PHOTO: One of several similar ‘Life Monuments’ located in various U.S. locations, created by sculptor Timothy Paul Schmalz.
This story by Sofia Resnick appeared on Colorado Newsline on September 14, 2023. We are sharing it in two parts.
Operation Save America sees Georgia as a key battleground state, because, like South Carolina, it still allows abortion for the first few weeks of pregnancy, when electrical activity can be detected on an ultrasound. This law, whose constitutionality the state Supreme Court will determine this fall, does something legally strategic. It defines personhood with potentially future-history-making clauses:
‘Natural person’ means any human being including an unborn child.
‘Unborn child’ means a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb.
But this near-total ban doesn’t go far enough for Operation Save America and its partner groups like End Abortion Now, who’ve been lobbying for a much more extreme bill that was introduced earlier this year, but has not advanced out of the state House.
Under the “Georgia Prenatal Equal Protection Act,” doctors could be convicted under homicide charges unless they could prove the abortion was necessary to prevent “imminent death or great bodily injury.” Pregnant people suspected of having abortions could also be convicted under homicide charges, unless they could prove they were coerced into having the abortion. The bill says nothing about pregnant teenagers and children accused of this crime. Georgia is among 27 states where capital punishment is a possible sentence for homicide.
“In keeping with our oaths of office, the God-given right to life shall be secured and the impartial and equal protection of the laws shall be provided to all unborn persons from the moment of fertilization and at every stage of development, and abortion shall be abolished in this state, so help us God,” reads the bill.
OSA and its partners have lobbied for similar bills, many of them crafted by the Foundation to Abolish Abortion and advanced by sympathetic lawmakers, in more than a dozen states, including Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
The largest uterus in Washington, DC, is made of reflective stainless steel. It’s embedded within a nearly 4,000 pound, 10-foot-tall bronze statue of a serenely pregnant Virgin Mary that now sits on the lawn in front of the Catholic University of America’s Theological College. Curled up inside what looks like a giant steel bowl is a bronze, unborn Jesus.
Canadian sculptor Timothy Paul Schmalz says he believes it’s the first representation of Jesus as a fetus. Schmalz, whose work has been commissioned by the Vatican, opposes abortion. He toured the globe with this ‘Advent’ statue before bringing it to its permanent home in May, in DC, where it is now known as the ‘National Life Monument’.
Schmalz’s goal is to get one in every U.S. state Capitol building. There’s a bill to erect ‘Advent’ in Texas. One could end up in Arkansas, whose secretary of state is actively seeking design submissions for an anti-abortion monument.
It’s an appropriate representation, in a statue, of what many state legislatures are trying to do in statute: separate a woman from her womb.
This past spring, Washington Archbishop Wilton Cardinal Gregory blessed D.C.’s new giant uterus while surrounded by other male Catholic leaders. After the ceremony Schmalz told Catholic News Agency that he sculpted Mary’s uterus like a halo, one made of “mystical material.”
But in real life, the uterus is shaped more like a pear than a halo, located between a woman’s bladder and her rectum. Pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus, which will nourish the egg until it develops into an embryo, then a fetus, and then a full-term baby. As the uterus expands, the woman’s other organs start to work exponentially harder to sustain this new life. Nearly every part of the human body changes during pregnancy and impacts the pregnant woman’s comfort and mobility. Pregnancy for some causes temporary or permanent health conditions of varying severity.
In the U.S., many women die during or soon after pregnancy or birth, especially pregnant women who are Black and Indigenous.
In 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Supreme Court prioritized the rights of the pregnant woman over the fetus until it reached a later stage of development. Even then, the court allowed states to give discretion to medical providers to weigh the physical and mental health risks women face against those of the fetus. A half-century later, in 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito described each stage of the unborn’s development, but wrote not a word about the bodily developments of the woman gestating that life.
The Court did not expressly address personhood in this ruling, but it’s expected to, in a future case. That’s why anti-abortion legal architects are now toiling away at the legal definitions that they hope will crack the federal personhood code.
Some states are testing the constitutionality of so-called “heartbeat” bills that ban abortion around six weeks’ gestation, about two to four weeks after a missed period. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an actual heart is not detectable by ultrasound until roughly 17 to 20 weeks’ gestation. What exists previously are electrical pulses. At this gestational point, pregnant people often begin to feel extremely tired or dizzy or short of breath as their hearts begin pumping what will eventually be a 40% to 45% percent increase in blood volume.
South Carolina recently became the second state, after Georgia, with a six-week ban, and Florida could be next, which would make abortion virtually inaccessible in the South. The South Carolina Supreme Court made national headlines after its lone female justice retired, and the country’s only all-male high court promptly reversed her majority-approved opinion that a nearly identical six-week ban was unconstitutional.
Helping Republican lawmakers advance increasingly restrictive anti-abortion laws are longtime legal strategists like Robert P. George and Harold Cassidy, who live-streamed their recent strategy chat at Our Lady of Perpetual Help-St. Agnes Parish in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey.
