For those who have not already read elsewhere, North Dakota’s legislative House today passed a bill that would grant personhood, and the rights that go with it, to fertilized eggs.
A measure approved by the North Dakota House gives a fertilized human egg the legal rights of a human being, a step that would essentially ban abortion in the state.
The bill is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that extended abortion rights nationwide, supporters of the legislation said.
Representatives voted 51-41 to approve the measure Tuesday. It now moves to the North Dakota Senate for its review.
The bill declares that “any organism with the genome of homo sapiens” is a person protected by rights granted by the North Dakota Constitution and state laws.
The bill’s sponsor, Dan Ruby, is clearly talking out both sides of his mouth. Because while in the article linked above he takes pains to note that the bill does not explicitly and directly outlaw abortion, he notes in this article that outlawing abortion and directly challenging Roe is precisely the point of the bill’s chosen language.
For arguments about why granting full rights to fertilized eggs is not only a really bad idea on the basis of pro-choice and feminist beliefs, but also really stupid in a general sense too, see this post by Jill.
I would, however, just like to add that the language of this bill is also a direct challenge to contraception as well as abortion, since non-barrier methods of contraception are believed to maybe cause fertilized eggs to fail in attaching themselves the uterine wall. I’d also like to add that since that attachment to the uterine wall is the only real way that we are currently able to identify pregnancy, and therefore how we define it, this bill would also give these fertilized eggs rights from before the moment at which we are currently able to scientifically prove that they even exist. Just wrap your head around that one.
I haven’t found any information yet on specific actions that you can take if you’re in North Dakota to help to stop this bill before it gets any further. Once/if I do, I’ll post it at the time.
Similar Posts:
- Dear Rep. Franklin: I submit my used tampon as evidence. by Jill February 25, 2011
- North Dakota Senate Passes New Infantalizing Anti-Choice Legislation by Cara February 23, 2009
- I think it’s about time we started protecting the innocent, adorable spermies by Jill November 15, 2007
- More Ballot Updates: No on Prop 4 by Cara October 28, 2008
- South Carolina Tries to Further Restrict Abortion Access by Cara January 28, 2009
Does this mean that a woman who is caught seeking abortion or taking the morning after pill could be arrested on murder charges? This is chilling.
Obviously the social/legal implications of this are terrible, but I am laughing my *ass* off at the bad science. “…any organism with the genome of homo sapiens”? Seriously? OH GOD I TOTALLY PUT A HUMAN GENE IN SOME BACTERIA THEN LYSED THEM I AM A KILLER!!1one!
And even assuming they mean the *whole* genome, how’s that work out for people with genetic problems? “I’m sorry but your kid is missing the CFTR gene — no rights for her!” And how the *hell* do they think they are defining “organism”? Single-celled? Multicellular? Self-sufficient (so not an obligate parasite like the early stage fetus? :p)
And can multiple gametes add up to a person? Like, if you ovulate 1 egg it’s okay ’cause that’s only *half* the genome, but if 2 get flushed out with your period YOU ARE A MURDERER??!
I work in the only abortion clinic in North Dakota. Currently we are trying to see what our options are. The North Dakota Senate is not in session right now.
This bill is really scary. It was completely under the radar. It seems like no one knew about it until it was too late. We at the clinic are nervous, but are still working just as hard to provide this service. Since we are the only clinic in the state, women travel for hours to have abortions. We have to fly our doctors in because all the local hospitals and clinics make their doctors sign contracts that they will not preform abortions. I am worried about our future whether this law passes the senate or not.
Define the “human genome”.
Because we all have exactly the same genes, amirite?
So, unless I’m getting my biology wrong, this bill means that all women in North Dakota could be charged as mass murderers, for flushing away a fertilized egg once a month during their period.
… right?
God, I wnat to head desk so hard, but I might crack the cheap balsa wood my desk is made of.
So . . . no more fertility clinics for North Dakota?
