Look at Alabama. Do you see what Republicans are doing? They are trying to slowly set the state to where one day the FEDERAL SUPREME COURT, Republican Senate, Republican controlled House an White House can pass a law making abortion illegal in all 50 states.
This extremist strategy of establishing fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as people with constitutional and statutory protections, as exposed by this decision, not only subverts the personhood of pregnant people and threatens to criminalize anyone with the capacity for pregnancy, it also poses deep threats to our democracy.
Fetal personhood laws, and their proponents, have been lying in wait for this moment. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the focus was on the abortion bans that went into near-immediate effect, triggered by the resulting fall of Roe v. Wade. But fetal personhood laws also serve as trigger laws of their own.
It increases the ability of the state to police and criminalize pregnant people, their behavior and their pregnancy outcomes.
While pregnant women are begging state courts around the country to recognize their personhood and their right to life — to grant them the basic right to have a life- or health-saving abortion — states are granting such rights to frozen embryos without so much as a passing recognition of its cruel hypocrisy.
Opinion: What the Alabama Supreme Court’s Decision Says About Our Failing Democracy
The high court ruling that the “wrongful death of a minor” law could be applied to an embryo created through in vitro fertilization is another extremist strategy in the criminalization of pregnant people.
