"Personhood" doesn't apply to you, lady

That's what the Alabama Supreme Court says, and Republican "moderates" agree

Maryland Governor’s office

It’s not often that I lead with someone else’s Substack, but it’s very important that everyone understands what’s really going on with the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos of the sort used in in-vitro fertilization (IVF) are “children.” Because a lot of the coverage I’ve seen suggests that, while bizarre and not what normal people believe and another one of those crazy things Republicans in their current batshit phase are doing, the ruling only affects IVF and is basically procedural and surely saner heads will prevail so people who want babies and that’s the only way they can have them will be able to do so.

But it’s not just about people who want babies — and restricting the discussion to their (completely legitimate) concerns is a way of distracting from that. It’s also, actually mainly, about people who don’t want to have babies, or who want control over their own reproductive organs, and the people who would deny them that right.

Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day is an invaluable resource in post-Roe America and her essay on this ruling is fantastic. Read it all, but here’s the nut:

If you’re not already worried about fetal personhood, you should be. In Alabama last week, the state Supreme Court ruled that embryos are “children,” and that families whose embryos were destroyed in an accident could sue for wrongful death. The justices decided that the law “applies to all unborn children, regardless of of their location.”

If “location” wasn’t enough to send you into a tailspin, consider this assertion from Justice Jay Mitchell:

“Unborn children are ‘children’…without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics.”

ANCILLARY CHARACTERISTICS? Is that what they call women now? This has always been the danger of fetal personhood—it deprives pregnant people of their humanity.

The Alabama Supes’ decision is full of bangers — including a discussion of whether laws that apply to embryos “in utero” apply here because there is no uterus — but the language is sufficiently totalizing that anyone who believes in reproductive rights will see the danger in it:

All parties to these cases, like all members of this Court, agree that an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life begins at fertilization and ends at death. The parties further agree that an unborn child usually qualifies as a “human life,” “human being,” or “person,” as those words are used in ordinary conversation and in the text of Alabama’s wrongful-death statutes. That is true, as everyone acknowledges, throughout all stages of an unborn child's development, regardless of viability.

“As everyone acknowledges” is a key phrase. The American people continually show, in polls and at the polls, that they do not believe this. But they — we, I should say — are not part of the “everyone” the Supes refer to. We don’t count.

(Do you notice the big switch from the temporizing, opinions-vary language these people used when Roe was still in force?)

And this is the linchpin of the whole post-Roe order. Republicans frightened by adverse election results will say things they think are soothing to non-believers — but their concern is only for the short term, i.e. the next election, not the long or even the medium term. They dream and hold fire for a day when they don’t have to pander to the majority that, as the Alabama court agrees, doesn’t count.

For example, take the Republican former Maryland governor, Larry Hogan. In office he used his limited power to stop abortions. Now that he’s running for the Senate, he’s making conciliatory noises. But when the rubber meets the road — like when he’s asked whether he’ll support a state constitutional amendment protecting his constituents’ right to abortion, as other states have done — he goes homina-homina.

Understand: This is not because Hogan is genuinely conflicted or agonized or any of that horseshit he wants to convince you of. It’s because Hogan’s trying to get elected in a blue state, and all he has to work with is the formerly-operative understanding of “Republican moderate” that got him over as Governor back before Republicans ripped the mask off.

You may see that as a clumsy losing play, and I hope you’re right. But it really is all he’s got — if he went fully pro-choice he’d lose his base and his big donors. So he’s doing as much of a can’t-we-all-just-get-along shuffle as he can. He won’t promise to protect his constituents’ basic rights. But he wants them to know he deeply cares.

This is similar to what “moderate” “Trump alternative” Nikki Haley, now running for the Republican presidential nomination (or, actually, whatever she can get after the blowout or insurrection of 2024), is trying to do. Remember the horrifying Karen Cox case in Texas, when Cox had to flee the state to get an abortion that would probably save her life? Remember when a reporter asked Haley about it and, instead of saying of course she wouldn’t demand a woman bear a dead baby that might kill her because she wasn’t some kind of monster, Haley said she’d “humanize the situation and deal with it with compassion” – which pretty much means “let the bitch die so my career can live”?

Maybe you don’t remember, because the prestige press acts as if these people are sincerely conflicted rather than simply full of shit. By the way, this week they asked Nikki Haley about the Alabama decision, and she agreed with the court. She didn’t try to temporize as she had with the Cox case, and you and I know why: Because she’s hoping most people won’t realize it means she also agrees that every fertilized egg is sacred and their human incubators are nothing compared to them; and she dreams, as they all do, of they day when they can make their dark fantasy the law of the land.