After the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion in its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, many anti-abortion advocates shifted their focus to a bigger battle: conferring the legal rights of a person before birth. If successful, the fetal personhood movement would go further than Dobbs. It would make abortion murder and rule out all or most exceptions.
Treating a fetus as a legal person opens up a range of questions. What if a person has a miscarriage? How does this impact IVF treatments? Would birth control still be legal? Some implications go beyond the realms of reproduction. In Georgia, a law provides pregnant people with a $3,000 tax credit per fetus and allows them to file for child support even before birth.
In this video, we explore the fetal personhood movement and its history, the constitutional argument underpinning it, and what it could mean for the future of abortion.
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- Mary Ziegler, professor at the UC Davis School of Law.
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