We'll build perhaps we should all brush up on arguments for why we're opposed to abortion

on demand. This article in the New York Times by legal scholar Erica Bashyoshi argues that

it's the personhood of the fetus that is most important. Do you think that's the main issue?

Well, I think the way that she defines the personhood of the fetus does make this the issue.

She is equating here persons with human beings because that's the way the US Constitution

uses the expression and so she's not making a philosophical point about when does a human being

count as the person she's equating human beings with persons and in that case I think it is the

humanity of the fetus that is the really key question here. She says now that the Supreme Court

has returned the issue of abortion to legislatures pro-lifers will work to ensure that unborn

children in every jurisdiction are protected by law. Though individual states can and already

have sought to protect the most vulnerable human beings through ordinary legislation,

constitutional protection of unborn children as equal persons under the law remains the movement's

ultimate if elusive goal. And she continues, making this constitutional case will require rejecting

the concept that a rights-bearing person is fundamentally self-owning and autonomous.

Indeed, it is precisely the unborn child's state of existential dependence upon his mother,

not his autonomy, that makes it especially entitled to care, nurture, and legal protection too.

To exclude some human beings from the laws protection because of their size, location,

and state of dependency, and post-row, whichever jurisdiction their mother happens to be in,

seems to pro-lifers an egregious human rights violation. Just the kind we believe the 14th

Amendment was meant to prevent. So Bill, she's saying that it's not necessarily the unborn child's

autonomy that is an issue, but the unborn child's utter dependency on its mother that most

entitles it to care and protection. Further down, she says, my fellow pro-lifers and I will also

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