Dec. 4, Anthony Colangelo, Professor of Law at the SMU Dallas Dedman School of Law, for a commentary encouraging U.S. Supreme Court justices to consider more than the ‘absolutes’ regarding the debate about abortion as they discuss a Mississippi law. Published in the Washington Examiner under the heading: The Supreme Court should think differently about abortion: https://washex.am/3osF47h
The Supreme Court has taken up the issue of abortion, kicking off yet another round in the abortion debate in this country. The debate centers on the existence of certain rights that each side respectively claims permit abortion on the one hand and prohibit it on the other: namely, a woman’s right to privacy and a fetus’s right to life. Unfortunately, the debate is typically and simplistically cast in terms of absolutes: An absolute right to privacy overrides all other contradictory interests; similarly, an absolute right to life overrides all other contradictory interests.
Indeed, each side goes even further and disputes the very existence of the countervailing right. Conservatives argue that a right to privacy simply does not exist because it appears nowhere in the text of the Constitution, and liberals argue that a right to life simply does not encompass a fetus as a constitutionally cognizable person.
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