extraordinary and perhaps and unthinkable implications would follow.First and foremost, the state would be compelled to treat all abortion as murder. But abortion in the Anglo-American tradition has always been considered, if a crime at all, then a lesser crime than murder. No state has ever treated early abortion as the legal equivalent of the murder of a child. Indeed ,even in Louisiana, the state that had the harshest abortion law prior to Roe, although murder was punishable by death, the punishment for abortion was only ten years.This no doubt reflects a strong, although not “provable,” human intuition. Whatever reaction anyone might have to the pro-life position that a fetus is a human being, nearly everyone is likely to believe, even if they are reluctant to say so openly, that abortion, particularly Moen 11early in pregnancy, is not the equivalent of killing an already born person and that the woman who chooses such an abortion should not be punished as a murderer.Think next about the principle that a woman must be at least be permitted to abort a life threatening pregnancy, a principle that even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, one of the original dissenters in Roe V Wade, thought implicit in the “liberty” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. If an embryo a person, how could this exception be justified? What basis would we have for deliberately sacrificing one person’s life for anothers? Especially if the woman initialy chose to become pregnant, how could we justify securing her survival by destroying her voluntarily conceived child? No claim of self-defense could go this far. We have no established method for balancing the rights of two people in such a situation, no moral or legal calculus for deciding that one person may be killed so that another may live. If the fetus were a person, what would we do in the fairly common situation of a pregnancy that subjects a woman to , say, a 10 percent risk...
