“It’s about establishing the personality of the unborn child in tax laws, in maternal child support, in our census counts, throughout our statute book so that we can lay the foundation that no other state in the nation has achieved in the last 46 years has ever done, which is to establish the personality of this child, and we will take this to the highest court in the country,” Mr Setzler said in the video.
Mr. Setzler did not respond to requests for comment.
Georgia’s push to recognize a fetus as a person could provide the blueprint for other conservative states that have yet to clarify the meaning and implications of such an approach, legal experts said.
“The anti-abortion movement has always been a personality movement, there just wasn’t a consensus on what that actually meant,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has written several books on abortion and the law.
Before Roe’s downfall, conservatives were united around the single goal of restricting access to abortion. But Ms. Ziegler says the anti-abortion movement is struggling to find a consensus on what fetal personality means in a post-Roe legal landscape.
“Nobody’s really figured out how to force personality beyond just ‘You can’t have an abortion,'” she said. “Georgia is starting to figure that out, but they’ve really only looked at a handful of situations. How do you enforce this in HOV lanes? Do you give a fetus its own advocate? There are so many unanswered questions.”
Last month, a pregnant Texas woman who was ticketed just for driving in the HOV lane argued that her fetus was counted as a person under the state’s abortion ban. The Texas abortion ban does not include fetal personality, but the penal code does.
Georgia’s abortion law also allows the mother to collect child support to cover “direct medical and pregnancy-related expenses” before the child is born.
