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 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”.

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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.

  • _haha_oh_wow_English
    34•3 months ago

    “Hey, let’s criminalize miscarriages!”

    -GOP politicians across the country

    • Flying Squid
      9•3 months ago

      I’d say don’t give them ideas, but they’re already planning for that.

      • _haha_oh_wow_English
        7•3 months ago

        Yep, I was referring to that lady from Ohio. They eventually dismissed the charges, but still wtf?

    • proleEnglish
      2•3 months ago

      That’s the idea… They aren’t worried because they know that rules like that don’t apply to their class.

    • @[email protected]
      2•3 months ago

      They already have in some states. If a woman comes to the emergency room with signs of a miscarriage, they are supposed to ask her if she has taken any abortificants and if she answers in the positive it’s a crime.

      • _haha_oh_wow_English
        2•3 months ago

        Yep, that’s what I was referring to: At least person was already charged (though the charges were later dismissed).