I'm not sure how much I can say about abortion that I haven't said before, but with the new bans coming out in Alabama and Georgia, I guess it's time to talk about it again.
The one detail that I'm going to focus on this time is the various unintended (or possibly intentional) consequences of fetal personhood. There are a few entertaining comments that have gone around social media (such as asking when child support starts or asking when one can claim an extra dependent on their taxes), but there are also some very serious concerns about what this means for murder or manslaughter laws.
Interestingly, I've seen some conservatives explicitly dismiss those concerns, arguing that people won't be punished for unintentionally harming their fetus because the bills define abortion strictly enough to prevent that. Honestly, I think that's complete nonsense; we already have women being charged with crimes and thrown in jail for miscarriages as it is. This sort of change just adds more circumstances under which that outcome is possible, not less.
And while the question about unlawfully imprisoning a fetus (for example, because the pregnant mother is in jail) seems like a joke, there are more serious questions to ask about what sort of support the state needs to provide to a fetus that ends up under its care. Some of those consequences could even be good, if they force prisons and shelters to provide better care for pregnant women... but some could be dangerously restrictive, if they give the state the right to make all decisions about how to manage the pregnancy.
In the end, it all seems like yet another example of these laws not clearly thinking through the consequences, or how to actually reduce the number of abortions.
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