I never claimed any such clause or article existed in the document, you did by way of a strawman.
What else could absolute power of life or death be? What else could having the power to make the unilataral decision be construed as? Any argument in favor of abortion on demand is exactly that. It is, in effect, ownership.
Where does the Constitution say that the right to life supersedes all the other rights?
A couple of places. The first place it is stated is the 5th amendment.
" nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,
nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. "
It says it again in the 14th amendment.
"nor shall any state deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
You have to understand that legal writing takes a certain form even back in the old days when they wrote with quill pens. If you understand the legal form of writing and the rules that applied then and still apply today, it says it as clear as day. In legal writings, when items are put in a list, in this case, life, liberty, and property, the order of their appearance establishes thier order of precedence. Had each been held equally, the way that they were named woud have had to be different. My own experience in writing a will and a few other legal documents suggests that each would have had to have been named in a separate sentence in order to be given equal precedence or specifically stated to have equal weight.
Consider, for just a second, some of the ramifications of all three basic human rights having precisely the same weight. Theft, no matter how petty could be construed as a capital crime. Other problems come to mind but I am not going to dwell on them here.
The fact that the founders listed them in sequence within one sentence, and the writers of the 14th amendment did the same doesn't just suggest that life takes precedence over liberty and property and that liberty takes precedence over property, it makes it an actual legal fact and the logic behind them writing it that way is flawless. As I have asked before; of what value would a right to property be if your right to liberty were not first secured; and of what value would your rights to property and liberty be if your right to live were not first secured.
Consider just for a moment the legal fact that an unborn can inherit property. It can't necessarily be listed as a beneficiary to an insurance policy, but it can inherit. If its beneficiary dies, it inherits property. Of what value exactly is that property if its right to live is not secured?
You see, and perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought all our rights were all equally important. As you pointed out, my right to liberty and property would not mean much if I didn't have a right to life... That's true enough but what good is my right to life if I have no right to liberty or property?
Most people believe that all rights are equal and I was among them. For the greater part of my life, I believed that all of our basic human rights held equal weight. When I was confronted with the anti abortion argument (at the time I could be called pro choice) I spent a great deal of time and energy trying to prove that abortion was constitutional. During my research, I had occasion to discuss certain points with a constititonal lawyer. The more I learned, the more evident it became that abortion on demand simply can not be legally justified. There are numerous arguments in support of it that sound rational on the surface, but when put to the legal fire, they break down.
Take your own argument for example. Do you really believe that in a court of law, the child's consumption of calories could be shown to be just cause for the forfieture of its life? Your argument must give absolute power of life or death, in effect, ownership of the unborn to its mother in order to work and such power of one individual over another is the reason we went to war with england in the first place. We fought a war so that each and every one of us would be on equal footing before the law.
Of what value is your right to live if you don't have an absolute right to property? You never had an absolute right to property in the first place. You have an absolute right to pursue property but no absolute right to it, even if you aquire it. You have a right to pursue it, and once you attain it, you have a right to extract benefits from it, but no absolute right to keep it to the point that you may kill another over it. Theft is not a capital crime. Even the constitution lays out reasons you may have to forfiet property for the greater good. I don't see anything about forfieting freedom for the greater good, but then freedom isn't really an issue in the abortion debate. Folks like topgun will try and equate pregnancy to a loss of freedom but the claims don't stand up to examination and are in reality, just an appeal to emotion.
