Opinion of Roe vs Wade

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Pseudoconstitutional claptrap. The trimester framework is the epitome of legislating from the bench and not even hardcore CLS scholars like Mark Tushnet defend it. If the Court absolutely had to find a constitutional right to have an abortion, surely there was something better to ground it in than impressionistic substantive due process esotericism. I think the equal protection argument is tenuous too, but at least it's not an affront to common sense.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Reading pro-choice content into the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and reading pro-life content into it are both eisegetic and absurd, guys.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Seems worth noting that Aquinas also believed all human law should be statutory rather than created by judges, noting that "those who sit in judgment of things present, towards which they are affected by love, hatred, or some kind of cupidity; wherefore their judgment is perverted." So Aquinas, too, fundamentally rejected common law...

Late medieval and early modern law in Europe was informed by Aristotelian and Thomistic understandings of personhood even in places that didn't have a primarily-statutory legal tradition.

But, yes, common law prior to the early nineteenth century or so was that abortion was legal prior to "quickening" and either manslaughter or a serious misdemeanor afterwards.