Rachel over at Our Bodies, Our Blog reports on this evil initiative to have fertilized eggs declared legal people with full constitutional rights.
Oh, I hear half of you groaning already–it’s not evil. It’s not evil.
Really?
Let’s think about what it means if a fertilized egg is a legal person with full constitutional rights.
1. Half of all fertilized eggs are never implanted in a woman’s uterus. Instead, they are just shed in the woman’s next menstrual cycle. If those are legal people, there must be some accounting for them. A woman wouldn’t be allowed to give birth to a number of dead babies and just put their bodies in the garbage. So, if those fertilized eggs are people, will we each have to turn our used tampons and pads over to the Colorado government to make sure that the ones that need to be disposed of according to the laws governing the disposal of human remains are disposed of so?
2. Every miscarriage will have to be investigated. If your child dies under uncertain circumstances while in your care, no one sends you home to grieve. They call the cops. If you have multiple children die while in your care, we really demand the cops get involved. So, pity the poor family going through multiple miscarriges. Their personal tragedies now become police business.
3. As Rachel points out, no exception seems to be made for where the fertilized egg is located. So, a fertilized egg that attaches in a woman’s fallopian tube instead of in her uterus has, legally, as much a right to life as a fertilized egg in a uterus. It seems that a woman would not be allowed to end that pregnancy until her life was in danger, since, until that moment, the fetus has a right to life that trumps her convenience, even though there’s no way for an ectopic pregnancy to carry to term. In other words, a woman would be legally required to carry an ectopic pregnancy as far along as possible, even at the risk of her reproductive health. After all, even if I’m sure you might kill me some day, I can’t shoot you today to prevent it. I have to wait until my life is in emminent danger.
4. Thus ends many fertility treatments in Colorado. What company is going to want the headache of working around these rules? Many fertility treatments now involve making many more embryos than ever are expected to become actual babies. More embryos than needed are put into the uterus in hopes that one or more take and, in many cases, when four or five take, the doctors selectively reduce their numbers in order to give the most viable fetuses the best chance. All that would have to stop. You couldn’t say “Well, we’re going to put twelve children in this room, even though we know that most, if not all of them will die” and not be charged with murder.
5. Women will have to carry their rapists’ babies to term.
6. Any form of birth control that prevents a fertilized egg from being attached to the uterus will be illegal. But, more importantly than that, any form of birth control that can be used to prevent a fertilized egg from being attached to the uterus would be illegal as well. So long Pill.
7. Since the Pill would be illegal in Colorado, the women of Colorado who take medicine that causes birth defects will either have to stop taking that medicine or stop having sex. I’m sure men all over Colorado will love that.
I think it’s obvious that, in order to enforce the legal personhood of fertilized eggs, women would have to be subjected to intense and often cruel scrutiny.
But let’s think of the human cost at a step back from that as well. We all know how tough being a first-responder can be on a person. Being the EMT or the firefighter or the police officer or even the tow-truck driver who has to arrive at an accident and deal with overwhelming tragedy is a grueling drain on a person’s soul.
Imagine you were on the “miscarriage investigtion team.” It’s your job to show up at every reported miscarriage and, at one of the worst moments of a person’s life, investigate her tragedy as a crime. Most miscarriages just happen for reasons no one understands.
What kind of emotional toll does it take on you to have to butt in at a moment when 99% of the time, the person has done nothing to bring this on?
And what if you do find evidence of some kind of negligence on her part? What if she drank like a fish before she found out she was pregnant?
Those are cases we want our prosecutors to take up? We’re going to put women who wanted to be mothers in jail just because they weren’t careful enough?
It’s ridiculous and cruel. The whole thing.
And here’s what I don’t understand. I really can understand folks who are anti-abortion and who wish that women didn’t choose to have abortions. But many anti-abortion folks are married or in committed sexually active relationships and many of them have probably lost pregnancies they wanted very much.
You have to know, or at least be able to imagine, how much that sucks.
Why on earth would you craft or support legislation, or even a position, that puts women who very much want babies and but can’t carry that pregnancy to term square in the middle of your battle against abortion?
Is it so important for you to make sure that this has as much life as it can, that you are willing to make this the subject of constant police monitoring?
Tiny Cat Pants 
Zygotes are people too! I’m gonna register some to vote. 4 out of 5 vote Democratic, don’tcha know — the party that is concerned about them after they’re born!
