4 . 9 . 21
Are there sufficient reasons for the Court to hold that the unborn are persons within the meaning of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? Edward Whelan continues to doubt it. He also questions whether such a holding would have much legal effect. To these doubts he adds finally the view that the equal protection argument ought not to play much of a part in “pro-life legal strategy.”
Since questions of strategy have not been my concern, I will continue to say nothing about them, save that any strategy about anything should be aligned with the truth; my first and second essays together argue that there are here two truths converging on the same result. (1) The original public meaning of “any person” in the equal protection clause includes the unborn, as began to be judicially acknowledged and enforced almost as soon as intrusive limitations on the meaning of that clause s “deny . . . equal protection” fell away in the 1950s and, coincidentall