LTI Blogs gives and overview of John Noonan�s book, A Private Choice: Abortion in America in the Seventies.
Traditional American jurisprudence, grounded in the Declaration of Independence, held that government was not an absolute sovereign whose fiat creates rights. Rather, human beings exist prior to the state and have certain rights simply because they are human.[snip]
Next came Roe v. Wade, where Justice Blackmun ignored biological evidence for unborn and simply declared that unborn were not persons in the whole sense (i.e., they were merely potential life). Membership in the human community was not a question of fact, but fiat, and only the Court�s counted.
Noonan sums up the danger this way: Your rights flow from your human nature. Yet not one of those rights is secure if power rests with nine men and women to simply define you out of existence.
