For most of USA history plenty of people didn't think others had rights.
Women, immigrants, Catholics, blacks, gays... the list is endless.
Next on the agenda are the unborn.
I fully expect the same sort of resistance every other class of " non-persons" got.
Tom
Fetuses (feti?) won't ever have the same status as other groups which gained the full rights of people.
They're fundamentally different in several ways....
- They're still inside & entirely dependent upon the mother.
- They don't advocate for themselves.
- They don't do activities associated with many rights, eg, voting.
Consider something like the right to marry to gay folk.
Their exercising this right places no burden upon anyone else.
But to deny an abortion does place a burden upon the mother.
So there's the issue of either balancing rights, or one's rights trumping the other's.
I have broached the subject of granting at least one right to the unborn.
It's a conditional right.
If a fetus is brought to term, it has the right to be as free of birth defects as practical.
This would mean that no one (including the mother) has the right to harm the fetus-which-will-become-a-person.
There'll be messy arguments about things like the mother's right to get drunk.