[...] Cara also talks about this bill, and links back to this post by Jill, which is a favorite of mine on this issue of granting full personhood to embryos or blastocysts. Pro-lifers claim to value each and every human life, from the moment of conception. That’s why, they say, they want abortion to be illegal — because it kills a person. And there are indeed a lot of abortions. But the abortion rate pales in comparison to the rate of fertilized eggs that don’t implant and “die” by being naturally flushed out of the body. Yet there is not a single pro-life organization (at least that I can find) dedicated to finding a solution to this widespread, deadly epidemic. The “death rate” of unimplanted fertilized egg-persons almost certainly far exceeds the abortion rate and the death rate from AIDS combined. Why the silence? Why no mass protests or funding drives or pushes for research?* Where is the concern for the fertilized egg-people? [...]
Of course, as someone already pointed out on Pandagon, the supporters of this bill are correct when they deny that this bill would ban abortion — no human has a right to live entirely within the body of another human, suck out its vital nutrients, etc.
FWIW, though, the egg you flush out in a period generally isn’t fertilized (though it can be).
Of course, what happens in the case of cancer — depending on how you define “human genome”, cancers, which are pretty much “independent” have human genomes. Oops … treating cancer is murder?
Meabsolutely… wow. Hang in there.
AWESOME. So…if I transfer my one remaining frozen embryo to North Dakota, we can claim it as a dependant on taxes?
That would be wicked cool.
All other intended uses for this law are full of suck, though. Honestly, what’s next? Outlawing (male) masturbation? Requiring that women be inseminated monthly, lest they waste teh preshuss egg?
Oh, and if a pregnancy requires bed rest, does that mean you can sue the fetus for lost wages? Could you sue for pain and suffering if the birth was less than orgasmic? How would that work, exactly?
Can embryos vote? Can they hold property? Can they be called for jury duty? Can they legally sign a contract?
I would love to hear the supporters of this bill answer these questions. I mean, they’re stupid questions, but it’s a stupid bill, too. Gah.
As an aspiring geneticist and someone who is strongly pro-choice, I’m deeply disturbed by this law. Not only does it cross the line between pro-life legislation and anti-contraceptive laws, but it basically excludes North Dakota from any future in in-vitro or genetic engineering. How can a couple be legally allowed to undergo in-vitro if there is a chance that they will not use all of their embryos? Will the law also suggest that such a treatment is immoral, as it risks the death of an artificially implanted embryo?
This is very disturbing. I mean, as I am pregnant now, this logic could find me guilty of attempted murder if I do something, even unknowingly, that is harmful to my fetus. I just don’t understand a country so caught adamant on giving rights to unborn fetuses when it doesn’t even give it’s actual taxpaying, hardworking citizens the basic human right of free healthcare. I don’t mean to sound as though I’m wavering from the topic here but I’ve definitely noticed now more than ever that the fetus seems to be more important than even your own life. I don’t want to hear anymore of it, because if that fetus with all its rights comes in to the world homosexual, any other race than white, or poor, nobody will give a crap about its rights.
HeLa? Fucking HELA CELLS have “the legal rights of a human being”?
I look forward to hearing of women being prosected on manslaughter charges for miscarriage.
Seriously, WTF.
Best of luck, ‘Meabsolutely’. You’re a brave, wonderful person for continuing to do what you do.
Though I think when it comes down to it, what we’ve learned is that Dave Barry was absolutely right about North Dakota all along. :(
I really feel for all of the poor, *fully human!!* women this will hurt. And I truly hope no other state decides to use this a precedence. We need a federal law guaranteeing women equal constitutional rights and bodily autonomy–in a way that fundamentalist asshats can’t mess with at their leisure.
People may be interested in Toby Ord’s article in the America Journal of Bioethics, which points out exactly why this is a stupid illogical thing to do.
http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/scourge.pdf
Judging by the NY Post cartoon that is the subject of the previous post, I would suspect that the mentality of too many people in this country is still such that they would not consider HeLa cells to have a human genome based on a little something about the skin coloration of the late Mrs. Lacks.
Witness, for example, how the forced-birth crowd has gone after a woman for giving birth to octuplets even as they celebrate the Duggarseses.
“Can embryos vote? Can they hold property? Can they be called for jury duty? Can they legally sign a contract?”
Children can do none of those things. Nor can immigrants who have entered the country illegally.
Right-wingers are very selective about who they choose to consider humans.
What a smart step to take at a time when states barely have the money to pay their employees. Now they want to monitor every ND woman’s uterus and bathroom wastebaskets on a monthly basis to ensure they’re not “murderers.” GAH!
