Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!i2pn.org!i2pn2.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: ltlee1@hotmail.com (ltlee1) Newsgroups: soc.culture.china Subject: The Insidious Legal Theory Behind the Abortion Rights Rollback Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2024 13:16:16 +0000 Organization: novaBBS Message-ID: References: <1a1a2570554cdbaccefe8c63485636b5@www.novabbs.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Info: i2pn2.org; logging-data="2003560"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@i2pn2.org"; posting-account="pxsmGrN7Y7mF0hfJcY//7F6kiWqDRq/tZN4FOOcim3s"; User-Agent: Rocksolid Light X-Rslight-Posting-User: 0099cdd7dc5bd7b25c488bf8bcfab81a117b2ffc X-Rslight-Site: $2y$10$UXYEFylF.L6jCKeNsrLInecDMaB10A5jbEJb9AIqNtvoyzWqOlxtq X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 4.0.0 Bytes: 3375 Lines: 41 The abortion rollback is based on a non-scientific emotional argument fortified by an arcane legal framework. "But there is a legal framework—it’s just an arcane one. It’s called coverture. Under coverture, when a woman married, she ceased to have an independent legal identity and was instead “covered” by the legal identity of her husband. The eighteenth-century legal scholar William Blackstone described the concept in 1765: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband ... and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.” If this still feels a little abstract, here is a contemporary description from several political and historical scholars to put it in perspective: “Like children, servants, and slaves, a woman’s identity was inseparable from that of a male property owner. She could not sue, be sued, buy or sell property, or engage in the public sphere.… [A] woman’s body was not her own.” Sound familiar? The legal maneuver performed by coverture—the subsuming of a woman’s identity into a nearby and supposedly superior interest—precisely describes what happens in legislation that is advanced on the basis of the state’s interest in protecting potential life. In other words: When the state recognizes the legal interest of the fetus but not that of the pregnant person, it is subsuming the identity of the pregnant person into that of her fetus. From a legal standpoint, when a person becomes pregnant, she simply stops existing. The only thing that exists is her fetus. We can see this conspicuous absence all over the current panoply of abortion restrictions. This is particularly the case in the definitions embedded in the legislation, which often feature elaborate wordings that foreground the legal identity of the fetus and de-emphasize that of the pregnant person. For instance, the provision of the Georgia Code that defines classes of persons currently defines “unborn human child” to mean “a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb”—but never references the person whose body contains that womb. " https://newrepublic.com/article/185911/abortion-coverture-arcane-legal-theory