Since his surprise election win, Donald Trump has spent most of the last month throwing red meat to the right. But it turns out that Trump may have thrown his biggest and most rancid piece of red meat before the election. Apparently he’s become the newest recruit to one of the most extreme branches of the pro-life movement–the personhood movement, an outfit that thinks it can effectively outlaw abortion by declaring a fetus to be a legal person from the moment of conception.
People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch discovered that just before the election, Trump answered a candidate questionnaire for the National Pro-Life Alliance, a group that openly states that it wants to enact a “Life at Conception Act” that would declare a fetus meets the constitutional definition of a person. He answered “yes” to all 10 questions, including Question 9:
“Would you support and cosponsor a Life at Conception Act defining that life begins at the moment of conception thereby resolving for all time, as stated by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, ‘the difficult question of when life begins?'”
Congressman Alex Mooney of West Virginia introduced a “Life at Conception Act” at the start of the current Congress, and managed to recruit 146 cosponsors. A companion bill was introduced in early 2016 by Senator Rand Paul, and has 11 cosponsors.
A number of personhood proponents believe that if Congress were to enact such a law, it would effectively bypass Roe v. Wade by declaring that constitutional protections apply from “the moment of fertilization.” This reasoning has been rejected by people on all sides of the abortion divide, including so-called mainstream pro-lifers. Indeed, a number of pro-lifers fear that if a personhood bill made it as far as the Supreme Court, it could open the door for expanded constitutional protections for abortion under the Equal Protection Clause.
That may explain why Mooney’s bill has gone absolutely nowhere in the House, despite the GOP holding its biggest majority in that chamber since before the Great Depression. It may also explain why Paul’s bill will also likely die with this current Congress. But it didn’t dissuade NPLA from touting Trump’s support for this bill. When it pushed a petition urging Trump to recruit “steadfast pro-life” judges, NPLA noted that Trump had given “one-hundred percent pro-life” answers to its survey.
Perhaps Trump would do well to answer some of the questions posed by former federal magistrate Vanzetta Penn McPherson this spring. McPherson pointed out that a personhood bill could potentially make prenatal kids eligible for welfare upon conception, as well as bequests upon a parent or grandparent’s death. After all, a personhood bill could have the effect of arbitrarily determining when a woman conceives even though there is no real way to determine when that happens.
It could also potentially tie doctors’ hands. For instance, medical opinion is unanimous that if an embryo attaches outside the womb, that pregnancy must end immediately. Otherwise, the woman’s Fallopian tube could rupture, causing her to bleed to death. The same would hold true if a mother develops cancer or heart trouble.
When personhood bills are introduced, they die. And when they’re introduced as proposed amendments to state constitutions, they lose big–even in crimson-red states. It’s mainly because people on both sides of the abortion divide have peered into the guts of these bills and realize they’re more trouble than they’re worth.
Then again, Trump hasn’t been known for thinking anything through. So it probably makes sense that he’s the newest recruit for a movement that stands behind such a harebrained proposal.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
