Personhood

Personhood is a concept that determines what constitutes a person in the eyes of the law. In the United States, someone or something who is considered a person is guaranteed certain protections under the Constitution. Determining who is a person might seem straightforward. However, many issues—including women’s rights, animal rights, religious rights, and corporate rights—complicate the notion of personhood.

Personhood, Abortion, and Reproductive Rights

In twenty-first-century America, the idea of personhood is often tied to debates concerning women’s reproductive rights and abortion. The main issue being that some anti-abortion groups want the government to pass laws stating that life begins at conception, when sperm fertilizes an egg, and that from that moment on the fertilized egg is a person. Extending personhood to embryos would essentially make abortion illegal because those embryos would have the same rights as every living person under the Constitution. Anyone who performed an abortion could then be charged with murder or manslaughter under the law.

Until 2022, one of the main obstacles to any type of federal personhood legislation for embryos was the Supreme Court’s historic ruling regarding abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973). Under Roe, the court refused to grant embryos or fetuses personhood status, arguing that the framers of the Constitution never intended for them to be viewed as persons and, therefore, they were not eligible for the same constitutional protections.

Roe was challenged many times at the federal level and remained unchanged until 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. As a result, some anti-abortion groups were emboldened in their efforts to enact legislation that would change laws at the state level. For example, if a state law defines life as beginning at conception and ending with a person’s last breath, then embryos and fetuses would be considered people. A personhood law like this would effectively outlaw abortion within that state.

Changing the definition of what constitutes a person has larger implications beyond the right of women to obtain abortions. The wording of such laws could make some common forms of contraception, such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and certain types of birth control pills, illegal because they could be classified as abortifacients, substances that induce abortions. This idea has raised concerns among doctors, women’s rights advocates, and some politicians.

Personhood laws might affect not only women trying to avoid pregnancy but also women who hope to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization (IVF). In this process, doctors often create several embryos, but only one or two embryos are put back into the patient in the hope that one of them results in a pregnancy. Additional embryos are frozen, but many are never used and are later destroyed. Fertility doctors could face legal problems if state or federal laws recognized these embryos as people, and IVF as a practice could be outlawed.

Most initial proposals for state personhood laws have failed. During the 2014 midterm elections, personhood bills failed in both Colorado and North Dakota. However, following the overturning of Roe in 2022, many states with anti-abortion ideals began introducing fetal personhood laws. According to the Guttmacher Institute, by August 2022, eight states (Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Vermont, and West Virginia) had introduced legislation to ban abortion by establishing fetal personhood, with Arizona having already enacted the bill in March of that year. Over the next two years, the introduction of fetal personhood bills increased even more, with over twenty states debating such legislation in early 2024. In February of that year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created during IVF procedures are considered children under state law, thus raising concerns among critics that similar fetal personhood legislation would pass in other states and restrict IVF treatments in more places. Reproductive rights advocates, as well as some pro-life supporters, also voiced concern over the ruling's impact on IVF services in Alabama moving forward, noting that many clinics would need to raise prices to pay for added costs like medical malpractice insurance to defend against potential wrongful death lawsuits.

Corporate Personhood

Corporations can also claim personhood. The idea is that the rights that legal persons enjoy are also extended to the businesses they own. Over the years, Supreme Court decisions have granted certain constitutional protections to corporations that were formerly reserved for persons. In a 2014 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby, a craft store company, did not have to provide insurance coverage of contraceptives for its employees under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act because doing so went against the owners’ religious beliefs. The decision to extend religious freedom to corporations concerned many, including the justices who dissented in the case. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg worried the ruling could set a dangerous precedent. She argued that it could allow other companies to claim that they do not have to provide employees with insurance coverage for medications or medical procedures that violate the owners’ personal religious beliefs. Even so, corporate personhood has its advantages. It allows businesses to make contracts, just as people do, and it allows them to exercise their right to free speech.

Animals as Persons

Many animal rights activists have made the argument that animals should be considered persons under the law. Although animals are afforded certain protections, such as the protection from cruelty extended to many domesticated animals, these protections are not the same as the ones that legal persons enjoy. Critics argue that the fact that humans rely on animals as sources of food makes the idea of extending personhood to them impractical. Animal rights proponents claim that the cognitive and emotional intelligence of certain animals, such as dolphins and apes, puts them on par with humans. However, critics contend that granting personhood to only certain groups of animals would be complicated and unfair to less intelligent animals.

Courts have been reluctant to confer legal personhood to animals. In 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project, founded by lawyer Steven Wise, filed suits that argued for the personhood of two New York chimpanzees. The goal of the suits was to secure the chimps’ release from captivity. However, a mid-level court would not recognize the chimps as legal persons, and the state’s court of appeals refused to hear an appeal from the Nonhuman Rights Project regarding the issue in 2015.

Environmental Personhood

The concept of environmental personhood, or recognizing that nature has rights and thus granting elements of nature such as rivers and trees the same legal status as humans, also was debated in the early twenty-first century. In 2008, Ecaudor became the first country in the world to include the legal rights of nature in its constitution. Bolivia followed suit in 2011, and in 2017 New Zealand recognized one of its rivers, the Whanganui River, as having the legal rights of a human. In 2019, Bangladesh became the first country to grant all of its rivers personhood, allowing courts to treat rivers as living entities and thus help prevent them from illegal dredging, pollution, and other harmful practices. Some communities in the United States likewise had environmental personhood laws in place. The city of Toledo, Ohio, for example, passed legislation in 2019 protecting Lake Erie and recognizing its rights through a so-called Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

Environmental personhood laws caused the citizens of a nation accused of harming the country's protected nature to face much steeper consequences. However, critics argued that such laws were difficult to enforce because the entities deemed in charge of places like waterways could be unclear and cross city or state boundaries. Others contended that the laws infringe on the rights of people who coexist with nature, such as farmers and residents of river communities.

Bibliography

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