the Thirteenth Amendment and the equal protection clause because men have no comparable legal obligation to be Good Samaratins. “The law of abortion,” Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School declares, is the “one place in the law where a really significant and intimate sacrifice has been required of anyone in order to save another(Olasky 112).” Any decent community must recognize that “the right to privacy is inherent in the right to liberty.” “Keeping Reproductive Choice in Private Hands” a bold heading in one law review article proclaims, “is Essential to a Free Society(Olasky 113).” Another question in the politics of abortion is whether or not the fetus is a person. So what has the constitution to say on the subject? Throughout the text the Constitution uses the word ‘person’ in a way that would not really make sense if fetuses were thought to be included. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, says that “ all persons born or naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States and of the states they resideMoen 10in.” This at least establishes that those who wrote and ratified the Constitution did not have the unborn in mind when they spoke of ‘persons.’ And it establishes that if fetuses are persons, they most definitely are not ‘citizens.’ This inference is also true in the Fifth Amendment which says that no person may “for the same offence...be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” This provision applies to persons who are not citizens, such as resident aliens(Tribe 216). Apart from how the Constitution uses the word ‘person,’ there are serious problems in viewing the body of a woman as the locus of two separate persons for purposes of Constitutional interpretation. If we were to treat women, for some significant portion of their lives, as the conjoined locus of two full human beings, ...
