In the wake of Obama’s executive order reinstating embryonic stem cell research comes action from several state legislatures to grant fertilized embryos the status of “personhood”. The stated goal is to prevent the farming of human embryos for research purposes, but clearly a thinly veiled secondary goal would be to outlaw abortion. The laws would work by granting the full legal rights of a human individual to pre-implantation embryos, thus making the destruction of such an embryo amount to murder.

Now there are lots of arguments to be made with regard to weighing the rights of an embryo against the rights of a woman, the parents, or even the people who might be cured of dreadful conditions by stem cell research. But what I want to focus on are the simple legal implications of granting personhood status to embryos. This is not a “slippery slope” argument. Rather, I believe these are the immediate and indisputable (albeit unintentional) consequences of such legislation should these laws be passed and broadly enforced.

To apply to embryonic stem cell research, and embryo would need to be defined as one or more cells imbued with human genetic material from at least two donor individuals. (The requirement for multiple donors gets around dealing with cloning issues, since it is inevitable that human clones will be technically possible, I assume we wouldn’t want to have cutting your finger or blowing your nose be murder offenses since you would be discarding cells with viable genetic material.) There can be no further requirements for implantation, viability, self-sustainability or any other criteria. We are talking about making it murder to destroy or allow the death of a cluster of cells in a petri dish, which require a microscope to locate. Further, if they want to rope abortion in with these laws, there can be no distinction of embryos located internal to another human vs. external in a lab. After all, there is no precedent for someone’s legal rights being different based on the location of the individual (unless you were at Guantanamo).

Now let’s look at criminality of existing murder laws. Obviously I can be charged if I directly cause the death of another. But I can also be charged if my negligence or failure to act results in someone’s death. I can even be charged if a situation I created or failed to prevent indirectly results in someone’s death.

With regard to the intent of the law, the murder statutes are nicely comprehensive. The fertility lab would be obligated to indefinitely preserve the viability of any and all embryos created there. They couldn’t discard them, neglect them, or otherwise allow them to come to harm. I think from a legislative perspective, this is about as far as they have thought about it. Game. Set. Match. What’s for lunch? But this is just the beginning.

Remember, we have not only defined embryos in the lab as people, but embryos everywhere—including a woman’s fallopian tube. So immediately, IUDs are outlawed. That would be premeditated murder. But what of a woman, diagnosed by her ObGyn as being incapable of bearing children because her uterus lining was unsuitable for implantation. She and her husband have unprotected sex, and an embryo is conceived inside her. An embryo with no hope of survival. An embryo (person) knowingly and willfully created with a built in death sentence. Is that not at least manslaughter? Would the mother not be obligated to have the embryo extracted medically and lab preserved? Should she not be obligated to undergo a monthly exam and extraction during any month in which a conception was possible? And why just her? Most women conceive many many more embryos than they implant. Should they not be examined as well? The implications being that birth control becomes a legal requirement for most anyone not trying to have a baby. And those trying must be examined at each ovulation cycle for embryo harvesting in the event that implantation does not succeed.

So now we have labs overflowing with “people” in petri dishes. What of them? Can they just stay there indefinitely? Certainly by precedent, if a baby or child is abandoned by the parents or otherwise becomes a ward of the state, the state has an obligation to provide for their upbringing. Why would embryos be different? Especially since we’ve gone to such lengths to assure they are treated as “people.” Besides, what would the implication of an ever growing storehouse of embryos be? There seems little point to keeping them if you’re never intending to grow them. Therefore, it seems clear that the government would be required to hire (draft?) women into service to give birth to these embryos. And then what of all these orphans? Who will raise them?

By now I’m sure you’re thinking this is all pretty silly. And yes, the implications of making an embryo a person would be pretty silly. Even if you restricted the law to only apply to lab grown embryos, the inevitable result would be either that fertility clinics would go out of business or someone would need to grow all these “snowflake” children to term. Neither of which seems a desired outcome.

Curiously, these laws are being pushed in the most politically conservative areas of the country. The same people are clamoring for smaller less intrusive government. A government limited to essential services and not obligated to provide for the support of any individual not capable of making it on their own. So maybe we should just tell the labs to place the petri dishes on the curb and see which zygotes have the wherewithal to cut it in the real world? Wouldn’t that be social Darwinism at its finest? Oh yeah, these people don’t like Darwin either.