So…the women’s movement got set back by half a century in the last year or two! That was a thing we all got to witness!
I mean, I shouldn’t make light of it, but what else can you do? Freaking Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are following right along in Scalia’s train of thought, who argued women weren’t guaranteed rights in the Constitution, so all of this was just noise.
I mean, women have been saying for years this was the end-game and they were going to roll back rights and we were told we were hysterical and over-emotional.
SO. WEIRD.
It’s like when women or People of Color are afraid of dire consequences the white patriarchy belittles and gaslights them until they don’t know which way is up, so when the dire consequences DO happen, so not only is it a surprise, it’s even MORE of an emotional blow.
No, this doesn’t sound like psychological warfare at all.
Sound extreme? Think I’m being irrational?
Funny, that’s just what we were told when we said that our FUNDAMENTAL LIBERTIES WERE IN JEAPORDY.
Okay. Let’s talk about Alabama (and really, Florida and Texas and pick your red hellsllcape).
First off, let’s get into specifics. Not everybody really knows about what this most recent case entails. Most people have just seen the memes. So let me give you this summary from The John Hopkins School of Public Health:
In this case,
The plaintiffs are three couples who all underwent IVF treatment at a fertility clinic in Alabama. Through the IVF treatment they received, they all became pregnant and gave birth to healthy babies.
As a result of the IVF treatments, they also produced a number of additional embryos—this is standard procedure in an IVF cycle. Those additional embryos that were not used were frozen and preserved by the fertility clinic. The presumption is that the couples could come back at some later time and have another IVF cycle using these embryos without having to again go through the hormonal treatments and surgeries.
What happened next is what gave rise to this case. The plaintiff couples’ frozen embryos had been cryo-preserved at the fertility clinic, which is located within a hospital. In December 2020, a patient of that hospital entered the fertility clinic’s cryo-preservation unit and opened one of the tanks in which frozen embryos are stored. These embryos are stored at sub-freezing temperatures, so when the patient put his hand in and grabbed some of the embryos, he burned himself and dropped the embryos, which hit the ground and were destroyed.
The plaintiff couples brought lawsuits against the fertility clinic and the hospital. One of the lawsuits is for negligence and wantonness, but that wasn’t part of this case. The other lawsuit—the one that’s the subject of this case—was against the hospital and the clinic for the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, which is an Alabama statute. At the trial court, this case was dismissed; the trial judge stated that embryos that exist in vitro are not people or children for the purposes of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, and therefore there was no claim that the couples could bring under that act.
The couples appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of Alabama, the highest court in the state. The Supreme Court disagreed and, in a nutshell, said that the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act does apply. This is a brief quote: “to all unborn children without limitation. And that includes unborn children who are not located in utero at the time they are killed.” So in fact, the Alabama Supreme Court determined that these in vitro embryos are declared personhood, so they are children or people, and the couples can therefore proceed with their lawsuit. They are seeking punitive damages for what they say is the wrongful death of their children.
THIS is why everybody is freaking out.
If embryos created in the IVF process are “minors,” then they can’t be destroyed. Because that would legit be murder. And if you define an embryo as a minor then IVF really can’t happen because multiple embryos are always produced even though most are never used.
This is a real sticking point for the pro-life movement. If embryos are people, then abortion is murder. But then so is this infertility treatment.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that when getting rid of embryos is helpful to poor people or People of Color or unmarried women, it is murder, and you should be charged with a crime for it. When it is to help rich white people have kids – no problem!
Unless you’re the Alabama Supreme Court who said, “burn it all down!” and declared that embryos created during IVF were minors and destroying them was murder, thereby pissing off every suburban mom over 40 in the nation. A group the GOP is desperately trying to win back right now.
At the heart of this, for many people, is the question of whether an embryo is “alive.”
I don’t think that’s a good question.
Because the truth is, SOMETHING is alive at every stage. There are living cells involved all along the way. NOBODY is denying that. But that is very different from whether the embryo is a person. And I think the question we should be asking isn’t so much “is it alive?” but about personhood. “Is it a person?”
Personhood is a wildly different question.
Now, historically we are not particularly good at answering this question. We spent 400 years denying the personhood of Black people because it conveniently supported the cotton trade. And I am very confident in saying that was wrong. But maybe we can be better about it this time around.
So, what is a person?
In the ideal, a person has agency, and can act of their own volition. They can think for themselves and move and act in this world according to their own will. A person can take care of themself and make their own decisions.
That sounds great, but anyone with half a heart can see that this definition is problematically ableist and denies personhood to people who are in situations where they are stripped of their agency because of oppression, poverty, or some other institutional or human means.
