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Two SCOTUS cases will address the legal status of the human fetus

Come right down to it, the argument is simple to the point of being self-evident: a human embryo is either a human person or well along in the process of becoming one. In either case, the embryo enjoys fundamental legal rights of personhood, including the right to life.

That occurred to me again while reflecting on the furor over an Alabama Supreme Court decision asserting the legal personhood of human fetuses in a case involving in vitro fertilization—IVF for short. Pro-lifers were predictably gratified, while pro-choicers predictably threw a fit.

The Alabama case was not directly about abortion. But it undoubtedly has helped set the stage for two new U.S. Supreme Court cases that are. The court will hear oral arguments in one case, from Texas, on March 26 and in the other, from Idaho, on April 24. Decisions in both are expected before the court’s current term ends in late June or early July.

No matter what the Supreme Court does, its decisions will further inflame debate over abortion as an issue in November’s presidential and congressional elections. President Biden and Vice President Harris say they will make abortion central to their reelection campaigns. And in November a dozen or more states will consider ballot measures to add a right to abortion to their state constitutions.

In the Texas case (Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, consolidated with Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine), the court is asked to consider a ruling last August by a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The 5th Circuit largely upheld a lower court ruling that placed substantial restrictions on the abortion drug Mifepristone.

Mifepristone is used in more than half of all U.S. abortions, especially so-called mail order ones performed by women on themselves. The lower court ruling being considered by the Supreme Court reduces the point in pregnancy after which Mifepristone can’t be used from 10 weeks to seven weeks—the time when the fetus begins to feel pain. It also bars non-physician prescription of the drug and sending it through the mail, and requires three in-person visits by the woman to the prescribing physician.

Read more at Catholic World Report 

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