Guys, let’s talk about zygotes.
What’s there to talk about, right? They’re just hanging out in magical uterus land, enjoying being the union of two gametes. They’re all like, “Hey, I’m a diploid cell that contains DNA from two people! Come at me, bro.”
According to North Dakota, my little bro-anthropomorphized zygote is now a person endowed with all the legal and unalienable rights of a U.S. citizen.
Well that seems a little silly, don’t you think? Nonsense. Nothing is considered silly when it comes to the abortion battle. Bring all your junk science and skewed analogies to the table, because it is about to get absolutely ludicrous up in here.
North Dakota’s anti-abortion amendment on personhood sums up that since that a zygote is imbued with all the legal rights of a U.S. citizen at conception, to terminate that zygote would count as murder. The fact that this bill banning all abortions has passed through the state’s House and Senate says something to the extent that a solid way to get an agenda across is to tell people their diploid cells need more rights.
But it’s the means to an end, right? It’s not about the argument itself: It’s about whatever it takes for North Dakota to outlaw abortions completely and to shut down its one lonely abortion clinic. (That’s not even an exaggeration. There is only one in the state.)
So I understand that. What bugs me is that lawmakers and anti-abortion advocates are so focused on the end game they don’t really believe the arguments they are making anymore.
Neither the state nor the supporters for the bill believes personhood begins at conception.
About 20 percent of human embryos end in miscarriage, according to The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. They fail to implant on the uterine lining within a certain amount of time and get flushed out of the woman’s body. This happens pretty quickly, and most women don’t even realize they were pregnant.
If someone actually believed life began at conception, and that anything stopping that life was murder, this would be truly upsetting information. Twenty percent? That’s a constant slaughter; genocide like the world has never seen. How can we fund medical research into helping reduce the number of lives that are taken? Can we start a 5K to help scientists find a solution to stop our own murderous bodies from taking the lives of the innocent?
That never happens. No one thinks twice about those zygotes. So it’s pretty clear people don’t really consider a fertilized cell a viable human life. Or at least some zygotes are worth more rights and public outrage than others. Personhood supporters could change their motto to: “Life begins after a few weeks — when we can be reasonably assured that it won’t be aborted by the body.” But I don’t think that has the same ring to it.
And apart from the laws it makes, the state doesn’t consider your embryo a U.S. citizen either.
If it did, as soon as you peed that plus sign you would be running out to get a conception certificate, pick out a legal name and register that squirming mass of cells with a social security number.
The state recognizes your gift of life when, and only when, it has first exited your body. It’s called a birth certificate for a reason — that is the moment when your kid is officially on the societal grid. So even though the North Dakota Legislature may claim a zygote is a person, its hospitals, census takers and tax collectors won’t.
Of course personhood supporters in North Dakota aren’t actually concerned with these discrepancies — they are just trying to make sure abortions get outlawed.
This won’t swing any views, so let this at least be an exercise in seeing the difference between the fight and what is being fought for.
Lauren Flannery is a business administration sophomore at UF. Her column runs on Tuesdays. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
