Opinion: Even full fetal personhood shouldn’t end abortion rights
The law shouldn’t force pregnant people to assume greater duties to their fetuses than parents have to their children.
A horror story is playing out in Georgia, where physicians at Emory University Hospital have kept Adriana Smith, who is brain-dead, on life support for three months against her family’s wishes solely as a means of incubating her still-developing fetus. Georgia law declares that an unborn product of conception at any stage of development is a “natural person.” Between that statute and Georgia’s ban on abortion after six weeks of gestation, Smith’s doctors decided that discontinuing life support would effectively “abort” the fetus.
This is not the first time a pregnant woman has been treated as an incubator for her fetus.
