Editorial: ‘Personhood’ abortion laws could nix the last, most basic protection women have | Editorial

Under such a statutory scheme, abortion at any point, for any reason, would by legal definition be murder. Abortion bans would no longer allow exceptions to preserve the life of the woman, since both she and the zygote she carries would have identical legal standing. This extremist agenda isn’t some alarmist fantasy of the left but a stated goal of the anti-choice movement that, with the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade, is now being pursued by Republican politicians in legislatures and Congress.

Immediately after the Supreme Court scuttled Roe’s longstanding protections in June, Republican-controlled states began passing or activating abortion bans of varying severity. Missouri’s is one of the strictest, banning the procedure from conception, even in cases of rape or incest, unless it’s necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman.

That one exception is, so far, common to all the new state abortion restrictions — but there’s nothing in the Supreme Court’s ruling requiring it. As such, it was virtually inevitable that some in the anti-choice movement would soon begin agitating to remove exceptions that elevate the importance of the woman’s life over that of what they consider to be another person.

As The New York Times reports, conservative lawmakers in Georgia and Indiana want to make their already-strict abortion bans absolute by removing any exceptions. Georgia already has a law on the books giving tax exemptions and child-support status to fetuses. At least one similar proposal is pending in Congress. It’s a notion with obvious symbolic aims, if largely unworkable in the real world. (Are state officials charged with child-support and tax collection going to be expected to parse pregnancy test results?)

But the dangers of this mindset go far beyond bureaucratic complexity. Women with health conditions that make pregnancy inherently life-threatening — which could even include very young teenagers not physically developed enough to safely give birth — would be condemned by a legal structure that gives her no more right to live than the clump of cells in her body. Routinely used birth-control methods that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb could be criminalized. Even a lifesaving procedure like chemotherapy could be defined as murder if it interrupts a pregnancy.

Solid majorities of Americans support reasonable abortion rights, but that only matters if it translates into votes in the midterms. Only the electoral rejection of this extremism will keep women safe from an agenda that views their basic rights — and their very lives — as virtually irrelevant.