Fetal personhood and the anti-freedom Republicans

I’m not sure how we got to the point where comedians are some of our best political commentators. Maybe a bit of dark humor makes it easier to keep paying attention when there’s so much bad news to digest. 

John Oliver’s recent show exploring the concept of fetal personhood — and the horrifying consequences when that concept is put into law — demonstrated that he is one of the best of our comedians-turned-explainers.

Personhood advocates are the hard-core, no-compromises wing of the anti-abortion movement, insisting that fertilized eggs deserve full legal and constitutional rights from the moment of conception. A defining trait is their opposition to any exceptions for rape or incest in laws banning abortion.  

Not long ago, these were considered fringe positions even within the pro-life movement. But anti-abortion extremism has increasingly become the norm among today’s Republican politicians — even though voters often reject it when given the chance. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has pushed legislation to enshrine in law his belief that life begins at conception.

And, as Oliver noted, once the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority overturned Roe v. Wade, all the guardrails have been eliminated. That has meant more women being brutalized by the legal system in states with abortion bans.

The consequences of politicians defining a fertilized egg as a legal person deserving the full protection of the law are far-reaching. In states that treat the rights of an embryo or fetus as predominant, pregnant women lose their agency as human beings. Instead, they are treated, in Oliver’s words, as “incubators” — or, in the words of an anti-abortion politician he quoted, “hosts.”

Women have........

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