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.

  • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    I can’t wait for someone to freeze 12 embryos and claim a few thousand in child support every month.

    “Hello IRS? I have a dozen dependant extra-uterine children, that’s cool right?”

  • 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.

            • prole@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              Huh? What do you think would happen after the first few years to change anything? We have millions of homeless people, and about half of the country don’t view those people as human. Now combine that with an entire class of uber-wealthy sociopaths who are willing to do literally anything to save themselves from an illness and/or prolong their own life…

              Throw mandatory organ donation into that pot, and baby you got a stew going… What do you think would happen in that scenario? It’s actually basic supply and demand. A massive supply of organs belonging to a group who’s seen as less than human, and a demand for new organs by the wealthy…

              I feel like that’s a recipe for something, but I just can’t put my finger on what exactly.

              Maybe you can help. What do you think is the next logical step in a situation like that? Do you think the wealthy folks suddenly change and decide to accept their mortality and donate their wealth to house those homeless people and everyone lives happily ever after? Wouldn’t that be fun?

    • 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.

      • Dupree878@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        So is shooting someone raping you and it’s still legal because you get to control what someone else does to your body.

        We cannot even harvest organs from a deceased anonymous person without their permission. A corpse has more body autonomy than a woman