The Starting DebateFollow

Too soon to suggest replacing every instance of chicken in this thread's recipes to aborted fetuses?

I never thought I'd be proud of Mississippi.

I'm not sure how that causes a crisis. There are lots of people who live in the US, who are not citizens. Rights are granted to "persons". Certain privileges are granted to "citizens". Honestly, the bigger questions were those raised during the last couple weeks and revolve around questions of IVF, abortion (obviously), and probably most significantly, birth control methods.

Hah! That's more of a loophole in the law, and hardly represents a constitutional crisis. The constitution says nothing about how the law should deal with persons who are not citizens. I suspect that we could have managed a common sense solution to that problem.

Yeah. I figured that. But I honestly seem to recall someone actually seriously making that argument somewhere (no clue if it was on this forum or somewhere else though). When you mentioned it, I was like "Oh yeah! I've heard that one before...".

They're not US citizens, but they're citizens somewhere. If an embryo is legally a person but not legally a citizen anywhere, they exist in "statelessness" - they don't belong to any country yet. How would it be represented in a court of law?

We could just call them enemy combatants (it was kicking her stomach!) and do whatever we want with them behind closed doors. I wonder how you water board a fetus?

Edited, Nov 10th 2011 8:19am by Lubriderm

I really can't think of any reason it would even be brought up, and I spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about it, and seeing as it's never happened this is purely hypothetical but if someone figured out how to prosecute a fetus and it's citizenship were brought up I imagine they would use the mother's citizenship for the child or possibly a matter of dual citizenship based on both on the mother and father, but still favoring the mother's because that's just how it works out (courts always favor the mother). As an aside, it could also close the Anchor Baby loopholes, but it'd make a mess out of births from mothers still working on their citizenship. The question would pretty much be do the children get new citizenship status based on their birth locations or do they keep what they had as an embryo? Seeing as how a xenomorph would most certainly be constitutionally regarded as a foreign existence to a human body (since it couldn't occur naturally ), I'd imagine it'd be regarded as an illegal alien at the moment of conception, and the product of face rape so eligible for abortion.

Should I be concerned the xenomorph question is a lot more cut and dry than the human baby question?

But that doesn't mean anything. You're subject to the laws of whichever nation you're standing on. Anyone born and walking around doesn't get to say to the US judicial system "I'm from Colombia so only Colombian laws apply to me!" so why do you think it would be different here?

I think I remembered where I heard this now!

Technically the embryo isn't standing.

If your point is to claim something that is absolutely false, then I suppose that can be your point.

"The people" and "persons" have rights within a nation. This is abundantly clear to anyone who bothers to read the bill of rights and other amendments to the US constitution



That's just in the bill of rights, but what's probably the clearest case is the good ol 14th amendment:




The 14th amendment makes a clear distinction between being a "person" and being a "citizen". All citizens are persons, but not all persons are citizens. And for the record, citizenship is what's dependent on birth *not* personhood (so said law would not violate anything in the constitution).

Citizens have their "privileges and immunities" protected. Persons have their rights to "life, liberty, and property" and are promised "equal protection of the laws".

Persons have rights. Citizens have the same rights as persons, but they also have privileges and immunities. How you somehow managed to get that more or less completely backwards is somewhat mystifying.