ALL YOUR BODIES ARE BELONG TO US

Republicans are finally saying it out loud — your mind and body are government property

When you first hear the term “fetal personhood” it sounds fanciful, especially when you realize it’s now being applied even to frozen embryos.

The most advanced embryo that we freeze is between 100 to 120 cells, which is known as a blastocyst. It is around 120 microns, or about a tenth of a millimeter.

Minute, invisible to the human eye. Yet today, 19 American states have some form of personhood provision in their law, according to Politico. 

So that infinitesimal clump of cells has, in many states, all the same “rights” as you and me.

The Alabama Supreme Court touched off a nationwide furor in February when it ruled that frozen, fertilized embryos legally count as “children.” The ruling upended the lives of patients undergoing IVF in Alabama and opened up a new front in the post-Dobbs battle over abortion rights. 

It also revived interest in — and concern over — so-called “fetal personhood” laws, which give fetuses, and in some cases embryos, the legal rights of a person. These laws, on the books in more than a third of states, have long worried reproductive rights advocates because they can be used to prosecute pregnant people for miscarrying or potentially for undergoing necessary medical procedures. Now some fear that the Alabama ruling could open the door to more courts applying the laws to frozen embryos, jeopardizing IVF treatments across large swaths of the country.

In practice, if embryos/fetuses have “personhood” rights, that means that women no longer do. Your rights have been abrogated and you, reduced to the status of vessel —and possession of the state. Your autonomy is gone, baby, gone. You don’t get to make decisions about your body, your family, your future. Your state’s government does. And the Republican party is working very quickly to enshrine that as federal/national law, so there will be no place in this country to escape the draconian stripping away of your own personhood.

It’s all happening so fast it’s hard to respond to…but that is the point. Like any attack in any war, it’s meant to catch you off guard and physically or psychically wound you, again and again, before you can recover.

The Idaho Republican Party expanded its anti-reproductive health efforts last week during a party convention, affirming its support for the fetal personhood ideology and proclaiming that they oppose “the destruction of human embryos,” a reference to the common practice in in-vitro fertilization treatments of creating more embryos than are needed, and discarding those that are not viable or are not used.

“We affirm that human personhood begins at the moment of conception and ought to be protected and cherished from that moment on,” the platform — obtained and published by Idaho Reports — reads. “We oppose all actions which intentionally end an innocent human life, including abortion, the destruction of human embryos, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.”

You will note that they want to control not just how you live, but how you die.

The hubris, the supercilious, condescending gall of those who believe they are entitled to pull your strings like a puppet, is rooted not in a single impulse, but in a variety of paternalistic belief systems.

Catholicism being one of the primary culprits. It is no accident that the worst offenders in the Catholic crusade to deprive women and girls of personhood — like SCOTUS justice Samuel Witchburner Alito and Republican House Speaker Holy Mike Johnson, are christian nationalist activists. What other religion in recorded history has held humans so captive to its will as Mother Church, which has been so heavily invested in controlling every single aspect of human sexuality?

The toll of this casual cruelty is rising fast.

In the wake of Texas’ abortion ban, the state’s infant death rate increased and more died of birth defects, a study published last Monday shows.

The analysis out of Johns Hopkins University is the latest research to find higher infant mortality rates in states with abortion restrictions.

The researchers looked at how many infants died before their first birthday after Texas adopted its abortion ban in September 2021. They compared infant deaths in Texas to those in 28 states — some also with restrictions. The researchers calculated that there were 216 more deaths in Texas than expected between March and December the next year.

In Texas, the 2022 mortality rate for infants went up 8% to 5.75 per 1,000 births, compared to a 2% increase in the rest of the U.S., according to the study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

Among causes of deaths, birth defects showed a 23% increase, compared to a decrease of about 3% in the rest of the U.S. The Texas law blocks abortions after the detection of cardiac activity, usually five or six weeks into pregnancy, well before tests are done to detect fetal abnormalities.

The pandora’s box of absurd consequences of “fetal personhood” is illustrated by the legal morass in Missouri. Fourteen years ago, Jalesia Kuenzel and her then-husband had created four embryos with in-vitro fertilization. Two became her sons. The other two remain frozen in a storage facility in Pennsylvania. 

She’s now re-married and wants custody of them. A Missouri court ultimately ruled the embryos were property that couldn’t be used without the consent of both Kuenzel and her ex-husband. So last year, she went to state Rep. Adam Schwadron. a Republican.

Schwadron agreed to file a bill that would require embryo custody disputes to be decided by a court in favor of the person most likely to create a child from the embryos. Similar legislation has also been filed by state Sen. Karla Eslinger, a Republican from Wasola. 

Both bills would mandate courts to presume the “best interests of the embryo” are to grant custody to the person who “intends to develop the embryo to birth.”

Personhood was written into Georgia’s abortion ban, where women can now claim a tax exemption on fetuses with a detectable heartbeat. Organizations like the American Society for Reproductive Medicine have warned that personhood laws could criminalize some contraceptives and restrict infertility treatments. 

“I see children coming into being without being wanted by one of their genetic forebearers,” Mary Beck, a law professor at the University of Missouri, said of the Missouri legislation.”

It isn’t just women who suffer from these heavy-handed and intrusive laws. Men too, can be compelled into parenthood without their consent.

In Arizona, the state’s law on child abuse applies to anyone who causes physical injury to a child “whether intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently.” The groups say that declaring a fetus a child could lead to abuse charges against women who undergo medical procedures that can harm a fertilized egg, including cancer screening or substance abuse treatment.

The state attorney general’s office argued that the fetal personhood statute created no new crimes that would lead to charges. But it acknowledged that it was “anyone’s guess” how prosecutors and courts might interpret it.

Laws identifying a fetus as a person have been used to criminalize women who use drugs. And abortion rights groups argue that establishing fetal personhood inevitably strips away the rights of a pregnant woman — her choices in a health care proxy, or about whether to have surgery, say — would have to be weighed against another equal person’s.

“Seemingly far-fetched possibilities too easily become reality,” the National Advocates for Pregnant Women declared in a report on fetal personhood last week.

These forced-birth and cellular personhood fanatics have made it plain that forcing their jackbooted knees onto our necks and jamming their religion down our throats is their “revolution.”

But in spite of, and because of, this massive infringement on our rights, we are not giving up and not going back. Maybe every 250 years we must defeat a mad king and his minions, and that time is NOW. Whoever the Dems nominate for president, I will vote for them.

Reproductive freedom measures, mostly citizen-initiated, are either already on the 2024 ballot, and sponsors are collecting or have submitted signatures for approval, in several states — including Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota. They vary, but most contain the right to abortion under many circumstances, access to contraception and protection of IVF—cutting across a wide swath of ideological divides. Mostly they can be understood to keep medical — and all private and personal decisions, in the hands of we the people, and not the government. 

Happy fourth of July — and let freedom ring.