An Interesting Question

Pro-life activist jeff White is currently on trial in Washington, DC. The charge? Keeping and exposing a dead body or body part during a demonstration on a public sidewalk outside a Planned Parenthood "clinic".

But wait. There may be a serious flaw with the charges.

Now, nearly a year later, White, 47, is on trial in D.C. Superior Court, being prosecuted by the District's attorney general in a case that White's attorney says underscores the contradictions in U.S. law over the legal standing of a fetus.

The argument of abortion rights advocates has long been that a fetus is nothing more than a cluster of cells and is not a human being, White's attorney, Brian Chavez-Ochoa, said in an interview.

"If that argument is correct," he said, "then how can somebody be charged by the District of Columbia with displaying a human being" when it was a fetus?

"It's a contradictory argument," Chavez-Ochoa said. "If it's not just a clump of cells, is the attorney general willing to concede that a . . . fetus is in fact a human being?"

Now if a fetus is a human being, then there it is crystal clear that a fetus is a "person" under the protection of the US Constitution. And if a fetus is a person, it has an undeniable right to life, one which must be protected under the Constitution and laws of the United States. That would mean that Roe v. Wade, a decision that has never had much in the way of constitutional, legal, scientific, and medical foundation, would have to be overturned as inconsistent with the Constitution. On the other hand, the charges cannot stand if the fetus is not a human being.