MSNBC Guest: Treating Fetuses and Embryos as People Creates ‘a Lot of Harm for Pregnant People’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
Velshi: “How the criminalization of pregnancy – I’m using this term because the point is once you are pregnant you are potentially subject to the state getting involved with your body in a way I will never be for any reproductive activity I undertake. How does this reflect on the goals of the antiabortion movement?”

ZIEGLER: “It’s all about setting a precedent. We saw when the antiabortion movement was attacking Roe v Wade it was plain the long game and shifting away over the course of decades before it went for that kind of fatal blow. The same is happening with fetal personhood. Most people don’t expect the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a decision on fetal personhood in the next year. The idea is to find lots of other laws that treat fetuses and embryos as people and even to use other laws that don’t say anything about abortion or anything about embryos where those laws are used to treat fetuses and embryos as people and that is designed to set precedent after president into conservative states to build a case for fetal personhood before the U.S. Supreme Court down the road. That might never work but in the meantime is creating a lot of surveillance and criminalization and harm for—“