Sofía is
an unborn child of an unlawful immigrant woman in Alabama— a person of my literary creation in “The Unborn Citizen.”
A summary of her legal plight appears below. If you want a copy of the paper—
it is short— I’d be happy to share it with my blog readers and FB friends. I welcome
critical comments, questions, clarifications, etc.
(There is no photo with this post. My hope is to have each reader form her or his own mental pictures.)
Summary
Alabama law creates constitutional rights for the unborn child
without addressing this child’s basic needs for shelter, food, and health care.
These problems are magnified for pregnant women who are poor, especially
unlawful immigrants. Nonetheless, by equating the life of an unborn child with
a born child, Alabama’s right-to-life laws have the effect of extending
birthright citizenship to any fetus that has a heartbeat.
I adopt the perspective of Sofía, an unborn child of an unlawful
immigrant in Alabama, to show that the state’s laws, in combination with
President Trump’s hostile treatment of unlawful immigrants, make Sofía’s unborn
life more fragile compared to her fellow unborn Americans. I suggest measures
to secure Sofía’s in utero rights as an American birthright citizen: She must
have a legal identity, access to basic welfare benefits, and subsistence from
her mother’s legal employment.
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