Cara,
I don’t believe that your hyper-vigilance in policing, and then deleting my rather innocuous comment – which challenged only an ill-fated line of argument – buttresses the merits of your position. It simply makes you appear silly, if only to yourself and me.
I live in North Dakota. I have been trying to process this for two days, but so far my only response is Fuck.
It doesn’t help that my best friend since kindergarten is a “pro-life” activist. So, the inevitable public protest I will have to make — letter to the editor, letters to legislators, etc. — is going to start one hell of a shitstorm with her. Loving people who are different from you is hard.
Anyway. As of right now I have no coherent plan, just… disappointment and sadness and anger and fear for the future.
Fuck.
Featherstone, if you use the word “illegals” here, your comment will indeed be deleted. Period. I don’t care how “silly” you think that is, because it’s not going to change.
[...] commentary here, here and [...]
I know exactly what I’d like to do. The bill is going to the ND Senate (it was only passed in the house). If someone would PLEASE give me the stupid number of the bill (which I cannot seem to find anywhere, even on the ND legislative site), I would probably be sending emails to friends and my senators (who, alas, probably will not listen to me given they’re pro-life).
the decision in Roe v Wade balances the health of the mother with the viability of the fetus
1. the abortion decision is a privacy issue
2. science, philosophy, theology cannot agree on when life begins, and the court isn’t about to make a definitive statement about it — but, as the fetus approaches viability, the state can increasingly regulate abortion
3. even if life begins at conception, the state cannot override the interests of a pregnant woman to preserve it. first term abortions have a lower mortality rate than childbirth. the state can’t require women to risk their lives in order to protect potential life.
that’s all i got
“Featherstone, if you use the word “illegals” here, your comment will indeed be deleted. Period. I don’t care how “silly” you think that is, because it’s not going to change.”
Because you similarly addressed the preceding post with substantially similar nomenclature, yes?
I apologize for being inappropriately and boorishly ‘citizenist’ or whatever the hell the correct newspeak happens to be.
Would you like to point me to the comment where someone else referred to undocumented immigrants as “illegals”? Because I’m not finding it, and yes I would treat it similarly if in moderation, and would call it out if it had already gone through. As it stands, I see a comment that references “immigrants who entered the country illegally.” Which refers to actions, and is head and shoulders above referring to human beings as “illegals.”
Now stop derailing the thread. Which is, if you haven’t noticed, about a bill that would give fertilized eggs more human rights than most humans have.
So if my body chooses to miscarry for whatever reason, I can be charged for murder?
I’d really like to see men prosecuted for reckless abandonment when they ejaculate unused sperm. Oh wait! That’ll never happen. Because everyone knows that’s an accident.
If this isn’t a good excuse for a statewide realtime production of Lysistrata, I haven’t seen one. Why doesn’t anyone implement a useful bill-like forbidding all men to go out between the hours of 9 p.m. and 9 a.m? (That would actually make a huge difference in crime)
The bill declares that “any organism with the genome of homo sapiens” is a person protected by rights granted by the North Dakota Constitution and state laws.
Do they have any idea just how stupid this bill really is? Because you know what has a “human genome”? Cancer cells! That’s right, if this thing passes cancer treatment will be illegal in North Dakota. In fact, it will be murder. Oh, crap, I just realized, it’s worse than that: read loosely, it could make any surgery illegal. Removing an inflammed appendix? Not so fast. It’s got 46 chromosomes you know…They just made all surgery illegal! As well as, um, digestion: intestinal lining cells drop off into the intestinal lumen all the time. Know what happens to them then? Your body treats them like any other source of protein and carbohydrates. And after a little cannibalism, what do you do with what’s left of the bodies? FLUSH! How impolite.
Ok, so you might get away with declaring organs as not separate “organisms” so lacking human rights. But I think the cancer thing is pretty unavoidable: it’s a clearly genetically separate entity (but with recognizably human genes) which is being killed in therapy. Guess North Dakotans with cancer are just out of luck.
Featherstone: Whining about the injustice of being moderated on a private blog, and then arguing about whether you were whining, doesn’t buttress your argument. It makes you look like a petulant child with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. This is doubly true when you were in clear violation of the stated rules and the blog in question has an unusually accommodating moderation policy.
tl;dr: Show some fucking grace.
