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  • 2017-11-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Does the GOP Tax Bill Introduce Anti-Abortion Fetal Personhood Legislation? (en)
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  • Since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, which served to legalize abortion nationwide in 1973, there have been legal fights that alternately seek to expand or reduce the protections granted after the case. A common battleground on that front is the concept of fetal personhood — the legal theory that a fetus has the same legal rights as a person. A 2010 legal review on the topic describes the politics surrounding the debate: The latest effort to instate legal precedent for fetal personhood, media reports have argued, was quietly added to the two GOP-sponsored tax-reform bills currently under consideration in the House and in the Senate, though the Senate later repealed this language prior to passing their final version on 2 December 2017. At issue is a somewhat obscure proposal regarding beneficiaries to what are termed 529 plans (also known as qualified tuition programs), which are savings funds for college tuition. The new tax bills would make it explicitly legal to list an in-utero unborn child as a beneficiary to such saving funds. A description of the change in the Senate Bill describes the proposal: The House Bill, which was passed on 16 November 2017, includes an effectively identical provision. Responding to this and other provisions within the GOP tax plans, the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List expressed their support for this measure, arguing it allowed earlier college savings for a family: This — according to language in the Senate’s own markup of their tax bill — is misleading, as there was nothing to stop one from opening an account in a guardian's name and later transferring it to a child once they were born. Under existing law: We spoke with University of California, Irvine Director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and Professor of Law Michele Goodwin about other potential reasons for the new language. She told us via email that such measures are an attempt to suggest a conflict between women’s constitutional rights and the theoretical rights of an embryo or fetus: Numerous other measures have been passed at both the state and Federal levels that — in effect — bestow rights on the unborn, though this is the first effort to use the tax code for that purpose. According to a 2015 review, 38 states currently have fetal homicide regulation allowing some level of criminal protection for the unborn, and 23 of these states have laws that protect the fetus from conception until birth. On the federal level, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act — signed into law by George W. Bush in 2003 — provides some rights to the unborn in essence by treating the murder of a mother and an unborn child as two separate offenses. Because the language included in the GOP’s 2017 tax overhaul legislation does not explicitly state a goal of creating legal precedent or fetal personhood, but because it implicitly does this through otherwise unnecessary regulation, we rate the claim that fetal personhood language is included in the 2017 GOP tax plan as mostly true. Because only the House bill and not the Senate version include this provision, however, its ultimate fate is uncertain. (en)
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