Mary Ziegler:
Well, the common denominator is really a claim that, at the moment of fertilization, there is a separate, whole, unique human being, and that, as a result of this biological status, that person should have constitutional rights.
At the moment in the United States, there’s a lot more debate about what it means to enforce that concept of personhood. In other words, what does it mean to do justice to this fetus or unborn child? The general consensus in the anti-abortion movement is that it requires, at the moment, some form of criminalization, whether criminalization of the person who performs an abortion, criminalization of people who assist in abortion, maybe criminalization of the disposition of embryos after IVF or even the storage of embryos after IVF.
But there’s debate on the margins about almost everything else. For example, one of the most prominent debates we have seen break out this year even is a debate about whether abortion seekers or women themselves should be punished for abortion.
There are disagreements about IVF too, disagreements about contraceptives too. So what personhood actually requires in the real world, rather than kind of in more abstract terms being about who has rights, is something that we have seen really come to the fore now that fetal personhood is no longer a distant dream, but something the movement’s trying to realize in the shorter term.
