The 50th anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion widely accessible will mark the first year since it was overturned last summer, a move that set the new legal goalpost for anti-abortion advocates on the concept of fetal personhood.
, two pregnant women sued on behalf of their fetuses, arguing the state abortion law stripped their unborn fetuses of their personhood by repealing older state laws that established human life begins at conception.
The state Supreme Court ultimately found fetuses lacked proper legal standing to bring the lawsuit. The attorney behind the Catholic organization's legal brief, Diane Magee, went back more than 200 years to the writings of the high court's fourth chief justice, John Marshall, to make her legal case for personhood.Marshall analyzed the word"person" in a federal statute and"found it to be a word of inclusion, not one of limitation." The words"'any person or persons' are broad enough to comprehend every human being," Marshall wrote at the time. Magee used Marshall's words as the legal basis for her argument that the Rhode Island Supreme Court should have included"unborn plaintiffs" in the broad category of “any person” protected by the 14th Amendment.opinion, U.S. lawmakers responded by attempting to establish fetal personhood to guarantee a right to life for the unborn, but when such legislation failed, the Republican Party shifted attention to state legislatures,to ProPublica. By 2014, 38 states had similar"fetal homicide" statutes that add additional punishments if a pregnant mother's fetus is harmed in an assault against her. Earlier this month, Virginia Del. Nicholas Freitas proposed a bill that would grant a fetus personhood to permit a pregnant driver to use the high occupancy vehicle lane.a ticket for driving in the HOV lane by herself.. The Peach State's law allows for certain rights, such as tax breaks and child support for the unborn. In 2004, Congress passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which recognizes a fetus as a legal victim in 60 listed federal violent crimes. If Congress were to establish a law saying a fetus is a person or if the Supreme Court were to one day determine a fetus is a constitutional person under the 14th Amendment, then state laws permitting abortion would be invalidated, Schultz notes.But until then, it will take various test cases and legislative bills to build a"uniform rule" before the Supreme Court could adopt new precedent for fetal protections, he said. "Once you get that in terms of the uniform rule, let's say fetal personhood, then you can start building the precedents, bringing the test cases, you do more of the HOV lanes," Schultz said."You do more in terms of saying, 'OK, how about eggs that have been artificially fertilized?' ... We can use all of these kinds of cases here to just keep building and building and building along the line."
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