BY ARGHAVAN SALLES and AMY ALSPAUGH | When does life begin? As a midwife and a physician, we know this is more a philosophical question than a medical one—and one even scientists can’t definitively answer. Nonetheless, legislators have made numerous attempts at defining and enshrining fetal personhood into law. Until this point, all such efforts have failed. The legal justification in favor of overturning Roe in the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, however, provides a path for another key goal of the anti-abortion movement: establishing fetal personhood.
A bill recently proposed in Louisiana suggests life begins at the time of fertilization. Others have argued it begins at implantation into the uterine lining. Still others say life begins at some undefined point between fertilization and birth, such as the presence of a heartbeat.
The original decision in Roe v. Wade did not attempt to define the presence or absence of personhood, but rather marked a point in time at which “the state’s interest in preserving the potential life of the unborn child overrides any individual interests of the woman.” This has been widely interpreted to mean the point at which the “unborn child” could survive independently—currently around 24 weeks of gestation, depending on many factors including access to advanced neonatal care.
These philosophical definitions of when life begins are the basis of legislators’ attempts to restrict the bodily autonomy of people who can get pregnant. Consequently, legislators—most of whom have no medical expertise and cannot get pregnant themselves—in one state could assert that life begins at fertilization, while a neighboring state could say life begins at birth.
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