. The word “heart” comes up 39 times, but only to state the organization’s name.


conclusion doesn’t ask that acknowledgment that babies are people,