The purpose of fetal personhood is to eliminate women’s rights

The Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that frozen embryos are children is, obviously, bad for anyone who wants to conceive through in vitro fertilization. It’s also bad for women who conceive the old-fashioned way.

“Could a woman who is pregnant, or could be pregnant, have a right to do things that might endanger her embryo in a situation where an embryo is her legal equal, with a claim on state protection?” Moira Donegan writes. “Could she risk this embryo’s health and life by, say, eating sushi, or having some soft cheese? Forget about the wine. Could she be charged with child endangerment for speeding? For going on a jog?”

Most definitely. As I wrote back in 2016, we’ve already seen pregnant women lose all kinds of rights: “The right not to confine herself to bed rest without a second medical opinion. To not have a Caesarian. To have a legal drink. Women have gotten into legal trouble for exercising all those rights.” More examples here.

Despite forced-birther claims they never ever want to punish the mother, some in the movement advocate for it. Some women have already been punished. Sometimes just for falling downstairs (was she trying to self-abort?).  I agree with Jessica Valenti that many conservatives know denying abortions will kill women but they’re okay with that — what mother wouldn’t do that for her child? As Echidne says, ” The right-wing in this country wants to socialize decisions about conception, about pregnancy and even about giving birth, but once a child is born, everything should be privatized:  Almost all responsibility is saddled on the shoulders of the mothers, while the wider conservative society, in general, refuses to budge one inch from its traditional gendered expectations about the role of mothers.” That includes being willing to sacrifice everything. Not just life, as Valenti says, but avoiding anything that might endanger the baby in any way.

Asserting the fetus is a child just ramps that up a notch. You wouldn’t let a mother recklessly endanger her child without consequences, right? Ergo, anything she does that harms the fetus is equally bad. For example, Kim Blalock took legal, prescribed opiates for serious pain during her pregnancy. When the kid tested positive for opiates — this is treatable and not serious — the state closed its investigation. The police started their own, using “chemical endangerment of a child,” as the charge. When they found that didn’t apply to legal prescriptions, shitbag county DA Chris Connelly accused her of falsifying her prescription — she didn’t tell the doctor she was pregnant, that’s fraud. This was bullshit (as explained at the link) and I’ll give credit to forced-birth state senator Clyde Chambliss, who stuck up for her. But the charges getting dropped doesn’t make it any more terrifying for Connelly’s victim.

And keep in mind, Connelly seems to think that Blalock’s doctor should have cut her off, regardless of the extreme pain. Apparently a good mommy would have nobly suffered excruciating pain if that’s what it took to protect her baby (from a problem that isn’t even that bad). Also keep in mind, the law was on Blalock’s side. Connelly simply found a workaround because he wanted to charge her. Like Ken Paxton threatening to prosecute doctors for giving a life-saving abortion. Or Ohio prosecutor Dennis Watkins using laws against disrespecting a corpse to punish a woman for miscarriage.

I’ve written before about how forced-birthers reduce women to aquariums. Fetal personhood is another tool to that end. In Donegan’s words, “none of the opportunities, freedoms or responsibilities of citizenship are available to someone whose body is constantly surveilled, commandeered and colonized by the state like that. No citizenship worth its name can belong to someone who cannot even wield within the bounds of her own skin. It is humiliating to even have to say this: that women matter more than fetuses or embryos, that a frozen cell in a petri dish is not a human being, but we are. It is an absurdity to make this argument, an exhausting waste of our time, a degradation. That, too, is part of the point.”

For a more detailed examination of the horror and injustice of right-to-life arguments, feel free to check out my Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers.