Why Does a Corpse Have More Rights than an Unborn Child?

A corpse is an inanimate object. There is no debate about this one. It's not alive. Thus it has no sentience and cannot suffer. Yet you cannot take its organs without permission. And if you tamper with it, you can be charged with the crime of abuse of a corpse. But abuse of a corpse is a completely arbitrary concept. Because you can put a corpse in a casket and burn it to ashes and that's called cremation which is perfectly legal. But if you cut off the head and turn it into an ashtray, now it's a crime. Even though no one is being harmed and the body is being destroyed just the same. Not a lot of logical consistency there. So the answer to that question, of course, is that the former is considered respectful whereas the latter is considered disrespectful. But it's an inanimate object. So what difference does it make? Why do we care what somebody does with an inanimate object? Do we have laws saying what people can do with coffee tables? What's different about a corpse? My body, my choice, right?

So why is it that a corpse has rights even though none of its cells are alive? Whereas a zygote has no such rights even though it is provably alive by science from the moment of conception even in its most basic form.

Bear in mind that any attempt to defend why a corpse should have rights will completely throw the "viability" argument out the window. Since a corpse is clearly not viable.

 

The short answer is that corpses shouldn't have rights either.

The long answer is that treatment of a corpse is meant to reflect the wishes of the person who the corpse belonged to, i.e. the decedent if their wishes are known, or their next of kin. It is essentially the property of the person who is now gone, and people lawfully choose how their property is handled after death. Most people want a say on what happens to their things after death, and they incorrectly assume they'll be able to look down from heaven with approval. A fetus, on the other hand, never existed mentally and so was never in possession of their body, rather their body is like another organ in the mom's body.

 

Corpses don't have rights.

 

It has exactly the same rights, none.

 

An unborn child is a fetus sh*t, a soldier of god that will came to life scene but he can betray and be en enemy of god, while a corpse is a surrender, the enemies, the bastards as he calls them, were many and strong!

 

Have you been drinking, or are you speaking in tongues? Your post makes absolutely no sense. Why don't you try speaking English next time. You are wasting storage space. I usually don't comment on nonsense posts, I've posted a few of them myself, but this one is a doozy.

 

I get the impression that the anti-abortionists have been hanging out with the creationists because their arguments are equally nonsensical.

Statutory Law =/= Natural Rights

Neither the "preborn" or the "corpse" has legal standing in the United States because neither of them are a person. Only "persons" have Constitutionally protected Rights which don't exist for either the "preborn" or the "corpse" in the United States because they're not "persons" based upon the historical precedent for the definition of "person" established by recorded history.

The fact that there are statutory laws related to a "corpse" or to the "preborn" doesn't imply any recognition of rights that can only relate to a person. This is a nonsensical argument without any merit.

 

Considering that we burn some corpses until they are nothing but ash, or remove the organs and then pump them full of formaldehyde only to be placed in the ground where bugs and other creatures will slowly eat every digestible piece of tissue left on it, I don't think corpses are getting preferential treatment.

 

I'll just go ahead and tell everybody.....

after being here at PF and the Abortion Forum particularly?

Unifier is a "hit and run" troll. He posts an OP and then runs away without actually wanting to discuss it.

90% chance? He'll never come back to this thread. So there's no point in directing responses to him.

 

Yes, even in my "Fetus and brain-dead woman hypothetical" thread, OKgrannie said that a brain-dead woman still had rights after death for her body not to be used as an incubator in the event of pregnancy. So she obviously believes that the woman's dead body is valuable and has dignity...


If you want to see how the fetus's body is treated after death, see this thread: Those Who Deny The Fetocaust


Another old thread that touched on the theme of abortion desecrating a dead body: Best argument for banning abortion

 

The Supreme Court considers corporations to have many of the same rights as persons (the same Supreme Court that decided Roe v Wade), so why then would you think there couldn't be other entities granted similar rights?

 

Why? Are corpses crawling up inside the uteruses of women that don't want them there now?

Did I miss an episode of Walking Dead? Cause if not, I don't see the point of this discussion. Abortion is about a woman having the right to dominion over her own body.

 

The corpse doesn't possess the right to not be abused. That's just a legal restriction for something that is considered morally taboo.

