Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Judge: Fetuses Not People for Carpool Purposes

I'm a reasonably staunch defender of the legal and metaphysical personhood of unborn humans, but cases like this strike me as more than a little ridiculous. As a matter of both rational statutory interpretation and sound policy, it seems blindingly obvious that the statute doesn't cover fetuses. Aside from the purposive argument the Arizona judge laid out, consider this: if the traffic laws were intended to apply uniformly to all persons born and unborn, then wouldn't the woman in this case be liable for failing to secure her under-5 year old child in an appropriate child passenger restraint system (Arizona Revised Statutes 28-907)?