There is nothing un-libertarian, or even anti-strict constructionist about believing in human rights.
There are lots of different rights. We've talked about this before but I don't think "human rights" were part of the mix. We've talked about natural rights and constitutional rights, both enumerated and not, and civil rights, and the ever-popular inalienable rights. So now we have human rights in the mix.
Strict-constructionist is about the constitution and constitutional rights. Clearly the constitution awards no rights to embryos, only to citizens. Which is not to say that it excludes states from the option of awarding them as it does to foreigners, for example.
Now, you are awarding the embryo human rights. I'll go along with that, at least for the sake of argument. But if you want me to buy your claim of it as a constitutional right, you need to show me how it's incorporated into the constitution and do so in keeping with the principles of strict-constructionism.
It seems to me that states can go ahead and award embryos rights if they want to up to the point where those rights conflict with those of persons actually awarded rights by the constitution. Seems to me that if you want to justify their going past that and trumping the rights of a woman, you have to get that human right of yours into the constitution somehow.
You can go ahead and claim that human rights are incorporated in the same way that inalienable and natural and all those other rights are, via the penumbra or the ninth amendment or whatever, but I don't see how you can do that as a strict constructionist.
As for human rights, the professional advocates for human rights have a list of them. They include such things as the right to medical care and to a life sentence rather than execution. So it seems to me that if you want to incorporate one human right, you have to incorporate all of them. Which means that you'd also have to agree that that capital punishment is unconstitutional and that the government's failure to provide universal health care is a violation of the constitution. |
