Court Rules Six-Day-Old Baby Is NOT A PERSON

Ashley Jorgensen was only seven days old when she died. Her mother, Jennifer Jorgensen was convicted of manslaughter for causing her death and sentenced to three to nine years in prison.

That should have been that.

But it wasn’t over. Jennifer appealed the case, arguing that she couldn’t have committed manslaughter because Ashley Jorgensen wasn’t a person when she was fatally injured.

The New York Court of Appeals overturned her ruling and Jorgensen is free.

She was in her third trimester with Ashley in 2008 when she was involved in a head-on collision in New York State. She had been indicted for DUI.

The baby was delivered by C-section and died six days later.

But the courts ruled that Jennifer is only guilty of a misdemeanor, ruling that Jorgensen’s actions amounted only to a “self-induced abortion.” It’s so disgusting, it’s palpable.

The Times-Union is reporting “that the central question in the case was whether the state Legislature intended “to hold pregnant women criminally responsible for engaging in reckless conduct against themselves and their unborn fetuses, such that they should be subject to criminal liability for prenatal conduct that results in postnatal death? Under the current statutory scheme, the answer to this question is no.”

In a dissent, Judge Eugene Fahey said: “I cannot join in a result that analyzes our statutes to determine that a six-day-old child is not a person.”

But that’s the way the law is written in New York State, conservative blogger Todd Huston writes. A child is not a personuntil it physically exits the birth canal. Any moment prior to that, the child is not human by state law.

In this case it is clearly the legislature’s fault, not the court’s, and shows how iffy it is to say that a human doesn’t count as human until after they are “born.”

After all, it is a horribly cold, heartless–yes, even inhuman–thing to say that a baby that can be born alive through medical technology doesn’t count as a “person.”

This law essentially says that a human is not a “person” until they pass through the portal of birth, as if the birth canal itself bestows “personhood” on human beings. This is such an arbitrary and silly claim that it makes a mockery of the law not to mention belittles life itself.

The idea that you are not a person on one side of the birth canal but you are on the other is absurd–especially in light of the capabilities of modern medicine.

This case lays bare the illogic of proclaiming that a human doesn’t count as a person until it clears the birth canal. And the reason these illogical backflips are made in legislatures across the country is merely to give sanction to abortion–which is murder, too, but that truth can’t be said for political reasons.