Saying a corpse has rights would be tantamount to saying a statue has the right not to be damaged.

Executive summary: Corpses don't have rights.

 

So you would say that you have about just as much right over your body after death as a fetus does inside a woman who wants to abort it?

Is it ok to have your corpse torn apart and incinerated amongst a mass pile of bodies without your permission? How about plundered for organs for medical research?

 

That's not the corpse exerting a right. That's essentially an extension of property rights.

 

What if there is no surviving family or relatives?

And, according to this line of logic, would you say that the father might have certain property rights (however limited they may be) over his fetus?

 

What entities have rights or do not have rights, and under what conditions they have rights, is strictly a legal/social issue. There is nothing inherent in human existence that gives us rights. We simply make a decision.

Every argument about the beginning of life will inevitably founder. Is a frozen embryo stored for IVF a person with rights? Is a fetus a minute before birth inherently different than a baby a minute after birth? I defy you to construct a hard line on the beginning of life that doesn't fail in some major way.

This is because life is not a discrete event with a hard beginning and a hard end. Life is a process, and it is deucedly difficult to specify precisely where it starts and stops.

When does life end? Various human processes carry on even after 'official' death. For the sake of legal clarity, we may say life ends when the heart stops or when the brain is dead - but even these events are highly indistinct. A heart can restart or be replaced. Brain death is a matter of degree, not an absolute.

So just get over it. You may want life to begin at conception. That's fine, if you can persuade a sufficient number of legislators, then you may have your way. But that's all it will ever be: just another law. You can't make a blastocyst a human being no matter how many laws you pass.

 

Very well said

 

I see someone needs to do a little legal research, a business can be a juridical person, just as a fetus is a judicial person in some circumstances, being a juridical person does not imply "personhood"

 

While I don't personally agree 100% with the Supreme Court's logic it's based upon the fact that corporations are owned by "people" that have rights that they can exercise through the corporation. I understand that people own corporations and should have limited use of those corporations related to exercising their individual Constitutionally protected rights but that should be highly limited much more so than what the Supreme Court decisions allow.

I can also present another case I don't personally agree with 100% and that the "fetal homicide laws" because the "preborn" doesn't have any rights under the Constitution. The only way these laws are arguably Constitutional is because it relates to an attack on the woman where her rights are being violated. The additional punishment imposed upon the person that, in the act of assault and battery that could also result in the murder of the woman, is increased if a fetus also dies is justifiable based upon the rights of the woman because the fetus is a non-person without any explicit Constitutionally protected rights.

 

Some statutes are not assertions of any individual right to property or self at all , but an assertion of a collective right to govern for the public welfare, to provide order or to express a collective sense of morality and decency. All of the statutes dealing with how we handle human corpses in part reflect those assertions in that we are honoring the person that they were. For example, you cannot publicly urinate on a corpse because it is not felt that there is an individual right to urinate in a specific place at all and there is a collective sense of decency affronted if you do.

The OP is correct that we do not collectively honor a fetus at the expense of another person's rights to decide what will happen inside her body, because it used to be a zygote.

 

OK, but this type of logic you used here could potentially start opening the door for the biological father to have rights over his offspring, if he wants to assert them.

In your above post, you seem to be regarding the fetus as the woman's "property", the same way that a corporation is the property of its shareholders. But if the fetus can be the woman's property, who's to say the father doesn't have some stake in it? What if the father wants a burial? The way I see it, under such circumstances, the woman would only have the right to have the fetus removed, she would not have the right to otherwise damage the body (either by suction aspiration or dismemberment). She may even be under obligation to gestate the man's property if she signed a pre-conception agreement. In some States the common law concept of implied consent exists, so she may not even have to sign a contract. (i.e. if she wanted to be able to get an abortion without the biological father's permission she would first have to get him to forfeit his interest before the act of sex took place)

 

The law, bodily autonomy, biology.....

The fetus is the woman's property because it's in her. It isn't in the man.

 

We have discussed this before. The fact that you put something inside you does not necessarily make it your property.

I used the example before of a woman stealing a diamond ring from a jewelry store and stuffing it into a bodily orifice. Doesn't make it hers.