More than a third of states say fetuses are people….

Alabama is the ONLY one that got the media attention…..

And Alabama just restored the in vitro fertilisation procedure from being a crime….

A effort to Federally assure the availability of the IVF procedure is in the works in Congress….

More than a third of states consider fetuses to be people at some point during pregnancy. Any one of them could be the next Alabama.

That has state lawmakers and organizations on both sides of the political spectrum scrambling to understand state statutes, some of which are nearly four decades old, as they seek to protect access to in vitro fertilization, which is overwhelmingly popular in the U.S.

“A lot of state legislators right now are scratching their heads — whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, pro-life, pro-choice — and saying, ‘What are our laws on IVF?’ A lot of politicians have spent little or no time thinking about this. The Alabama decision kind of came out of left field,” said Billy Valentine, vice president of political affairs at SBA Pro-Life America. “For us, it’s about making sure that IVF is available but that these embryos aren’t needlessly discarded.”

The Alabama Supreme Court ruling that granted legal personhood to frozen embryos puts a new spotlight on the dozen or so states with so-called fetal personhood laws that confer rights on fetuses from the moment of fertilization. Others, like Texas, have tucked in their criminal statutes definitions that specify that personhood begins at conception, or rulings that have interpreted the law as saying so….

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More than two dozen bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year that the abortion-rights-focused Guttmacher Institute considers as establishing fetal personhood….

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While some states have used these laws to prosecute pregnant people for drug use, “a lot of these types of laws have passed under the radar for years,” said Jessica Arons, senior policy counsel for the ACLU…

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“A lot of times people will say, ‘This is not enforceable. This is just legislative declaration language,’” Allen, with the Lawyering Project, said. “Well, now we see how this language is being used, and it’s harming people who are trying to make these reproductive decisions for themselves.”….

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