Photo Credit: Brandon Kelly "Follower of Jesus. Husband. Dad. Pastor. Writer"
I’m
developing a research paper titled, “The Unborn Citizen.” Instead of disputing new fetal heartbeat laws, I accept (for this paper) the premise that human life begins at
conception, not birth. What are the legal ramifications for unlawful aliens who
are pregnant in Alabama? One implication is that the pregnant woman cannot be
deported because doing so would deport a U.S. citizen. There are other
implications.
For now, I pass along portions of The Alabama Human Life
Protection Act (source is here, https://legiscan.com/AL/text/HB314/id/1980843)
The law
is premised on earlier legislation enacted by Alabama voters. On November 6,
2018, electors approved by a majority vote a constitutional amendment. The Constitution
of Alabama of 1901 now declares and affirms the “public policy of the state to
recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn
children.”
The Alabama
Human Life Protection Act uses the Declaration of Independence as justification
for the law:
In
the United States Declaration of Independence, the principle of natural law
that “all men are created equal” was articulated. The self-evident truth found in
natural law, that all human beings are equal from creation, was at least one of
the bases for the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the
Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the American civil rights movement. If those movements
had not been able to appeal to the truth of universal human equality, they
could not have been successful.
Next, the
law states:
It is estimated that 6,000,000 Jewish people were murdered in German
concentration camps during World War II; 3,000,000 people were executed by
Joseph Stalin’s regime in Soviet gulags; 2,500,000 people were murdered during
the Chinese “Great Leap Forward” in 1958; 1,500,000 to 3,000,000 people were
murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970s; and approximately
1,000,000 people were murdered during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. All of
these are widely acknowledged to have been crimes against humanity. By comparison,
more than 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since the
Roe decision in 1973, more than three times the number w who were killed in
German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin's gulags, Cambodian killing fields,
and the Rwandan genocide combined.
The law defines the following:
Section 3(7) UNBORN CHILD, CHILD or PERSON. A human being, specifically
including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of
viability.
Section 3(8) WOMAN. A female human being, whether or not she has
reached the age of majority.
For my analysis, what I find interesting is that there is no
alienage restriction of who is an unborn person. This means that the unborn
child of an “illegal alien” has full constitutional rights under Alabama law.
For now, I welcome comments of all types, pro and con, regarding
this law—and I am especially interested in what readers see as implications if
one assumes, as I do here, that Alabama has the constitutional power to say
that life begins at conception. In other words, what does it mean—apart from
criminalizing abortion— to say that a fetus is a person with full constitutional
rights who enjoy the equal protection of the laws?
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