Legal Voice’s senior litigation counsel, Wendy Heipt, is an expert on the topic of legal fetal personhood: the idea that every single stage of fetal life, including the collection of cells formed at conception, is entitled to all the same legal rights as already born people. Her latest article, coauthored with the O’Neill Institute, appears in the “Pregnancy and Personhood Symposia” edition of the NYU Harbinger Review of Law & Social Change. The paper shows how anti-abortion advocates have made progress in the U.S. — and how similar efforts have been struck down by international courts.
Abstract
Legal fetal ‘personhood’ is the idea that every single stage of fetal life, including the collection of cells formed at conception, is entitled to all the same legal rights as already born people.
This concept makes no legal sense, any more than saying that people that have died are entitled to all the same legal rights as people that are living. That is why international instruments, and the laws of all nations, are primarily written to lay out the rights and responsibilities of people between birth and death.
But, in an effort to both outlaw abortion health care and control the reproductive lives of women, proponents of legal fetal ‘personhood’ have used the overthrow of the national right to abortion in the United States to embark on a renewed push to establish the ‘personhood’ of fetuses, embryos, and even fertilized eggs.
These efforts are meeting with some success in a number of U.S. states, achievements that stand in stark contrast to developments in a majority of nations around the world. Internationally, courts and lawmakers are generally moving in the opposite direction —recognizing that while an embryo or fetus has value, that value is not identical to having the legal rights of the already born.
This trend can be seen in several areas related to reproductive justice, and we provide two examples of areas in which the United States is moving closer to legal fetal ‘personhood’ while other nations and international bodies are recognizing that the value of a pregnancy is not equivalent to legal personhood.
