Ruth Institute Blog

By James V. Schall, S. J.

Robert Spitzer, S. J.’s new book, , deserves special attention. Spitzer takes up arguments that were used in Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court to justify its position that an unborn child was not a “person” under the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment. He is not the first to articulate the flaws in the Court’s arguments. Hadley Arkes, Robert George, Leon Kass, Gerald Bradley, Charles Rice, among others, have addressed this issue.

But Spitzer uses his own philosophical and scientific acumen to clarity the reasoning of the Court’s own arguments. Similar erroneous decisions have been made by executives, legislatures, and courts of other nations and international organizations. Spitzer is concerned with the “intelligence” of the justices. If their justifications were valid, the justices could hold their heads high to stand on principles of reason. If not, they violate their primary duty as justices.

All justices know the similarity between Roe v. Wade and the Dred Scott Decision. Spitzer shows the difference between these equally erroneous decisions. The Court, in the Dred Scott Case, used positive law (a provision in the Constitution) to justify the lack of full humanity to the slaves. The Court restricted their natural liberty. The Roe v. Wade decision used lack of Court precedent to justify the legal permission to kill real human beings by finding no mention of the word “person” in previous legal cases.

To the question of whether “what is born of human parents is human,” something that seems quite obvious, the Court interposed the presumed disagreement of theological, scientific, and medical experts on when human life begins. Everyone involved in the case recognized that if human life began at conception, as the Texas court pointed out, no case could be made to overthrow the Texas law protecting the unborn.

The fact is, as Spitzer points out, from Blackstone and previous decisions of State Courts, legal precedent existed that the human fetus at all its stages was a human person. The Court simply ignored this background.

Keep reading.