George says he became an anti-abortion activist as a young teenager in West Virginia, shortly before the Supreme Court made abortion a federal right. The Princeton University law professor has spent his entire academic career trying to overturn Roe and block LGBTQ rights. He has advised several Republican presidents and founded many influential political groups.
For decades, the professor and co-author of the 2008 book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, has been refining his legal personhood argument, which he submitted in a co-authored “friend of the court” brief in Dobbs, that the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment already guarantees the right to life for unborn human beings. During his conversation with Cassidy, George said that abortion should not be allowed at any stage, because embryos’ unique DNA make them fully separate humans from the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg.
“Harold is the same guy who was the embryonic Harold, the fetal Harold, the infant Harold, the adolescent Harold,” George said, gesturing to Cassidy. “All of our lives begin from the earliest embryonic stage. And at all stages, and in all conditions, human life is valuable. So the first thing we’re up against is that people have been mis-instructed by the law itself.”
Universities across the country have begun to reproduce the conservative legal training ground George created at Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He and his peers have been influencing young anti-abortion legal scholars with their brand of intellectual rather than overtly religious-based anti-abortion reasoning,
Cassidy’s legal career has centered around the so-called woman-protective argument, which the mainstream anti-abortion movement pivoted to during the Roe years in order to pass onerous legislative restrictions. Cassidy has represented women who claim to be victims of abortion, including Norma McCorvey and Sandra Cano, the anonymous plaintiffs in Roe v. Wade and its companion case, who would eventually oppose abortion. Cassidy asserts all women suffer mental traumas after having abortions. In a major legal victory, he drafted a provision in South Dakota’s law (which was upheld by an appellate court in 2008) stating that abortion terminates “the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” Abortion is currently banned in South Dakota, but Cassidy is trying to advance this language in future federal abortion challenges. He twists up the rights argument, saying allowing abortion violates a woman’s right to parent.
“We have to protect the real rights of pregnant mothers: their right to give birth to their child, their right to keep and maintain the relationship with their children, their right to enjoin the equal protection of the laws that say it’s a homicide to kill their child, and their right to an interest in their child’s welfare and life,” Cassidy said.
Cassidy and George and many of their legal peers have long claimed to oppose abortion laws that would penalize women. But their arguments have helped spawn bills that do create criminal penalties for the pregnant person.
And mainly men are advancing them.
Personhood laws will diminish the rights of pregnant people, says Khiara M. Bridges, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“It’s kind of like a zero-sum type of game, in the sense that the more rights you give to fetuses, the fewer rights you give to the people that actually gestate them,” Bridges told States Newsroom in a phone interview. “We have to acknowledge the conflict as opposed to obscuring it, which I think George and Cassidy participate in that. They need to say with a straight face, like looking people dead in the eye, that the fetus’ well-being is much more important to them than the well-being of the person who gestates it. Otherwise they’re just lying and trying to win by obscuring this truth.”
Pregnant women are already facing the legal and medical consequences of abortion bans and onerous restrictions, including bans on information-sharing and attempts from anti-abortion activists and lawmakers to prevent minors and women from traveling out of state for legal abortions.
Determining personhood from conception has terrifying implications for pregnant people, legal experts say. But it would affect more than abortion. If applied broadly, it could affect population counts and tax benefits. Many lawmakers advocating for personhood are unable to fully articulate the full implications or even how to enforce these laws. But even aggressively anti-abortion state governments like Texas’s have indicated personhood laws might only be used to prevent abortion rather than in ways that could benefit the pregnant person or fetus. The Texas attorney general’s office recently rejected a personhood argument in a lawsuit brought by a former prison guard who partially blames the state for her stillbirth.
That Texas’s government was suddenly uninterested in calling fetal life a person when it was unrelated to an abortion law wouldn’t surprise writer Gabrielle Blair, who believes most anti-abortion politicians are disingenuous. The Mormon mom of six behind the popular DesignMom blog has injected a new framework in the reproductive rights debate: Men are disproportionately responsible for unwanted pregnancies, and they should not leave pregnancy prevention exclusively to women, or criminalize women’s pregnancy decisions.
“We’ve put the burden of pregnancy prevention on the person who is fertile for 24 hours a month, instead of the person who is fertile 24 hours a day, every day of their life,” Blair wrote in the 2022 book adaptation of her viral 2018 X (formerly Twitter) thread, titled “Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion.”
Blair’s manifesto, like Matthew Trewhella’s, is also finding an audience among lawmakers, many of them women. She told States Newsroom that she’s heard from lawmakers receiving the book in Ohio, South Carolina, and Utah. South Carolina Republican Sen. Katrina Shealy read it into the legislative record. Blair said she’s also had encouraging conversations with men about making reproductive rights their issue too — working with rather than against women.
“For almost fifty years, a lot of men were focused on what it would take to overturn Roe v. Wade, claiming they wanted to reduce abortions,” Blair wrote in her book. “At any point, men could have eliminated elective abortions … without ever touching an abortion law, without legislating about women’s bodies, without even mentioning women. All men had to do was ejaculate responsibly. They chose not to. Today, they continue to choose not to.”
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