"The justices’ questions indicated that Roe would turn on two central issues. The first was whether a woman’s constitutional right to privacy gave her the right to an abortion under the “penumbra” of the Ninth Amendment. The second was whether fetal life was constitutionally protected under the terms of either the Fifth of Fourteenth Amendment. The case was thus a contest between two competing constitutional rights. If one of the rights were granted, it would nullify the other. Justice Harry Blackmun recognized this, which was why the majority opinion that he wrote in Roe not only presented an argument explaining why the constitutional right to privacy gave women a right to an abortion, but also included a systematic refutation of each of the arguments in favor of fetal rights. Theologians and philosophers disagreed n when human life began, Blackmun argued, so pro-lifers’ use of medical testimony to argue for the personhood of the fetus was not persuasive. Although courts had often awarded damage claims for injuries “in utero”, these precedents were insufficient to confirm pro-lifers’ claim that fetuses had legal rights, because the law had always treated birth as the point at which human life began. Furthermore, the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to persons “born in the United States,” a qualification that clearly did not apply to the unborn."