— Washington Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected a disagreement over whether the unborn are entitled to constitutional protections, sidestepping an issue that might be at the center of the next major abortion struggle after the conservative majority reversed the almost 50-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling.
Two pregnant women, on behalf of their then-unborn fetuses, and a Catholic group were denied permission to appeal a decision by the Rhode Island Supreme Court. The state court upheld a Rhode Island abortion rights law on the grounds that the unborn babies, Baby Mary Doe and Baby Roe, lacked legal standing to challenge the law because, under the 14th Amendment, they were not “persons.”
The legal dispute included the Reproductive Privacy Act, which was signed into law by then-Gov. Gina Raimondo in 2019 and aimed to codify the right to an abortion established by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court.
Two ladies who were 15 and 34 weeks pregnant when they brought action on behalf of their unborn children in June 2019 in Rhode Island Superior Court argued that the state’s abortion rights bill was unconstitutional. However, the Rhode Island Supreme Court decided against the women and upheld the law.
In their petition filed with the court, the women and Catholics for Life argued that the Rhode Island abortion law deprived their unborn fetuses of “personhood” by repealing older state laws that established that human life begins at conception, and that the 14th Amendment defines human life as a “person.” A provision that criminalized all abortions stayed on the books for more than 150 years before being overturned by the state’s new legislation.
In light of its judgment this spring in Dobbs v. Jackson Ladies’s Health Organization, which pulled back the constitutional right to an abortion, the women petitioned the Supreme Court to examine the validity of the Rhode Island statute.
“As determined by this court in Dobbs, abortion laws are distinct from all others. Do unborn humans have any rights under the United States Constitution, regardless of gestational age? Or, according to the United States Constitution, has Dobbs reduced all unborn humans to the level of persona non grata, below corporations and other fictional entities? “They stated in their appeal to the court. “No state court or legislature can provide a response to this question. As the final arbitrator of the interpretation of the United States Constitution, only this court can do so.”
The petitioners contended that the issue questions “do not require this court to decide on any ‘theory of life’.”
The authors noted, “This case illustrates the inevitable clash of Dobbs, which left unresolved the conflicts between the 10th Amendment, federalism, and any remaining constitutional protections for the unborn.” However, the Supreme Court has decided not to address these matters at this time.
The Supreme Court’s judgment in Dobbs, which undermined the constitutional right to an abortion, remanded the matter to state legislators, and in anticipation of the high court’s decision, some states passed fetal personhood statutes.
In Georgia, pregnant women can claim their fetuses as dependents on their tax returns under a 2019 law that confers fetal personhood to fetuses around six weeks of pregnancy. This law was permitted to take effect when the Supreme Court overturned Roe, allowing it to go into effect.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on abortion rights, at least seven states have presented legislation outlawing abortion by recognizing fetal personhood.