Passing a law outright banning it is unnecessary if life is defined at the federal level as beginning at conception.
This is false. Such an official definition would probably be only symbolic. The thing is, the federal government does not have any general police power.
Even if, by their definition, abortion were murder (and there's a lot more defining to be done before we could arrive at that conclusion), it really wouldn't matter. Consider that today, we would define all living people as "alive" (duh), the federal has no laws forbidding murder! Any murder charge is the result of state laws (other than in national parks and in DC, but those are a different argument).
The only way this could affect real life legalities is in the way it interacts with the 13th Amendment. But since that's got the goofy doctrine of incorporation, there would be no net change unless the Supreme Court were to recognize the right with respect to this new/clarified definition. And that just puts the ball right back into the SCOTUS court, which is where it sits today anyway.
(I upvoted you because I think it's worthy of discussion, but this is the way the answer is going to fall out in the end)
This is false. Such an official definition would probably be only symbolic. The thing is, the federal government does not have any general police power.
Even if, by their definition, abortion were murder (and there's a lot more defining to be done before we could arrive at that conclusion), it really wouldn't matter. Consider that today, we would define all living people as "alive" (duh), the federal has no laws forbidding murder! Any murder charge is the result of state laws (other than in national parks and in DC, but those are a different argument).
The only way this could affect real life legalities is in the way it interacts with the 13th Amendment. But since that's got the goofy doctrine of incorporation, there would be no net change unless the Supreme Court were to recognize the right with respect to this new/clarified definition. And that just puts the ball right back into the SCOTUS court, which is where it sits today anyway.
(I upvoted you because I think it's worthy of discussion, but this is the way the answer is going to fall out in the end)