Concealed Premises
Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases Under Scrutiny
edited by Pilar Zambrano and William L. Saunders
Justice Harry Blackmun noted in his majority opinion in the case of Roe v. Wade (1973) that the state of Texas had in its legal brief laid out "at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development." Drawing from leading medical textbooks and journal articles, the Texas brief showed how "modern science—embryology, fetology, genetics, perinatology, all of biology—establishes the humanity of the unborn child." The available evidence had, in fact, long demonstrated that:
From conception the child is a complex, dynamic, rapidly growing organism. By a natural and continuous process the single fertilized ovum will, over approximately nine months, develop into the trillions of cells of the newborn. The natural end of the sperm and ovum is death unless fertilization occurs. At fertilization a new and unique being is created which, although receiving one-half of its chromosomes from each parent, is really unlike either.
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