How many SCOTUS votes are there for fetal personhood?

[Sestak]

If I say "I built a chair", does this imply that the chair had to exist before it was built? Does "Congress created the Department of Education" imply the DoE existed before it was created?

I didn't anticipate this thread could become even more ridiculous than it already is, but congratulations!

Missing the point, but regardless:

The acting noun in each sentence, IE “Congress” and “I” existed prior to the action verb and the direct object. More precisely, a subject always exists prior to action verbs unless said action verb is some form of existence.

For example:
“The earth began to exist when....”
“Babies begin to exist when...”

Unless we are asserting the person did not even exist prior to birth, which seems to beg the question, it is logical to conclude that a subject usually exists prior to an action verb which it undertakes.

But your premise here doesn't hold - the 'person(s)' here are not undertaking any action verb! If you converted this bit into the present tense you would certainly not get "person bears in the United States...". The closest thing you could get here is "person is born in the United States...". Miriam-Webster doesn't even list 'born' as a verb at all, only an adjective; Oxford only lists 'born' as a verb as 'passive only'. If we were supposed to read the phrase as referring to the subject performing the verb then the fourteenth amendment would only guarantee citizenship to mothers and immigration officials.

[SenatorCouzens]

I think the responses are off. Much more likely to be a big fat 0 than anything approaching a majority. Scalia himself explicitly came out against this several times -- he said the Constitution is silent on abortion and the legislatures should decide. It's been in the Republican platform for decades at this point, but no justice has ever endorsed the position.

[Socani]

I voted three in the poll but there's maybe only 2 votes for fetal parenthood, Barrett could vote no because of technicalities.

[I’m not Stu]

We know it isn’t zero. It is definitely at least two.

[NewYorkExpress]

Three for certain (Thomas, Scalia, Kavanaugh). Gorsuch would join an opinion if he gets to write it (meaning control of the content of the opinion), Coney Barrett could go either way, and Roberts is only going to vote in favor of fetal personhood if all five conservative justices are also in favor, and I don't think both Gorsuch and Coney Barrett would vote for fetal personhood.

[I’m not Stu]

Alito is definitely a vote for fetal personhood.

[NewYorkExpress]

Alito is definitely a vote for fetal personhood.

I didn't mention Alito, but yeah, he's more likely to be a vote for fetal personhood than Kavanaugh.

So that makes four votes.

Getting that fifth vote will be tough for the right though. Coney Barrett and Gorsuch would probably both insist on being able to write to the opinion, and Roberts probably only joins such an opinion if all five other conservative justices are already also on board.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

We know it isn’t zero. It is definitely at least two.

Depends on what you mean by "votes for fetal personhood".  There certainly are justices willing to uphold a State or Federal law that granted personhood to fetuses. But I'm not certain that there are any justices willing to declare fetal personhood as a right guaranteed by the Federal Constitution itself, tho there may be a few, but by no means anything close to a majority.

[I’m not Stu]

Barrett supports fetal personhood too.

[David Hume]

Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. 5-4 with Roberts dissenting.

I strongly doubt Kavanaugh wants fetal personhood. He'd be down with overturning Roe and Casey and sending legal abortion back to the states, but that's not the same thing.

0 chance for Kavanaugh.

Fetal personhood is not mentioned in the constitution at all. From originalist point of view, there is no legal basis to declare this. This is purely the personal belief of justices, I don't think any of them will declare, even Alito.

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

Barrett supports fetal personhood too.

There are multiple big, fat, glow-in-the-dark lines between "supporting fetal personhood" as a moral or philosophical view (as Barrett, I, and indeed all orthodox Catholics do), "supporting fetal personhood" as a policy view (as Barrett obviously does), "supporting fetal personhood" as a personal belief about what the Constitution should say (as Barrett very well might), and "supporting fetal personhood" in the sense of being willing to pull an already-existing constitutional articulation of the idea out of thin air and enshrine it in our jurisprudence. Please clarify which sense this thread is supposed to be asking about.

[Ferguson97]

Seriously, think about the position for more than a sec: say the Court were to hold to a strict originalist interpretation of the inclusion of the word "persons" within the Constitution so that it'd have to apply to unborn fetuses, meaning that they'd be protected by the 14th Amendment. Given that the Citizenship Clause clarifies that citizenship is only granted to people who are born in the United States, such an interpretation would mean that fetuses - although people - would have to be considered stateless persons. It's such legal insanity that I just can't see anybody capable of making it to the Court ever signing onto such a position.