OK seriously, if zygotes are people what does that make miscarriages: suicides? That’s going to be a big problem for all of the Catholics in Colorado.
1) Many women use hormone therapy for reasons other than birth control and we don’t have other drugs that accomplish the same things. If the Pill is illegal as birth control, will it also be illegal as medicine, and isn’t that outrageously unfair for women to be forced to suffer terrible problems so easily alleviated?
2) Many of those embryos that never implant aren’t actually expelled from our bodies during menstruation. Many of them are just reabsorbed into our bodies. That seems like a much more direct muder. How would we mourn them?
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If this measure passes: Keeping all those fertilized embryos on ice is tantamount to holding people prisoner. I think they should all get their own apartments and jobs with health benefits. We’ll put the costs for all these little “people” on the tab of the anti-choicers who started this battle.
In addition to which, it says nothing to address the conflict inherent between two legal persons.
@amazonratz, yeah, is freezing people torture? Because we don’t torture. ;)
Right, Rachel. I especially don’t get that. It seems that, if a fertilized egg is a legal person, a woman’s rights might actually become more “pro-choice” in some cases. I mean, I legally have no right to your kidney, not even if I’m only going to use it for 9 months and give it back to you.
If a fertilized egg is a person, which, by definition seems to indicate some level of independence, what right does that person have to the resources of its mother?
You know, when my students hear of the one-drop rule, they’re amazed. Cause like… where is the one drop? Can you remove it? Why is race in your blood anyway? It’s so draconian and weird to them.
And we would never have legislation like that today because it’s not only racist, but scientifically insupportable.
And then…. wham. Suddenly the human soul resides in a fertilized egg. No wonder so many of them turn right around and mesh back in with the uterine lining.
Really? People are confused about the one-drop rule?
Hunh.
They’re confused that such thing would ever exist, for the reasons stated above. (They’re also not totally up to speed on their history, since the twentieth century was soooo long ago and one of them even wrote that the Holocaust happened a hundred years ago.)
My point is that weird legislation based on spurious and science-defying biological beliefs is supposed to be a thing of the past. And it isn’t.
… wow. That’s a bit of history-rosying that I’ve never heard before. In some ways, it’s kind of cool. (If, I’d imagine, absurdly frustrating for teachers…)
Where do they think race resides, if not in the blood?
Ah, nothing says fun like illogical strawman arguments.
So, if those fertilized eggs are people, will we each have to turn our used tampons and pads over to the Colorado government to make sure that the ones that need to be disposed of according to the laws governing the disposal of human remains are disposed of so?… Every miscarriage will have to be investigated.
Yes, just like absolutely every single death, even when obviously of natural causes, must result in a complete autopsy and accounting by the government. I mean, it’s not like they have something better to do with the funding, manpower, or anything else.
Hell, from a simple practical viewpoint, we should presume that everyone could randomly go and start killing folk with few or no legal records — there are ever so many illegal immigrants that some fascists right wing redneck obviously must be tempted to assassinate — so why not involve regular patrols of people’s homes to ensure that they couldn’t have gone on a killing spree recently.
So, a fertilized egg that attaches in a woman’s fallopian tube instead of in her uterus has, legally, as much a right to life as a fertilized egg in a uterus.
I mean, we can all imagine the jury that would convict someone for self-defense against a bad guy who stated he would knife the accused in a couple minutes, since the accused obviously could have waited a few minutes. Or the bad guy who threatened to infect someone with Ebola — after all, it would have taken weeks for that to kill you.
No, wait, I can see a DA struggling not to laugh as he or she shooed the wanna-be prosecution out the door.
Thus ends many fertility treatments in Colorado. What company is going to want the headache of working around these rules?
Single Embryo Transfer IVF methodology has been a valid technique for years, and in half of prospective mothers offers the same rate of pregnancy while dropping the risk of twins — unhealthy for both the parent and the children — to 0.
Forming the embryos will take more time, roughly 18 hours per embryo until a viable one is formed, but this type of technique is already being voluntarily used in some clinics due to the lower cost, lesser discomfort to the patient, and lower health risks. I can kinda understand this from a libertarian viewpoint, except every other part of these facilities are so heavily regulated that this is just a drop in the bucket.