If someone would PLEASE give me the stupid number of the bill (which I cannot seem to find anywhere, even on the ND legislative site)
The bills name is HB 1572.
There is one major flaw in your observation: logic. The people pushing and supporting this bill know damn well that its a back door to an abortion ban and will enforce it as such. Logic and internal consistency don’t factor into the discussion at all. They figure that no one is going to use this bill to arrest cancer patients for murder (because that would be fringe-y and extreme, I imagine) but at the same time they don’t specifically mention fetuses so maybe it has a chance to make it by a sympathetic judge.
Also, I’d strongly suggest refusing to use the phrase “recognizably human” in any discussion with folks who invoke Dred Scott with the intent of restricting bodily sovereignty and civil rights.
“We will do what is possible to prevent publishing comments that are racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, or transphobic.”
Gee golly William, I’m just not seeing it. But thanks for beating your presumably burly chest in defense of the imperiled damsels in distress, it looks to be quite a habit.
OMFG, what a bunch of wingnuts.
These people have a religious and ocial agenda. The don’t really believe a clump of cells is a real person with full rights of personhood.
How do we know they’re lying? Because not a single one of them would risk like and limb to run into a burning fertility clinic to save a petri dish full of blastocysts.
This is horrible and stupid and confounding.
So, IVF embryos. Say we leave them for 18 years. Can we then draft them to serve in the military? How will they vote? What about teratomas?
One thing this convinces me of is that we need to improve our science education.
[...] human rights to fertilized eggs has incredibly dangerous consequences and raises some pretty tough questions. Let’s hope the North Dakota Senate rejects the amendment and that the [...]
The fine damsels here at feministe are more than capable of defending themselves, though I’m not quite sure you rise to the level of imperiling. I do find it interesting that you perceived being dismissively called out on etiquette and a lack of grace as chest beating. I wonder why you seem to feel the need to steer an interaction in that directions. You did the same thing with Cara, incidentally; you behaved in a provocative manner that you should have known would be corrected and then you chose to interpret that correction as an act of aggression. Moreover you tried to paint yourself as the mature victim set upon by immature attackers. You then argued that the corrections you experienced were the result of other’s insecurity, implying that they were not only immature, out of line, and wrong but also weak (meaning you’re strong).
Another ND resident here–I never knew there were so many ND feminists on the interwebs!
Anyway, I’ve emailed my state senator, which is about all I can do. I’ve told Mr. A. that if this passes, we are moving across the river to Minnesota, lease be damned. If the idiots in the legislature can make a bill that’s pretty much scientifically indecipherable, I have no doubt that they lack the scientific understanding to understand that hormonal BC poses no danger to our new “citizens.”
ND has population problems as it is. Do they really think that this sort of legislation is going to *attract* the young workers and professionals that they need? My eyes hurt from rolling so hard.
Something that could be used to attack the bill on legal grounds is the scientific definition of organism. In my undergrad biology classes, an organism is usually held to be something that is self-sufficient. For example, we were taught that viruses aren’t ‘organisms’ because they need to infect a cell to replicate. Under this definition, a fetus isn’t an organism until it is self-sufficient, or able to survive outside the womb.
[...] and a job to obtain and/or keep. Unless of course they’re “recession proof.” Women’s fertilized eggs move closer to recognition as full people. [...]
The bill is House Bill 1572. Get yourself organized to present testimony on this bill when it comes to the Senate for committee hearing. Some women are organizing through the North Dakota Women’s Network and others. Bring your arguments to the floor of the North Dakota Legislature, which is comprised of mostly old, Medicare-eligible, men. There are a few token women, but very few and intimidation runs deep up there. Your help is needed. Start complaining where you get results. It does no good to fight with people quoting bible verses they believe support no abortions. Let’s get positive here and get something done. This bill must be defeated in the Senate. Help!!!
Update on House Bill 1572. The ND Senate referred this anti-abortion bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearing should be coming up any minute. The Judiciary Committee Chairman is Dave Nething a Republican from Jamestown, ND. He has been in the Senate since 1966. His e-mail is dnething@nd.gov. It would be appropriate to send him an e-mail to find out when he is setting this Bill for hearing.
Good news! Via Pandagon comes news that the bill has been defeated in the North Dakota Senate 29-16!