Supreme Court Rejects Consideration of Constitutional Rights for Unborn Babies

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal Tuesday to decide whether unborn babies have constitutional rights.

The high court’s decision to steer clear of the case comes after infamous abortion case Roe v. Wade was overturned and Republican-led states began implementing restrictions on abortion.

In Roe, justices decided that the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment does not include the unborn.

Brought by a Catholic group and two women, the appeal sought to “complete the analysis begun in Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’ Health Organization]” after a lower court ruled that unborn babies lacked legal standing to challenge a Rhode Island abortion law that codified Roe precedent.

Appellants argue that unborn babies are entitled to due process and equal protection rights under the Constitution. The appellants said in their petition to the Supreme Court:

As this Court held in Dobbs, abortion laws are different from all others. Do unborn human beings, at any gestational age, have any rights under the United States Constitution? Or, has Dobbs relegated all unborn human beings to the status of persona non grata in the eyes of the United States Constitution—below corporations and other fictitious entities?

The two women who sued were pregnant at the onset of the lawsuit and sued on behalf of their unborn children. The appellants said their lawsuit “presents the opportunity for this court to meet that inevitable question head on.”

Rhode Island’s supreme court rejected the claim a month before Roe was overturned, citing Roe‘s determination that unborn babies were not “persons,” saying, “unborn Petitioners, regardless of gestational age, are not entitled to the protections and guarantees of the due process and equal protection clauses of the United States Constitution.”

In the Dobbs decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the high court was not taking a position on “if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth.”

Some Republican-led states are working on enacting fetal personhood laws that would give certain legal rights to unborn babies — chief among these rights is that terminating a pregnancy would be considered murder.

Upwards of 12 states have enacted near-total abortion bans since the overturn of Roe.

The case is Doe v. McKee, No. 22-201, in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.