Any form of birth control that prevents a fertilized egg from being attached to the uterus will be illegal. But, more importantly than that, any form of birth control that can be used to prevent a fertilized egg from being attached to the uterus would be illegal as well. So long Pill.
Likewise, this one’s about as logical as saying that, because guns can be used to kill people, they must be banned. Or anything that isn’t light and padded, for that matter.
Oh, wait, except we find someone with a legal use. Why, what are the odds.
And what if you do find evidence of some kind of negligence on her part? What if she drank like a fish before she found out she was pregnant?
If you were an idiot or an asshole, you’d report it to your superiors, who’d notice that they had about nil chance of showing mens rea or even enough evidence to establish due care, nevermind lack thereof. I’d hope that most wouldn’t, but then again, we’re talking stategov folk.
Why on earth would you craft or support legislation, or even a position, that puts women who very much want babies and but can’t carry that pregnancy to term square in the middle of your battle against abortion?
Because, despite the automatic assumption by the more flaming libertarians, not all of us expect protecting the existence of human zygotes to automatically result in some sort of fascist police state complete with flashlight and speculum following every girl after her first menses.
We don’t exactly advocate the same thing for any other form of human life. It’s just a little irritating to see people express mens rea and chat about the actus rea on an act which overwhelmingly tend to done for convenience or because others “didn’t want” it.
“Ooo. I know Latin words which I’m going to toss around so that everyone will be in awe of my big brain and maybe suck my dick while they pretend not to notice that I’m advocating a position in which we enact laws we don’t intend to enforce just so we can show those mean old feminists who’s the boss of them.”
Golly gee, you are such a big smart man! Me with my little girly brain. I’m clearly worried for no reason. Thanks for the reassurance.
Okay, I’m sorry, but this is just cracking me up! Are you really, really arguing that you just want fertilized eggs codified as legal persons so that bitches will know their places and so, if men want to, they can, on a case by case basis, decide if a woman is worthy of terminating her pregnancy?
Shee-ooot. I’ve got some readers who like to whip out patriarchal bullshit every once in a while just to see if it will float, but I don’t remember the last time I ever had someone just out and out say that, in practice, once you get your way, what will happen is that men will judge and decide for women whether or not they have babies.
I don’t know if I should be shocked or flattered. I know there are some folks floating around here from bigger blogs like Shakesville and Pandagon. Is the arrival of this kind of argument proof that I have made it as a blogger?
Should I take a victory lap?
Does this mean I get to go to BlogHer next year?
Since apparently bothering with formalities and polite text is not part of the debate here…
Are you really, really arguing that you just want fertilized eggs codified as legal persons so that bitches will know their places and so, if men want to, they can, on a case by case basis, decide if a woman is worthy of terminating her pregnancy?
Only if you can’t read fucking English. I’ve said that people might codify eggs as legal persons to put bitches (and anyone that commits a felony resulting in the death of a bitch’s fetus, or who otherwise destroys a bitch’s fetus) in their place, subject to the same arbitrary and capricious legal system as everyone else. A woman trying to figure out if she’s going to have a baby still have a hell of a good number of choices when it comes to preventing pregnancy. Even your “worst nightmare” functionally impossible points would only result in punishing those who do such an act, not preventing the damn thing (hence part of why even a majority of the antiabortion crowd wouldn’t want to touch them).
A woman choosing to terminate her pregnancy is going to find herself just as subject to the law as if she fed her son or daughter black cohosh right after the birth.
My point was that it’s quite easily to hold a view in which a human fetus is worthy of protection without having a giant and overarching police state staring up your uterus, or even hitting a single one of the list items you put in place.
And, sorry, I’m just a linksend from Saysuncle, so that’s probably only worth a cup of coffee, and only with a few quarters with it. I also didn’t state anything about my sex or gender, nor the sex or gender of any involved police officers, potential prosecutors, DAs, juries, or judges.
I thank you for responding quickly, though, even if you managed to fill more stereotypes of the unhinged and mindless “women must be able to kill a pregnancy at any moment” feminist than I fulfilled of the “men having complete control of a woman’s body” statist male.
Ah. So, your thesis is that we’re going to create (with this, you know, weak state…nothing to see here, move along) a new category of human life and recognize that it has both positive and human rights, but we’re not actually going to (nor do we intend to develop the mechanisms to, because there is no way to) competently protect those rights?
