From: nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos)
Subject: Re: Is it Christian values or chavinism?
Organization: USC  Department of Computer Science
Distribution: usa
Date: 19 Nov 92 22:02:17 GMT

In <1992Nov8.011057.25387@netcom.com> ray@netcom.com (Ray Fischer) writes:

>nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos) writes ...
>> bob1@cos.com (Bob Blackshaw) writes:
>>>No Peter, I am stuck in the 1780's when some pretty intelligent people
>>>wrote the Constitution, the whole concept of which is a free people.
>>
>>Now you are stuck in 1973, when Justice Blackmun claimed to find 
>>something in the Constitution that those pretty intelligent people, to
>>whom he cannot hold a candle, never intended.  

>I find it more than a little presumptuous of you to be deciding what
>the framers of the constitution did or did not intend.  Personally, I
>find the opinion of a supreme court justice to be considerably more
>credible than yours.

I didn't "decide it," I am following the lead of Joseph Dellapenna, 
a professor at Villanova U. School of Law, who has published and 
written an enormous amount of documentation on
the history of abortion in the British-American legal system, which
thoroughly refutes Blackmun's meager and biased documentation of that
history.  

Blackmun bases most of his historical comments in "Opinion of the Court" 
in RvW on a propaganda piece by Cyril Means.  This
piece appeared in _N.Y.L.F_ [That's _New York Law Forum_ for the
uninitiated ] less than two years before RvW was written [17 N.Y.L.F.,
1971, including pp. 350-380--a lot of page numbers are missing from
my photostat.]  Indeed, he relies on Means a lot more than he lets on.

How Blackmun could mistake this obviously propagandistic article for
a serious piece of scholarship, I have no idea.  The article has been
raked over the coals by R. Byrn in 41 Fordham Law Review, 1973, and
been more patiently and evenhandedly corrected by Dellapenna in 
subsequent years.  A good place to start is:

J. Dellapenna, "Abortion and the Law, Blackmun's Distortion of the
Historical Record," in: _Abortion and the Constitution_, Horan et.al.,
Georgetown U. Press, 1987.

It's a short meaty article, and gives references to other, longer, more
thoroughly documented articles by Dellapenna.

[BTW Dellapenna would permit abortion without restriction up to the
point where brainwaves can be detected, then only under extremely
stringent conditions like a direct threat to the life of the mother.]

>>>Not just free men, but free people (which I assume means women too).
>>
>>On the other hand, by your standards, unborn children, who were 
>>protected by the British common law (which the colonies inherited)
>>do not even have the right to life, much less any other freedom.

>Of course unborn children have a right to life; they have as much
>right to life as I have a right to walk around on the moon.  However,
>I'll point out the obvious and note that an embryo's right to life is
>similar to my right to walk on the moon in that neither I nor unborn
>children are very able to take advantage of that right.

They are alive, and taking advantage of that right as long as they
are alive.  {I *do* hate to belabor the obvious, but...}

>A more relevent question might be: do unborn children have any right
>to steal the resources of the mother?

  Are you in favor of the
death penalty for somnambulatists who commit theft?

Peter Nyikos

Newsgroups: talk.abortion,soc.men,soc.women,alt.abortion.inequity