Lawmakers in more than a dozen states have considered efforts to give legal rights and protections to embryos and fetuses

Lawmakers in more than a dozen states have considered efforts to endow embryos or fetuses with legal rights and protections since the start of the year, and at least three states have advanced such “fetal personhood” legislation since February, when an Alabama supreme court decision ruling that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” unleashed national outrage.

The Alabama state legislature responded to the repercussions of that ruling – which led several of the state’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) providers to halt their work – by passing a bill to protect providers’ ability to offer that treatment. Yet, just hours after the legislature passed those protections, Republicans in the Iowa statehouse passed a fetal personhood bill that amends state law to criminalize causing the “death of an unborn person”.

As of 2022, at least 11 states – including Alabama – have what Pregnancy Justice identified as “extremely broad personhood language that could be read to affect all state laws, civil and criminal”, according to a brief by the organization. “Those are the ones that really have the power in their language itself to increase criminalization of pregnant people, to threaten IVF, to threaten forms of contraception and obviously to ban abortion,” Sussman said.

  • Steve@communick.news
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    8 months ago

    Even if a fetus a person, it doesn’t actually mean what they seem to think it means.

    There’s no law stating one person is required to donate blood, organs, or even time and effort, to save the life of another person.

    So a fetus is a person now. That doesn’t give it the right to take anything from its mother against her will.

    • ThePyroPython@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Ib4 they reach the end game and pass a law for mandatory organ donation and start harvesting the organs of the poor for the rich.

      • JDubbleu@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        I wouldn’t even be against mandatory organ donation so long as it went to those who’ve been waiting on the donor list. So many more lives could be saved. At the very least make it opt out.

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      The counter argument to ‘bodily autonomy’ is that not donating blood or organs is a passive act, while an abortion is an active one.

      I don’t agree, just putting it out there.

      • RedSeries@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Wow, is this actually their argument? Wild.

        “You weren’t actively having your blood and organs harvested, so saying no to that is okay. But that fertilized egg you are carrying against your will? Well…”

        • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Back in 2000 AD, Right To Life President George W. Bush came up with a compromise that allowed some embryonic stem cells to be used in research, because some embryos are more equal than others…