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 Unites States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws.
What I have typed above is the Fourteenth Amendment. This is the amendment from which so many of our civil rights derive from. What I want to focus here is the assertion that no State shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
The Constitutional cases regarding abortion has veered away from solidly proclaiming legally the definition of life. Al the time of Roe v. Wade, the judges focused on the privacy right on the woman as opposed to the defining the basis of their usage of the word "life." Instead of defining it, they went with what their institutions told them was life.
I thus propose an amendment to define what the hell the Constitution means when it says "life" in Amendment XIV. What better way is there to define what life is than through science?
Sadly, even the scientific fields have been corrupted by political feelings. They have all the elemental requirements necessary to define what life actually is, but many shy away from defining life in a way that would justify the claim that life begins at conception. Despite a myriad textbooks and professional articles insuring that life begins at conception (fertilization), regardless of the authors' religion, there are still conflicts within the biological community... A sad consequence of politicized science.
I will thus see if life begins at conception.
The following are the elements of life.
1) Metabolic
2) Growing
3) Reproductive
4) Responds to Stimuli
5) Biochemical
6) Genetic
Metabolic
The moment a sperm is fertilized, it begins to siphon nutrients from the mother's body. In the case of reptiles, they siphon nutrients from the egg itself.
Growing
As the fetus, however small, siphons nutrients, it grows and will continue to grow after birth.
Reproductive
Potential to reproduce as being part of a species is the more accurate description. It would be silly to say that an infertile woman is void of life. A human fetus, as being part of the human species, has a high chance of being able to reproduce. Thus it is reproductive.
Responds to Stimuli
The response does not necessarily have to be spontaneous. If an axe strikes a tree and left alone with a scar, the scar will heal over a long period of time. It would be proposterous to say that trees are not alive by the fact that the response to the stimulus of hitting the tree with an axe was not immediate. If a fetus was conceived in a toxic womb, say, a womb of a drug addict, it will likely respond to the environment eventually. Thus a fetus, however young, responds to stimuli.
Biochemical
A machine can be metabolic and can respond to stimuli. Certain chemical compounds can grow itself also. Thus there necessarily have to be a biochemical requirement to call something as having life. From the moment of conception a fetus is a combination of a sperm cell and an egg. Thus it is biochemical.
Genetic
Certain machines can replicate itself. If a coded computer has a free reign to replicate itself, it can. So we need genes, a biochemical compound that can be passed down. A fetus at conception carries the genes of his father and his mother. Thus it has life.
Here, we definitively see that life begins at conception. How enlightened are we that our laws do not define life in accordance to immutable scientific laws? We have rulings already dealing with immutable characteristics, do we not?
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