Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction What’s next for the battle over abortion? Mary Ziegler argues that simply undoing Roe v. Wade has never been the endpoint for the antiabortion movement. Since the 1960s, the larger goal has been to secure recognition of fetuses and embryos as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a step that the modern antiabortion movement argues would make liberal abortion laws unconstitutional.
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Palatine Centre
Personhood traces the rise of fetal personhood as a constitutional argument in the countermovement that mobilized to defeat the reform of criminal abortion laws in the 1960s. Professor Ziegler chronicles the internal struggles and changing ideas about race, sex, religion, war, corporate rights, and poverty that shaped the personhood struggle over half a century from the 1960s to the fall of Roe v. Wade and beyond. The book explores how Americans came to take for granted that fetal personhood requires criminalization and suggests that other ways of valuing both fetal life and women’s equality might be possible. Professor Ziegler argues that the battle for personhood has long been about more than abortion: it has aimed to overhaul the regulation of in vitro fertilization, contraception, and the behavior of pregnant women, change the meaning of equality under the law, and determine how courts decide which fundamental rights Americans enjoy.
Mary Ziegler is Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at University of California, Davis. She is an expert on the law, history, and politics of reproduction, health care, and conservatism in the United States from 1945 to the present.
Visit Professor Mary Ziegler's website here
Find out more about Professor Mary Ziegler here
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Speakers: Prof. Mary Ziegler
Hosts: Dr Samantha Halliday, Professor Shaun Pattinson, and Dr Chloe Romanis
This is an online event, please register using the following Zoom link:
https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5gv29iQVSuybK8ruu6rVGA