Original Public Meaning and Pregnancy’s Ambiguities

Authors

Evan D. Bernick, Northern Illinois University College of Law
Jill Wieber Lens, University of Iowa College of Law

Abstract

Relying on 1868 abortion statutes, the 2022 Supreme Court held in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that no federal constitutional right to abortion exists. Mere months later, a petition for certiorari asked the Court to determine that “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment includes prenatal existence, which would require criminalization of abortion in all states. The petitioners cited Dobbs and claimed the authority of legal history in 1868 and before. These arguments will be heard again, and they are increasingly framed in terms of the “original public meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This Article refutes these arguments on their own terms. It looks at 1868, but it doesn’t stop at statutes, treatises, or dictionaries. Instead, it looks at the reality of pregnancy in 1868, as experienced by the public—in particular, by women and their doctors. This was a reality full of ambiguities. Pregnancy was not medically diagnosable until quickening; ideas of prenatal development were fluid and women let doctors take their miscarried fetal tissue and stillborn babies away for scientific study; and pregnancy loss was common, expected, and impossible to distinguish from abortion.

Women and their doctors lived these ambiguities. Nothing in the laws in 1868 changed them. These ambiguities similarly negate any possibility that the original public meaning of “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment included prenatal existence.

Recommended Citation

Evan D. Bernick & Jill W. Lens, Original Public Meaning and Pregnancy’s Ambiguities, 122 Mich. L. Rev. 1443 (2024).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol122/iss7/3