Okay, so let’s try again.
A person can understand their situation (as much as they are able). We will draw from other philosophers who have said a person is conscious over a period of time and is able to perform complex adaptive behavior. A person has wants and needs and understands those to be the case.
That’s better, but maybe not exactly right?
The truth is, we could work all day on a definition of “person,” and we would never quite be satisfied with what we came up with. I know that because philosophers have been arguing for thousands of years over the definition and haven’t settled on anything that makes everybody happy yet, so I’m probably not going to do in the next few minutes.
Aristotle described “people.” I mean, he thought in stereotypes. For example, he said the young have strong but changeable passions. They are quick tempered and lacking in self-control, and this makes them all the more likely to yield to their passions. They are eager for superiority and easily feel slighted.
But that doesn’t tell us too much about what it means to be a person.
You could think about it in terms of sign/signifier/signified. The signifier is the word “person,” the signified is the concept of the person…but that doesn’t do a lot to define anything.
But what I DO know, is that regardless of what definition you come up with, it almost always applies more directly to a woman than an embryo.
Women, or sadly as is too often the case, teenage or young girls, are people, or persons. And the problem with these laws is that they give personhood to embryos and strip that from people who obviously have it.
And I don’t think the right understands that THAT is what we are mad about. LIFE isn’t the issue. It’s about PERSONHOOD.
Women have been clamoring to be acknowledged as people for SO long. And these laws elevate the autonomy of something that doesn’t have consciousness, agency, or adaptability above us. Of course, if you don’t see women as people to begin with, that wouldn’t strike you as a problem.
Susan B. Anthony once asked, “Is it a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?” The whole speech was based on a basic syllogism:
Major premise: U.S. citizens have the legal right to vote.
Minor premise: I am a U.S. citizen.
Conclusion: I have the right to vote.
It seems so simple, but it was so radical at the time. It was illegal for women to vote, but Anthony was arguing that her value as a citizen gave her the right, just as it did for men, the right to vote. All she was demanding was the same recognition and acknowledgment that men got for occupying the exact same position in society.
Anthony wasn’t saying, “Look at me, I’m special!” And she certainly wasn’t saying, “Women are different!” She was saying, “All citizens should be treated the same under the law.” Women are asking for the same, now.
Compare that to Sojourner Truth’s poignant question to the white women of Akron in 1851, when she asked “Ain’t I a Woman?” Truth stood in front of the crowd and bared her body and said her arms and back bore the marks of hard work and mistreatment – but was she not a woman like the rest of them? Did she not deserve to be treated with dignity and respect?
These questions are STILL at the heart of what women are asking the public today. Are we not citizens? Are we not women? Are we not people?
And what women understand, but what I guess the GOP doesn’t, is that these are really painful questions. It hurts to have to ask whether you count. It really hurts to have to ask when you are a person or whether your citizenship or your humanity amounts to anything. And to have to ask it for generation after generation – that is painful in ways that these men in power just don’t get.
And I’m not interested in getting into the oppression Olympics, here. Women are not the only group who feel this way. But we DO feel this way.
And the juxtaposition is particularly hurtful. Women, and girls, are fully realized. We understand our world. We can make decisions (supposedly). We respond to our contexts. We think. We love. We get angry. We have friends. Sometimes we have enemies. We have lovers. We eat. We bleed. We do all of these things that mark us as human – and specifically mark us as people. These are the things that make up a person – that allow us to build societies and civilizations. Villages, which became cities, which eventually became the people we are today, are built upon these capabilities.
And we can do all of these things! But an embryo cannot. So I think it is particularly hurtful when an embryo is granted rights that we are not. Because we have the ability to build civilizations. Women have the ability to ask for their rights. To demand to be treated equally. To insist upon our agency. To ask to be treated in a human way.
And we are. We’re asking to be treated in a human way. And when the answer is, “No, you don’t get to be a person, but this collection of cells does,” that isn’t just hurtful, it’s enraging.
And that’s, I think, the disconnect between the far-right and the majority of American voters. The question isn’t about life. The question is about personhood. And most Americans at this point pretty much agree that women are, on some level, people. But these laws and these decisions are making it abundantly clear that those on the right do not agree.
That’s a fast way to lose support.
So don’t bother getting into an argument over what is alive and when. Cells are alive. Period. But the question of whether a collection of cells is a person is a completely different issue.
Sojourner Truth’s question of “Ain’t I a Woman?” was specifically about the experience of Black women, slaves to be precise, in America in the 19th century. Were not Black women, ALSO women?
The question facing American women today, is “Am I not a person?”
Unfortunately, it seems to be up to the Courts to decide.
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