Good to know. You’ve just summed up why this is an idiotic piece of legislation. Thanks for playing.
All Say Uncle’s folks are welcome here. They just have to realize that the list of things we have in common is very, very tiny and the list of things we don’t is large and disparate.
As for how I guessed you were a man… well, it was, at first, the way you showed up here slinging legal terms like you needed to be sure we all knew where you stood philosophically and educationally. Women tend to join conversations, at least here, with “I’m just a lurker…” or “I came over here from…” They look to establish a relational reason for being here and speaking. Men, again in general, tend to establish their reason to speak through displaying their big brains.
Second, when women talk about abortion, even pro-life women, they tend to assume that the center of the abortion debate comes back around to a question of whether women should be having sex in the first place. Men tend to talk about abortions in terms of “convenience” and as if women who have abortions are somehow cheating.
Third, when you realized I was laughing at you, if you were a woman, you would have likely done one of three things: you would have immediately tried to apologize and explain yourself (again, trying to make right relations with the group) as if the problem between us was just that I didn’t understand you; you would have thought I was a huge bitch and stopped reading; or you would have gotten that I was laughing at you and made a joke in return.
But a man? Come on. Of course a man sees a woman laughing at him and assumes she’s unhinged.
there’s an interesting conundrum in gattsuru’s thinking, though.
not every law passed has to be (or even can be, but i’m ignoring that for now) enforced. in some places, there’s a cultural tradition of sorts of ignoring the “wrong” sort of laws in the “right” sort of contexts. get out into the countryside of southern Europe, or the countryside of most any continent really, and get friendly with the locals; you’ll see.
from one point of view, this is a good thing. it lets politics be played for the mindless mass entertainment it too often is; lawmakers can pass the laws they think need passing, the dogs bark, and life moves on as usual.
from another point of view, of course, it’s deeply problematic. it downright invites cronyism and the good-ol’-boy syndrome. the laws don’t get ignored equally, and social groups on the bottom of the various social ladders will tend to have the laws enforced against them to the letter, but conveniently ignored when the laws might actually help them.
to conveniently ignore a law when doing so makes life easier and hurts noone is, i think, usually the right decision. but to make a law with the tacit understanding that it will be conveniently ignored at all the right moments, that makes my skin crawl. gattsuru seems to be calling for the latter, and i very much doubt that a law so made would be good for the women who’d have to live under it.
Exactly. In the US antebellum south (with a revival after Reconstruction) incest laws were enforced only to police the monster “bad patriarch” while awarding the vast majority of white men extensive and creepy sexual property interests in their children. Peter Bardaglio’s work reveals the lasting harm that did to American southern women by driving sexual assault ever deeper into the heart of the home.
I can think of many other examples in US law. However, I can’t think of a single instance in which one of these laws didn’t operate to empower the empowerful and silence/harm those without.
Bridgett, we do not have the ability nor the capability to defend the rights of the vast majority of the population. That does not, however, make it unreasonable to recognize the rights of a group and attempt to protect them when doing so does not violate the rights of another group to a greater degree. We recognize the right of free speech for Muslim individuals, even if we can not logically protect that right to free speech perfectly.
Mrs. B, the idea that women can’t be educated enough to use, or choose to use in a discussion about the law, the terms “mens rea” or “actus rea”. There are over a quarter of a million female lawyers, and these numbers are only increasing with time. The terms are also not exactly stuff that takes passage of the bar to achieve; they’re common in most criminal law discussions, and it’s difficult if not impossible to have a discussion at volokhs without picking them up.
I’m not sure about stated reactions. They may well be cultural, or otherwise variable. My statement about being unhinged was more regarding the immediate jump from the initial discussion — the effect on this . My apologies.
As for whether abortion is a convenience or making sex less risky, I’m not sure whether all women are supposed to assume its a matter of making sex less risky, or just a pro-abortion viewpoint. I’ve seen a good few anti-abortion women put forward the convenience viewpoint, and I think it’s largely supported by the data : nearly half of all abortions in 2000 were from a pregnancy where no contraceptives were used. With the average abortion costing well over 360 USD, and the average combination contraceptive use being well, well under that for long-term contraceptives and still lesser for short-term ones… it’s difficult to say that there are not options which exist and are as available or more available.
