13 Things Every Woman Should Know About Personhood
If you’ve been watching the news in the last year, and especially in the last month as the midterm elections get closer, you may have noticed the word “personhood” popping up a lot. At first glance, it seems pretty self-explanatory. You know what a person is, right? Your friends, families, significant others, school and work colleagues — all people. But what does the term mean in the political context? Why are so many legislators talking about “personhood” and what a person is? And what does that have to do with your everyday life? Personhood could actually have a huge impact on your reproductive and medical choices. Here’s why it’s so important to understand the issue.
1. Personhood is a political push to create a standard, legal definition of “person,” which would begin when an egg is fertilized by sperm and end when the last breath is taken. The anti-abortion activists who support it hope to challenge Roe v. Wade by getting the Supreme Court to rule that a person is legally defined as existing from the moment of conception. The language comes from Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who stated that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause does not refer to the unborn because they are not legally people. “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment,” Blackmun wrote in Roe v. Wade.
2. If a personhood amendment passed, abortion would be outlawed. Because a person would be defined from fertilization to last breath, any harm caused to that “person” would be considered a crime. That obviously includes abortion, but medical professionals also worry that personhood could mean they’d have to withhold care until a patient’s life is truly in danger so they don’t accidentally do something seen as causing the death of an embryo or fetus, which could be considered murder or manslaughter.