From another PJM article about Sotomayor, I find this. In opposing the Alito nomination Senator Obama is quoted as having said that those on the Court should address the question of “. . . whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions.” What I am not getting is if human beings have a God-given right of privacy granted by their Creator, who created them all in a state of equality, why then doesn’t the equally-created child, in partially being born, have an equal right of privacy as codified, penumbra-like, in our Bill of Rights? If we can agree that she obviously does then this should effectively bar anyone from piercing her skull and sucking her brains out for financial purposes. The Right of Privacy for this reason does not resolve the question of abortion — only the question of the humanity of the child can effectively resolve this issue. If we look at the honesty of ante-bellum slave owners or of the Nazis or of the anti-capitalist Bosheviks in impartially resolving the question of the humanity of their intended victims, then we know the human brain, affected as it constantly is with ulterior motives, cannot be trusted to resolve this issue, whether it is the brain of an average human being walking around, or the brain of a trained Supreme Court justice with no legislative power. Thus we see that Jefferson was right in enunciating the required default position: We are all created, not born, equal, and any other more restrictive argument is automatically suspect since no one says that, hey, a baby is subhuman so let’s kill her. No. The brain works the other way. We actually say “I hate Jews or I want to own slaves, or this baby is an imposition so I want to get rid of them or exploit them, and it would certainly serve my interests if I could do that, so they must be sub-human. The Right of privacy thus means that no one with human DNA is sub-human so you can’t kill anyone, unless they’re trying to kill you. I can’t figure out any other logical answer from the founding religious principles of our Nation.
