The Rise of the Fetal-Personhood Claim in the Anti-Abortion Movement
“I believe this is the civil-rights violation of our lifetime.” In a startling new investigation, Sarah Stillman reports on the people who are neglected and starving to death in prison—and the private companies and government officials behind the crisis. But, first, Margaret Talbot explores the debate about whether an embryo is entitled to Constitutional rights. Plus:
Abortions aren’t stopping any time soon—indeed, the number of abortions performed in the U.S. actually rose from 2020 to 2023, after the constitutional right to the procedure was eliminated. It’s “not what activists were looking for when they campaigned to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Margaret Talbot writes, in a review of a new book about fetal personhood, a major focal point of the fractious anti-abortion movement. In “Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction,” Mary Ziegler, a law professor and a leading historian of reproductive politics, traces the back-and-forth of the legislative debate, showing how the argument for personhood is both malleable and strategically deployed. Read Margaret Talbot on what the future of the debate might be »
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P.S. Meta’s antitrust trial begins today, litigating whether its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp created a social-media monopoly. When Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in 2018, Nathan Heller wrote a poem about it: “Zuck took some blame but all the rest denied. / He was extremely bullish on A.I.”
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