"The Roe Court pointed to the varying severity of charges and punishments among state laws proscribing abortion prior to and after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment as evidence that states did not believe in preborn personhood. In some jurisdictions, the maximum sentence for abortion was less severe than for murder. The Court believed this suggested that the law did not include fetuses as persons during this period. But the principle permitting legislatures to determine how to classify and punish different types of unlawful killing is one of historical provenance. It says nothing about the personhood status of the victim. In his Lectures on Law, the early American legal scholar and founding father James Wilson recognized that policy-driven ranges of punishment for crimes of killing were permissible.144 He wrote that âgrades of solicitude, discovered, by the law, on the subject of lifeâ exist, and he acknowledged that the law may consider âdifferent degrees of aggressionâ against life. How these various âdegrees may be justified, excused, alleviated, aggravated, redressed, or punished,â he said, âwill appear both in the criminal and in the civil code of our municipal law.â"
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pp.563-564
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade
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Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the
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