The Dred Scott Case of the Twentieth Century

In the 1973 abortion cases, the Supreme Court quoted this language from an 1871 report of the Committee on Criminal Abortion of the American Medical Association. The Court, however, did not follow the advice. Instead, the seven man majority held that the child in the womb is not a person within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment, which provides, No State shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The Court refused to call the child in the womb a living human being and refused to say that life, as we recognize it, begins before live birth