Redefining Personhood

1857

The U.S. Supreme Court declares that black people are not legal persons; that they are the property of their owners, who can buy, sell, torture and kill them at will. Slavery is legal.

Free blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justify and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

— Chief Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 7-2 decision

1936

The German Supreme Court, The Reichsgericht, refuses to recognize Jews living in Germany as persons in the legal sense. Genocide is legal.

Anyone who studies the Holocaust must realize how easy it is to extend the destruction of life once you accept any form as legitimate. If abortion, why not euthanasia and eugenics?

— Raul Hilberg, dean of Holocaust scholars, Chicago Tribune, Nov. 13, 1992

1973

U.S. Supreme Court rules that the prenatal are not persons in the legal sense; they have no civil or human rights; they are the property of the mother, who can choose to kill them up to the day of delivery. Abortion on demand is legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy.

The word ‘person’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.

— Justice Harry Blackmun in Roe v. Wade, 7-2 decision

The position that life is a private matter … that you have a right to do with it as you please … was the premise of slavery.

— Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1977

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