Yeah this is the rational refutation of the argument, but why would Barrett, Alito, and Thomas be bound by that rationality?

I think worst case scenario, those 3 vote for it. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Roberts join the liberals.

[MarkD]

My first question is ... how could a case actually arise to be heard by the SCOTUS in which they would have the opportunity to address fetal personhood? Who would have standing to argue that all fetuses have rights to due process and equal protection? Is some guardian ad litem going to be appointed to represent the rights of all fetuses?

[Torie]

I doubt any Justice would rule that the killing of a zygote from the moment of conception was malum in se homicide, and thus strike down a law on Constitutional grounds that allowed it.

Yes, the way the question was framed is tendentious.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

My first question is ... how could a case actually arise to be heard by the SCOTUS in which they would have the opportunity to address fetal personhood? Who would have standing to argue that all fetuses have rights to due process and equal protection? Is some guardian ad litem going to be appointed to represent the rights of all fetuses?

Inheritance law most likely. As I said earlier, it's a lot easier to imagine a State law providing for fetal personhood being recognized in that State being upheld than finding support for a Constitutional right to fetal personhood. Suppose I'm a pregnant mother who lives in a State that recognises fetal personhood. My ancestor who lives in a State that does not recognize fetal personhood has a clause in eir will providing for a payment to each descendant living at the time of eir death. Does my unborn child have a claim to that payment? By the time a case could be filed, the child would likely be born, so the question of whether a suit could be brought on eir behalf wouldn't need to asked, just if ey had grounds to use for a share of the estate.

Even that might not be enough to provide a means for finding a Constitutional right to fetal personhood as the case could be decided on the narrower ground of whether a State that does not recognize the personhood of a fetus residing in that State must recognize the personhood of a fetus not resident in that State that has personhood according to its State of residence.

[progressive85]

It's absolutely four right now, they need one more vote to outright overturn Roe in a 5-4 decision.  Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett are those four.  They are all very much in line with the pro-life movement's eventual goal, which is turning back time and returning to a pre-Roe legal system in this country.

John Roberts has become the center of the court and he's conservative but I don't even know if he'll be on it much longer.  He seems like the kind of guy that may retire before people think he will.  I get this feeling that since Trump, John Roberts has changed from what he once was.  Even going back to 2015, he wrote a very bitter (I say ridiculously nasty) dissent against Obergefell and I thought very lowly of him.  He was very biased.  Today I see him in a little bit of a different light.  Something's going on there.  Not to say he'll become a progressive like RBG was, but he has moved somewhat to the center I'd say.

So as long as he's on that court, and as long as Stephen Breyer is not replaced by an ideologue who comes right out of the fringes of the pro-life and anti-feminist movement, Roe is not really going to go out the window completely, at least I don't think it will be.

What's funny is that the Supreme Court was never, not in my lifetime, ever a liberal bastion or a place where progressives dominated.  I was one years old when they handed down that disgusting ruling with Bowers vs. Hardwick, which was the single worst ruling the Court has made in my lifetime.  It was so blatantly based on the homophobia that the judges had for gays, and took place during the AIDS crisis, and I'm sure that was part of it.

Byron White, a 1962 Kennedy appointee, wrote the majority opinion that said that gays had no right to be intimate with each other in the privacy of their own homes.  It was of course later overturned by the Court in Lawrence vs. Texas and Sandra Day O'Connor switched her vote.

Justice Lewis Powell, a Nixon appointee, regretted the decision to join the majority in 1990.  He was at NYU and said it was inconsistent with the logic behind Roe vs. Wade.

Lewis Powell was pro-choice because of something that happened when he was in Richmond, VA, because the girlfriend that was seeing someone on his staff had died bleeding from an outlawed self-induced abortion.  He believed that women should be able to control when and how they gave birth, and thus he was part of the 7-2 majority on Roe in 1973.

Now, back to the present day (sorry I know I'm manic and go off on a million tangents when i write) - I do believe that Roberts will block the other four from going that far.  He might not want to be as part of his legacy the swing vote on his court (and I do believe the man's ego truly believes this is HIS court) an overturning of Roe due to the upheaval it may create in the country.  Also he might believe it to not help the wider pro-life cause because it may cause further divisions and certainly a huge backlash from women and pro-choice people.