During Supreme Court deliberations over Roe v Wade in 1973, in considering whether the unborn child is a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Harry Blackmun began his imaginative opinion by going all the way back to the third century BC. He regaled readers with a history lesson about Aristotle, the Stoics of ancient Greece, the Persian Empire, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and how the Catholic Church once believed the Aristotelian theory of “mediate animation” (i.e., that the male embryo acquires his soul after forty days, whereas the more complex female embryo must wait until the eightieth day).
Curiously, Blackmun saturated his opinion with twenty-seven references to the idea that “quickening,” the point at which a mother first perceives fetal movement, was long thought to be the moment when life begins. Never mind that medical science had discarded this notion as archaic long before the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868.
Modern medical science knows now that unborn babies exhibit sentience, the ability to feel pain, and the ability to learn as early as the first trimester.
Read more details that reveal how the 1973 Supreme Court Decision indeed ignored medical science, which in the ensuing years has only strengthened the cause of life, in this article:
