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What are the priorities of the government? The Wyoming Constitution was written with the true meaning of the state of Wyoming which is freedom and equality for all, not freedom and equality as per someones definition. Let's look at this abortion thing in that light. The Wyoming Constitution says that the US Constitution is the law of the land, so let's start with the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." So we know that one of the ultimate purposes of all governments both federal and state (since the US Constitution is the law of the land) is to "promote the general Welfare". Now if we just understood what they meant by welfare we would know more about what the government is supposed to do. So we need to know what Welfare meant. The only reference I have is Webster's 1828 dictionary that is only 40 years after the US Constitution was ratified and the word Welfare was defined as: "WELFARE, noun [well and fare, a good faring; G.] 1. Exemption from misfortune, sickness, calamity or evil; the enjoyment of health and the common blessings of life; prosperity; happiness; applied to persons. 2. Exemption from any unusual evil or calamity; the enjoyment of peace and prosperity, or the ordinary blessings of society and civil government; applied to states." And since it begins with "We the People" requires that we use definition 1 above. As of late person and personhood has been attempted to be applied to zygotes/embryos/fetuses but we need to know what the writers of the U.S. Constitution thought a person was. I mean if their definition of a person doesn't agree with this new definition of a person then essentially the new version of the word is an attempt to rewrite our US Constitution without going through the amendment process. So what did our founders think a person was? "PERSON, noun per'sn. [Latin persona; said to be compounded of per, through or by, and sonus, sound; a Latin word signifying primarily a mask used by actors on the stage.] 1. An individual human being consisting of body and soul. We apply the word to living beings only, possessed of a rational nature; the body when dead is not called a person It is applied alike to a man, woman or child. A person is a thinking intelligent being." There is no way to shoehorn in the fact that you can define a zygote/embryo/fetus as a woman or a man but there may be a question about the word child. A child at that time was defined as: "CHILD, noun 1. A son or a daughter; a male or female descendant, in the first degree; the immediate progeny of parents; applied to the human race, and chiefly to a person when young. The term is applied to infants from their birth; but the time when they cease ordinarily to be so called, is not defined by custom. In strictness, a child is the shoot, issue or produce of the parents, and a person of any age, in respect to the parents, is a child." And of course we need to understand what definition 1 meant by living "LIFE, noun plu lives. [See Live.] 1. In a general sense, that state of animals and plants, or of an organized being, in which its natural functions and motions are performed, or in which its organs are capable of performing their functions. A tree is not destitute of life in winter, when the functions of its organs are suspended; nor man during a swoon or syncope; nor strictly birds, quadrupeds or serpents during their torpitude in winter. They are not strictly dead, till the functions of their organs are incapable of being renewed. . . . 4. The present state of existence; the time from birth to death. The life of man seldom exceeds seventy years. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. 1 Corinthians 15:19." So we know that at the time of the writing of the 14th Amendment the word life applied only to what had been born, not what may eventually be born! And finally we need to know what they thought being intelligent meant "INTEL'LIGENT, adjective [Latin intelligens.] 1. Endowed with the faculty of understanding or reason. " We also know that even a newborn is not intelligent. The only interaction they have with the world outside themselves are instinctual reactions such as muscle contractions to do things like suckle. But they will suckle on anything placed near their mouth such as your finger, your elbow, your toe, a woman's nipples, a man's nipples, or the nipple on a bottle. There eyesight is so poor they cannot see anything to realize any kind of relationship to the outside world yet. That would mean that even a newborn baby is not technically a person but one could reasonably argue that most fetuses by the 3rd trimester have enough neurological connections in their brains to begin having intelligence. The degree of intelligence is hard to define in that the only test so far to tell if something is self-aware and therefore intelligent is the "mirror test". And just generically it takes until the baby is 20 months old until they can all pretty much pass the "mirror test". At 6 months a large number of babies can recognize external objects but they cannot yet tell the difference between themselves and their reflection in a mirror. So, a person is someone who has been born and is intelligent. In summary we can say that the ultimate objective as defined in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution is to look after the Welfare of all born members of the human race that have organs which are capable of performing their functions and they are intelligent. Moving on to the 14th amendment we have: "Section 1 All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." We have a definition for a person and life now we need a definition of a citizen and it was: "CITIZEN, noun 1. The native of a city, or an inhabitant who enjoys the freedom and privileges of the city in which he resides; the freeman of a city, as distinguished from a foreigner, or one not entitled to its franchises. . . . 5. In the United States, a person, native or naturalized, who has the privilege of exercising the elective franchise, or the qualifications which enable him to vote for rulers, and to purchase and hold real estate. If the citizens of the United States should not be free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own." As you can see, in 1869 the 14th amendment redefined what a citizen was relative to its normal usage. Prior to the 14th amendment a citizen had to have the "privilege of exercising the elective franchise, or the qualifications which enable him to vote for rulers, and to purchase and hold real estate."and they changed that definition to "All persons born or naturalized in the United States". This is how you change our Constitution and the definition of words used in the Constitution. You do it by amendment not by people's, including judges, feelings. Moving on to the Wyoming Constitution which says: Wyoming - "Article 1, Section 2 Equality of all. In their inherent right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, all members of the human race are equal." This inherent right covers "the time from birth to death" [See definition of life earlier] Wyoming - "Article 1, Section 3 Equal political rights. Since equality in the enjoyment of natural and civil rights is only made sure through political equality, the laws of this state affecting the political rights and privileges of its citizens shall be without distinction of race, color, sex, or any circumstance or condition whatsoever other than individual incompetency, or unworthiness duly ascertained by a court of competent jurisdiction." And you will notice that this requires that our inherent right to life from the time of birth to death be applied equally to every person without distinction of sex (man or woman) and under any condition, and pregnancy is a "condition". In Wyoming statutes the stages of pregnancy concerning the zygote/embryo/fetus is defined as an "Unborn child" in "Title 6 CRIMES AND OFFENSES CHAPTER 1 - GENERAL PROVISIONS ARTICLE 1 - IN GENERAL" as: "6-1-104 (a) (xviii) "Unborn child" means a member of the species homo sapiens, at any state of development, who is carried in a womb;" So, each and every egg which makes it to the womb is an "Unborn child" since they are literally the earliest possible state of development since researchers have shown that eggs can start dividing like a zygote without any genetic material from a male sperm cell (UK 2005). And like all species of mammals this condition could occur naturally but would probably result in a miscarriage. This is just another example of how things can go wrong during a pregnancy and possibly kill the woman. So in summary we can say that the highest priorities of the government of Wyoming are the protection of inherent right to life of "all persons born" regardless of any circumstance or condition whatsoever and without distinction of sex. We also realize that this "distinction of sex" applies to laws which address things unrelated to the physical working of that sex. In other words it is allowable to have laws about women having to cover their breasts when there are no such laws for men. There are also laws against men exposing their penis/scrotum which does not apply to women simply because women have no penises/scrotum's. This brings up a problem for the State. Since it is common knowledge that a lot of the chemicals sold in stores and released by many industries including farming and ranching can cause a woman to miscarry, does that mean those industries are responsible for performaing an abortion and their CEO's/Majority Partners, Owners, etc. and must be prosecuted? We apply our laws equally to everyone, including those that run businesses that kill people when they know their products do that. Murder is murder, we apply different punishments based on knowledge before hand and actions taken to prevent harm, but then whatever you define as Murder applies to EVERYBODY. And yes, persons can be Extradited to and from Wyoming for Murder charges. We know what the priorities are, how does that apply to abortions? There is a fundamental thing we must point out here and that is in the United States the federal government and all states are of the Republican form and thus the laws tell the government what they can do and laws tell the people what they cannot do. The government has no inherent rights, people have inherent rights. The government has rights granted to it and the people's rights can only be obstructed when the people have granted the government the right to do something, and that right to do something is inherently narrowly defined. So in order to understand how the government must act in this case we need to understand what the 14th Amendment and the 2 Wyoming Constitution articles are talking about. The 14th Amendment Article 1 talks about Persons and Citizens. Wyoming's Article 1 Section 2 is talk about the entire human race, and Section 3 is talking about Wyoming citizens. The 14th Amendment takes precedence so we look at that first: We know that the 14th amendment defines a citizen as a person who is "born". And a zygote/embryo/fetus is not "born" and therefore is neither a citizen nor a person and therefore any rights it may have are inferior to any person’s (woman's) rights. And this would fit with the fact that up until the early to middle of the 20th century abortions even under the best conditions of the day were still killing a lot of women, even more than pregnancy was. The abortion laws that were passed in the various states in the mid 1800s, before Roe, were passed NOT to protect zygotes/embryos/fetuses but rather to protect woman.. (See Roe V Wade majority opinion). So we know for sure now that the original intent of the founders was that in the broad sense if an entity could maintain life if it had air, water, and food it could make/maintain itself as a living being. They were also aware that except for very late in pregnancy whatever was in a woman's womb could not maintain a life outside the womb and thus gave it no rights. It is true that technology has advanced and in some cases things like iron lungs can keep someone alive even though their own body cannot breathe on its own. So it would not be unreasonable to assume that their definition of a person would need to be extended to not only the person being able to maintain their own life but rather if their life can be maintained either totally on their own or with the assistance of human technology. And when you are talking about abortions you are talking about all kinds of specialty care for fetuses that are born early and in the future, if artificial wombs are ever considered important enough to spend development money on, then with a constitutional amendment the requirement that their organs be capable of performing their functions can be changed to include any equivalent man made technology. Then at whatever state the zygote/embryo/fetus can be sustained outside the womb the harm to the woman would be abated because the zygote/embryo/fetus could be removed and maintained by human technoligy and not threaten the life of the woman. Except for very late in pregnancy this is not possible now. The Wyoming Constitution Article 1 Section 2 says that all members of the human race have an inherent right to life. The words "human race" are not defined by Webster but he did define: "HU'MAN, adjective [Latin humanus; Heb. form, species.] 1. Belonging to man or mankind; pertaining or relating to the race of man; as a human voice; human shape; human nature; human knowledge; human life." "RACE, noun [Latin radix and radius having the same original. This word coincides in origin with rod, ray, radiate, etc.] 1. The lineage of a family, or continued series of descendants from a parent who is called the stock. A race is the series of descendants indefinitely. Thus all mankind are called the race of Adam; the Israelites are of the race of Abraham and Jacob. Thus we speak of a race of kings, the race of Clovis or Charlemagne; a race of nobles, etc." Okay but what did they mean by descendant? Can you shoehorn in a zygote/embryo/fetus? Well no, you can't. Descendant was defined as: "DESCENDANT, noun Any person proceeding from an ancestor in any degree; issue; offspring, in the line of generation, ad infinitum. We are all the descendants of Adam and Eve. " So in the Wyoming Constitution "human race" means human life's continued series of persons indefinitely. And both life and persons requires someone born which would exclude zygotes/embryos/fetuses but would include the woman. Since we do not believe that the writers of our Wyoming Constitution wrote it in violation of the U.S. Constitution, and our Constitution was written after the 14th amendment, we therefore know that by human race they meant all entities that qualify as persons regardless of their citizenship in Wyoming or the United States. In this way they could protect all the different races/sexes within Wyoming borders regardless of some people's tendency to say that some races were not humans, or "foreigners" are not protected, as well as all sexes (Since before 1890 the medical profession was fully aware of things like hermaphrodites). Article 1 section 3 is talking about citizens. And this is different from human beings because they are addressing political rights such as voting and serving in offices and such many of which would not be applicable to people who do not live in Wyoming. At the time the Wyoming Constitution was written a citizen was defined in the 14th Amendment as "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. . . ." Again you have to be a person to be a citizen. And at the time of the writing of the Wyoming Constitution a zygote/embryo/fetus was not a citizen. So we know for sure that any inherent rights of a zygote/embryo/fetus has is subservient to the inherent rights of a citizen/person/woman/man/child since women, men, children, and citizens are all persons. So what does all this mean? So far we have shown that under both the U.S. Constitution and Wyoming's Constitution regardless of any statute that the legislature may enact to ensure rights for non-persons those rights are subservient to the inherent rights of persons. And you cannot rewrite our constitutions by defining something in a statute or an Executive Order or a Judicial decision to change the meaning of the Constitution. And this idea has been reinforced in the 14th amendment when they redefined the meaning of the citizen through the amendment and not just having the judges or legislature or executive decide the word had a different meaning. If we allowed judges, executive, and legislatures to do this redefining then we would allow these political actors to turn us into an oligarchy, a fascist state, a socialist state, a monarchy, a communist state, an authoritarian state or just about anything the splinter group on either the right or the left with the most power can muscle their way into. Many people have trouble with "originalism", but they don't understand that one must always understand what the original writers intended, why they wanted it, and what it will take if there has to be a change but that change must come about by an appropriate vote that specifically points out the change. What did the Wyoming legislature do? Well they are trying to get around the US and Wyoming Constitutions by providing rights to a zygote/embryo/fetus that override the inherent right to life defined very specifically to women, men, and children in our US and Wyoming Constitutions simply by defining this state of development as an "Unborn child" and then giving that zygote/embryo/fetus inherent rights that override what the right to life given in the US and Wyoming Constitutions means that they want to rewrite both the US and the Wyoming Constitutions without their ever being a proper amendment procedure followed. In title 6 what they have done previously is to say that they are trying to protect the zygote/embryo/fetus from harm due to things like a spouse who doesn't want any children and then physically inducing a miscarriage of some sort when the objective of the woman was to have a child regardless of the risks including the risk of death. In these cases there is no abortion involved. It is the actions of someone that is not suffering a life threatening situation and therefore has no right to terminate the pregnancy. And these types of laws follow common sense. Women have the inherent right to the liberty of attempting to have a child and when somebody else interferes with that right of the woman then they must suffer the consequences. The woman also has the right to the liberty of never having a child regardless of others religion/philosophy/feelings/desire to be part of the in group or for any other reason they come up with. Since we know women die in childbearing, childbirth, and postpartum complications we know for sure that an "Unborn child" within their body, whether invited or not, can kill her. Now, considering that you can use deadly force, whether or not your actions were the proximate cause of the assaulter being in the place that harm/possible death is being inflicted, to stop someone from doing great bodily harm or killing you than a woman has an equal right to have an abortion for fear the pregnancy will do them great bodily harm or kill them. The "condition" of pregnancy does not and can not by our Constitution be used as an excuse to exclude somebody from taking all measures necessary to maintain their inherent right to life in self defense actions. And considering that the judges, law enforcement, politicians and doctors are not gods that can bring you back to life and the judges have always said the government can't and won't protect you individually from death, and law enforcement has no requirement to protect any one individual (Example: 19 Dead children while police stand outside shaking in their boots), and the politicians laws do nothing but punish those that harmed/killed you after you are dead, and the doctors cannot always diagnose or treat deadly conditions associated with pregnancies means it is the woman who is responsible to prevent their death under ALL conditions regardless of what the incapable judges, incapable law enforcement, incapable politicians, or incapable doctors think. Reality is as reality is. Considering that the original laws that outlawed abortions were to keep women from dying from the abortions since that was much more common than dying due to the pregnancy the states in those cases were trying to protect the women from something they didn't truly understand and all they knew was that more women were dying due to the abortions then were dying due to pregnancies. And even though the abortions in those days weren't suicide they were still more deadly than the alternative and thus it makes sense to outlaw them. But since that time medicine has advanced way beyond that problem. The problem now is that more women are dying due to pregnancy then are dying due to abortions. Alito and Barrett both eluded to the fact that there are adoption agencies and “Safe Haven” laws that take newborns in and adopt them out. But they don’t tell you that this is a for profit industry and it has been having an economic downturn the last few decades. And I have to wonder about this fact considering that apparently 4 of the 5 judges in favor of overturning Roe said in their congressional hearings that Roe was precedent on precedent and then not but a few year(s) later look to be attempting to overturned that precedent. Lying by a judge in any court generally only comes about when money is involved, and some of that money winds up being part of the judges wealth. And I have a problem with people making money off the untimely death of others (except morticians and cemeteries and the like, they get their money because someone died, not by forcing people into situations that kill them). Equality in Wyoming means equality no matter what the incapable judges, incapable law enforcement, incapable politicians or incapable doctors say. And it's plain language interpretation means that it does not mean equality as per someones religion/philosophy/feelings/desire to be part of the in group or any other reason anyone can come up with. Our legislators are essentially increasing the death rate of women and we know that our Constitutions tell us that: Women's inherent right to life cannot be legislated away because of their sex, Women's inherent right to life cannot be legislated away because of their condition of pregnancy, Women's inherent right to life cannot be legislated away because the incapable judges say they neither can nor will prevent women's death, Women's inherent right to life cannot be legislated away because the incapable Law Enforcement personal will probably not be there, are not always trained to administer medical procedures, have no obligation to help, and by example will often not take action to help prevent their death. Women's inherent right to life cannot be legislated away because incapable politicians THINK it is the proper thing to do while actually causing more deaths, Women's inherent right to life cannot be legislated away because incapable doctors cannot diagnose problems or stop deaths during and after pregnancies, Women's inherent right to life cannot be legislated away because judges want to amend our Constitutions without bothering with the proper process to do so, Women's inherent right to life cannot be legislated away because there are not enough babies in the for profit adoption industry. Women are ultimately responsible for their own life, simply because they are the ones that die in pregnancy. That is what Wyoming is about. Bruce Williams Gillette |