In the nearly 40 years since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Congress and State governments have chipped away at women’s rights to control their pregnancies. Restrictions on women’s health services have focused primarily on limiting abortion rights but other fertility control technologies like tubal ligations have been restricted by some health providers.
The most recent attempt by government officials to control a woman’s pregnancy is to declare a fertilized egg a person. These “personhood” laws would most certainly limit, if not ban, abortions, IUDs, and many birth control pills that work by not allowing fertilized eggs to implant in the uterus.
Numerous States and all Republican Presidential candidates have endorsed “personhood” laws. While the wording of these laws vary, all define a single fertilized human egg, or zygote, as having the rights of multi-celled, living and breathing humans. For example, Oklahoma’s Senate Bill 1433 defines a person as beginning at conception and “at every stage of development (has) all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”
But should all “potential people,” zygotes and fetuses, have a legal right to be born and become persons as we have historically conceptualize a person? To better think about the implications of expanding personhood rights, let me introduce you to three such zygotes and their families.
Zygote A resides in Alice’s womb. Alice was recently widowed at 39 when her husband we killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Her oldest of four children is about to enter college. Zygote A was not created her loving late husband but by a violent rapist.
Zygote B resides in Becca’s womb. With a family history of genetic diseases, Becca had the fetus tested. Unfortunately, Zygote B is destined to die an early horrible death.
Zygote C resides in Cory’s fallopian tube. After first learning of her pregnancy, Cory was thrilled as she lost two previous pregnancies. But this ectopic pregnancy is a serious threat to her health and possibly her life.
How might a personhood amendment impact these zygotes and families?
Does Zygote A have a right to be born? It isn’t the Zygote’s fault fertilization resulted from violence not love.
But pregnancy can be rough for a 40 year old, especially when she has four living fatherless children to support. Will the costs associated with carrying the fetus to term cause her to miss work? Will her oldest need to delay college or attend a less expensive school?
What about Alice’s right to privacy? Pregnancy is not easily hidden. While the rape is not her fault, at least in the eyes of most, it’s not something she wants to discuss with others.
Hopefully, the rapist will be brought to justice. But what would be his parental rights be? Would Alice be obligated to take the child to the penitentiary of visitation? Will the State reimburse Alice for expenses incurred by these visits?
None of these issues are covered in the personhood laws. It gets even more complicated for Zygotes B and C.
Unlike Alice’s pregnancy, Zygote B will not be born healthy but die within two years. Should the Affordable Care Act, referred to as Obamacare, be repealed, insurance companies will be able to deny coverage on the grounds of preexisting conditions. Becca and her husband will be saddled with huge medical bills for a child who will never be able to play a musical instrument, participate in sports, or even walk or control its bladder or bowls. This burden hinders Becca and her husband from trying for a healthy child, a “potential person” who will not even make it to the zygote stage.
Cory’s pregnancy raises more ethical and economic issues. While there are a few documented cases of mothers delivering live ectopic babies by caesarian, odds are that nature/God will abort it. If not, she will most likely have a medical abortion to protect her own health, if not life itself. Personhood laws do not include guidelines how we might balance Cory’s health concerns and the fetus’s right to be born.
Another question not addressed by the personhood laws is the impact it might have medical research funds. If zygotes and fetuses are now people, should we expend public funds to prevent misarranges in general? Estimates are that half of all human conceptions end in miscarriages or spontaneous abortions. In some cases, the women merely reabsorb their fetuses in the early stages of development. It is not clear why women reabsorb or miscarry their fetuses, but speculation is that these fetuses might have a genetic abnormality or the woman might have a condition that carrying the pregnancy to term would harm her.
We have a long history of allocating funds for diseases that take human lives - small pox, polio, and AIDS to name just a few. We legislate speed limits, ban driving while drinking, and require costly seat belts and air bags to reduce traffic deaths. We limit toxic substances in food, air, and the workplace. Following that logic, legislatures could conclude that they could legislate behavioral constraints and allocate public tax monies to protect the health and safety of their youngest citizens, zygotes.
Should we allocate funds to “save” the 4 million unborn we lose each year from miscarriages, reabsorption, and ectopic pregnancies? To protect these most vulnerable “people,” might doctors be required to report pregnancies to local police? Should zygotes be assigned a case worker from child protective services? Would incarceration be a proper response for women who abuse a zygote or fetus’s environment with alcohol or tobacco smoke?
Will an enterprising lawyer be able to sue on behalf of a zygote whose mother smokes tobacco or drinks alcohol? Tobacco junkies lower their offsprings’ IQ by an average of 3-points and they suffer from more medical problems. Alcohol abuse can leave the child with serious brain damage.
Some might object that monitoring and incarcerating pregnant women is extreme, but if we are serious about protecting zygotes and fetuses such measures might be needed in extreme cases where pregnant women refuse to obey the law.
Finally, at the risk of being accused of promoting eugenics, traveling down the “personhood” road will harm the gene pool and increase medical costs. Assuming scientists are correct that most miscarriages are of fetuses with genetic defects, research to save those nature/God is discarding might not be a wise use of medical resources.
More immediate will be the impact of genetic tests that have proven successful in reducing inherited genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs. These children usually die by age four after becoming blind, deaf, and unable to swallow. Using Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) there has been a dramatic reduction in the number infants born with Tay-Sachs and other genetic disorders that have plagued the Jewish community.
In this procedure, the mother’s eggs are fertilized with the father’s sperm in a test tube. After the fertilized eggs divide three times into an 8-celled embryo, doctors take one cell from each embryo to test for genetic diseases. If it is disease free the 7-celled embryo is implanted and hopefully produces a normal baby. Seven celled embryos are just as likely as 8-celled embryos to result in a healthy live birth.
As it turns out, dividing embryos has a scientifically interesting outcome that a personhood amendment would complicate. When we divide 8-celled embryos in any manner - 7 & 1; 6 & 2; 5 & 3; or 4 & 4 - each of the two parts will develop into a normal human. So, that one cell they now destroy to test for disease is technically a potential human being and genetic twin of its 7-celled counterpart, something these laws say you cannot destroy. And what about the 7-celled genetically defective embryos? Can they be discard or must it be kept frozen for decades or centuries until science is able to fix the defect?
Did you know there are currently over 500,000 frozen embryos in the U.S. alone? The “parents” of those embryos can thaw them, take a blow torch to them, or flush them down the toilet. The only thing they cannot do with their discarded embryos is give them to a scientist to study. Would a personhood amendment require they pay month freezer fees to keep the embryos alive? Might they be required to implant the defective embryos and try to carry them to term?
Like the unintended consequences of corporate personhood, we have not thought through the implications of zygote personhood. Should all fertilized eggs have a legal right to be born? Could legislatures grant a zygote the legal right to occupy a woman’s womb for nine months? Are we really prepared to force a woman to carry a fetus who will die young, bankrupt the family and leave no grandchildren?
Data from the 2010 General Social Survey (GSS) finds half of Democrats but only a third of Republicans favor allowing women to abort for any reason. However, Americans of all political persuasions overwhelmingly support the right of the three women discussed above to abort the fetuses they carry.
Eighty percent, including 71% of Republicans, think Alice should be able to abort the rapist’s fetus. Seventy-five percent, including 65% of Republicans, think Becca fetus carrying a genetic defect. And 87%, including 81% of Republicans think Cory should be able to abort the fetus that seriously threatens her health.
None of the personhood laws, as currently written, deal with these situations.
Before we grant every zygote a legal right to be born, we need to seriously consider the consequences. How will these laws will impact the legal rights of living breathing people? What impact will they have on the society at large?