Part of it is certainly due to issues with education; conservative areas don’t teach jack about even contraceptives that the friggen pope wouldn’t be able to whine about, and more liberal ones tend to spew out the defunct 99.99% effectiveness for spermicidal condoms (reality is 79% effectiveness for female condoms and 82% for male condoms). Both groups need to stop fooling around, especially when the right methodologies can get realistic 99%+ effectivenesses.
Nomen Nescio, I’m sorry to break it to you, but the vast majority of laws are made with the express knowledge that they will be violated in ways that can’t and/or shouldn’t be prosecuted. It’s illegal to drive without a license and insurance in most states, but we don’t see roadblocks outside every home to make sure that people don’t leave their purse or wallet at home. If you’ve ever been in an accident with someone who lacked insurance, you’ll know exactly how damaging this can be.
I don’t have as high of an opinion of the right to privacy as the Roe v. Wade era’s SCOTUS (and I still can’t figure out why that right disappears depending on the viability of the fetus outside of the womb), but I hold it in high enough regard that I’m not willing to break down every door and invade every restroom. This doesn’t automatically make way for some system of cronyism or “good ol boys” any more than laws against murder or theft do; the rights to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches exist for everyone.
Montana is trying this, too.
who decides which violations should not be prosecuted?
the people with political power and/or official status in society, of course. we all know that. we all also know that their decisions will not be objective, fair, or equitable in all cases; they will be slanted in favour of themselves and of people much like themselves. they will be slanted against people much unlike themselves, especially if such people also lack enough power, money, or influence to challenge that slant — as will usually be the case.
when you make a law knowing full well that it will not always be enforced, but will sometimes be enforced, you must keep in mind that you’ll be putting a new tool in the hands of Bull Connor’s kith. think carefully on what they might do with it, lest you become their accomplice.
laws that both can and likely will be enforced all the time, against all who violate it, may not be good ones; but they’re likely to be fair ones, or else be short-lived. the more likely a law is to be selectively ignored, the more likely that selectivity will make society less fair, less just, less equitable. do not call for such laws lightly.
it occurs to me that it’s my duty to restate the obvious.
laws giving fertilized ova status as legal persons are, of course, biased by design and from their very inception. they’ll do nothing to harm me, because i am male. the only people whose lives they might possibly affect are all women. what’s more, i can see no reasonable way they might affect anybody’s life in a positive manner; you’ll either be harmed by such a law, or unaffected.
laws which cannot possibly affect other than some one subgroup of people, by design, and then can only harm them — such laws really should be suspect on their face.
In realted news, in yesterday’s Snooze Gazette I happened to be glancing over the obituaries (why? I have no idea), and noticed one of the person’s survivors included a ‘future grandaughter’ Firstname Surname.
Oy Vey.
In other words, a woman would be legally required to carry an ectopic pregnancy as far along as possible, even at the risk of her reproductive health.
This just happened in Nicaragua, where abortion was banned entirely last year. Twenty-two year old Olga Reyes died after doctors would not perform life-saving measures after she suffered an ectopic pregnancy.
I really hate it that so many people seem to get the concept of abortion totally wrong. Abortion was not legalized because the supreme court recognized women’s rights to kill babies. Abortion was legalized because the court realized women have a legal right to privacy. If male politicians want to enact laws restricting women’s rights to make the best possible health care decisions for them, they better be prepared to go before a judge and petition when they need to undergo a vasectomy, a surgery, or even to purchase condoms.
And for all those religion pro-lifers, I dare them to show me in the bible where abortion is outlawed or even condemned. The only mention of abortion in the bible states that if a man causes a man’s wife to lose a child, he has to compensate the man for the loss of an heir. The crime isn’t an abortion, but rather denying a man the possibility of a son.
gattsuru, you’d do well to learn about Romania under Nicolae Ceausecu.
Bridgett, we do not have the ability nor the capability to defend the rights of the vast majority of the population
Come again? What does this mean? I’m not following at all.
We recognize the right of free speech for Muslim individuals, even if we can not logically protect that right to free speech perfectly.
How does one go about denying the right of free speech to Muslims…or anyone else…? Moreover, in the bizarro world where somehow, someway, the right of free speech for American Muslims has been violated…I’m pretty sure the ACLU would be alll over it. All kinds of recourse for folks whose civil rights have been violated.
Your example makes no sense.