When the Roe V. Wade opinion was written the point of it was to legalize abortion. In order to do this Blackmun had to abridge the Fourteenth Amendment so that it protected only a select group of people rather than all people. Once that was done he could say that the women had the right to an abortion because it didn't interfere with anybody's rights.
In the first chunk of the opinion Blackmun rambled on about the reasons for outlawing abortions, and how the country's abortion laws had changed. Then he correctly pointed out that if the unborn child is considered a person then his or her right to life trumps the right of the women not to be inconvenienced by pregnancy.Section 1 Fourteenth Amendment
"Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State 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." National Archives Amendments 11-27
"A. The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a "person" within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, [*157] for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment. The appellant conceded as much on reargument." Books.google.comFrom that point on he started making up excuses for why the unborn baby shouldn't be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. First he stated that no one knows when life begins, which was a lie even at that time.
"Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins [***181] at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer." Books.google.comThis statement is a lie because biologists have long ago defined a cell to be the most basic unit of life. At the moment of conception the unborn child is made up of cells that contain a complete set of human DNA that is different from either parent.
At this point Blackmun acted as though the constitution was the dictionary of the land rather than the law of the land.
"The Constitution does not define "person" in so many words. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment contains three references to "person." The first, in defining "citizens," speaks of "persons born or naturalized in the United States." The word also appears both in the Due Process Clause and in the Equal Protection Clause. "Person" is used in other places in the Constitution: in the listing of qualifications for Representatives and Senators, Art. I, ß 2, cl. 2, and ß 3, cl. 3; in the Apportionment Clause, Art. I, ß 2, cl. 3; n53 in the Migration and Importation provision, Art. I, ß 9, cl. 1; in the Emolument Clause, Art. I, ß 9, cl. 8; in the Electors provisions, Art. II, ß 1, cl. 2, and the superseded cl. 3; in the provision outlining qualifications for the office of President, Art. II, ß 1, cl. 5; in the Extradition provisions, Art. IV, ß 2, cl. 2, and the superseded Fugitive Slave Clause 3; and in the Fifth, Twelfth,and Twenty-second Amendments, as well as in ßß 2 and 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. But in nearly all these instances, the use of the word is such that it has application only postnatally. None indicates, with any assurance, that it has any possible pre-natal application. n54" Books.google.comThe problem with this is that it's not the job of the constitution to define the words that it is made up of. Words by themselves have their own meaning. A good example this is that word "sex" isn't defined in the constitution and only appears in the 19 amendment. If what he suggested were correct then the 19 amendment would be meaningless. If he was confused about what the meaning of "person" was he should have looked it up in a dictionary.
"In short, the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in thewhole sense." Books.google.com
What Blackmun did by asserting that the constitution must explicitly state what it means by person, was narrow down the group of people who are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. By doing that he contradicted the whole point of the fourteenth amendment, which was designed to give broad protection to all the people who are in this country. The idea was to prevent a future chief justice of the Supreme Court or legislator from saying that a certain group people didn't have any rights because of some technical reason, the way Roger B. Taney did in the Dredd Scott case.
In other words the Roe V. Wade decision is unconstitutional because it denies a group of people access to due process or the law by saying that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't apply to them. Likewise the act of abortion is unconstitutional since it infringes on the preborn's right to life.
