Is a Fetus a Legal Person

While 13 states had already enacted “trigger laws” designed to ban all or nearly all abortions once Roe was overturned, at least six states have also introduced laws to ban abortion by establishing fetal personality, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. 5. What are the possible effects of personality laws? NPR`s A Martinez speaks with Carliss Chatman, a law professor at the Washington and Lee School of Law, about fetal personality laws as a new frontier in reproductive rights litigation. Fetal personality laws could also have a significant impact on pregnant women. If a fetus is legally considered a person, laws that endanger children may apply. One state could potentially say pregnant women can only eat certain foods, or punish a pregnant person who is seen drinking, or force someone to have a C-section they refuse, Kluchin says. If a pregnant woman has to undergo chemotherapy for cancer treatment, Ziegler adds, she could theoretically be ordered to postpone treatment until birth so that it does not harm the fetus, as the New Yorker reports, “regularly” among pregnant women in Poland. (Many U.S. abortion laws provide narrow exceptions when the mother`s life is in danger.) The Supreme Court`s opinion on the suppression of Roe v.

Wade says the 14th Amendment`s right to privacy does not apply to abortion. From now on, each state can define its own reproductive rights laws. Abortion bans overturned by Roe were reinstated, including laws extending the legal rights of a fetus in utero. Carliss Chatman is a professor of law at the Washington and Lee School of Law. And she says what`s called a fetal personality could be the next frontier in the legal battle over reproductive rights in the United States. In the early 1970s, when lawyers representing the state of Texas brought Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court, they argued that a fetus is a person. Because a fetus is a person, they told the judges, a fetus is entitled to all the protections guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, including a right to “life.” Theoretically, fetal personality laws could affect the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure that uses a combination of drugs and surgical procedures to help sperm fertilize an egg and then implant the embryo into the uterus. One IVF cycle can produce multiple embryos that can be frozen indefinitely. Fetal personality laws could also affect access to contraception, as some members of the anti-abortion movement argue that IUDs and the emergency contraception plan B can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg and injure personality, says Mary Ziegler, an abortion law historian at the University of California, Davis School of Law.

(The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says these forms of contraception work by preventing fertilization in the first place.) But nearly 50 years later, Roe was toppled and Justice Samuel Alito said Friday in the Supreme Court`s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson`s Women`s Health Organization that Roe was “tremendously wrong from the start.” Now, laws that establish fetal personality — meaning they extend people`s legal rights to a fetus or embryo before viability — could be the next frontier in reproductive rights litigation in the United States. State human rights laws. Under the California Constitution, individuals have many fundamental rights and protections. For example, article 1, section 7, of the Constitution provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property or deprived of equal protection of the law without due process. The California Constitution does not define who is considered a person for these purposes, including unborn children. Linda Greenhouse, a longtime Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, wrote Blackmun`s final biography, making it clear that this was not the case. Blackmun preferred the point of acceleration — when the fetus begins to move for the first time toward the end of the first trimester — as the emergence of personality.

Last year, a federal fetal personality law was also introduced in both houses of Congress. The Life at Conception Act, which would grant fetuses and embryos a constitutional “right to life” from the moment of fertilization, has 164 co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives. • Depending on how they are worded, personality laws could make it illegal for a doctor to terminate a pregnancy even if there is a life-threatening complication, such as when a fertilized egg is implanted ectopically, that is, outside the uterus, where it cannot survive. Georgian law explicitly excludes abortion from ectopic pregnancies, while Arizona`s law was unacceptably vague on this point, according to the judge who blocked it. CHATMAN: Yes. And I like to compare that to what the United States was like before the Civil War. Before the Civil War, states had different definitions of when a black person was a person and when a black person had civil rights, human rights – all rights. And it varied from state to state. We are fighting a whole civil war over this. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed, states that every person born in the United States is a citizen, essentially saying that every human being is a person, a legal entity with legal rights and due process rights. So, in theory, we shouldn`t be able to allow states to define when personality begins when we have the 14th Amendment.

But with the fall of Roe, we know that the Roe-based right to privacy, which is the foundation of abortion law, is gone. But what happens to personality when Roe is gone? And I think you go back to the basics of what the 14th Amendment is, and to be an originalist, why we have the 14th Amendment in the first place. The Supreme Court refused to address fetal personality in the Dobbs case: “Our opinion is not based on a view of whether and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights it enjoys after birth,” Alito wrote. It remains to be seen how fetal personality will behave in court in Arizona and elsewhere. “I think the challenge for many of us is that we`re going to live in a legal gray area for a long time,” said Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which provides legal defense to pregnant people, including women who have had abortions. “The case law needs to be developed, or the statutes need to be clarified, because the scope of [the Roe case] is so monumental that I don`t know if anyone really has an answer to how this is going to play out.” In the United States, as of 2014, thirty-eight states offer some level of criminal protection to the unborn, and twenty-three of these states have laws that protect the fetus from conception to birth. [69] All U.S. states allow – by law, court decision, or jurisprudence – a litigation guardian to represent the interests of the unborn child. [70] In 1999, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress, which defines violent assaults against pregnant women as crimes against two victims: the woman and the fetus she is carrying. [71] This law was passed in 2004 after the murder of Laci Peterson and her carrying fetus.