Colorado Amendment 48: Fertilized eggs are not people

September 14th, 2008 | by Brian |

From the Colorado-based Coalition for Secular Government:

Colorado’s proposed Amendment 48 — the ballot measure that would grant full legal rights to fertilized eggs — would usher in disastrous government controls on abortion, birth control, medical research, and in vitro fertilization. It would violate the rights of real men and women — based on the faith-based fiction that a fertilized egg is a person with the same moral standing as a born infant. Yet the biological facts of pregnancy show that the embryo/fetus becomes a human person with rights only when born.

Find out more by reading a new CSG issue paper by Ari Armstrong and Diana Hsieh:
Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life: Why It Matters That a Fertilized Egg Is Not a Person

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  • Frank
    "Fertilized eggs are not people". "faith-based fiction" Interesting! You let a fertilized egg remain unharmed for 9 months and then tell me what happened to it, I'm just curious. How do you make kids (I've got 2), also known as people outside the womb? If fertilized eggs are not people or at least what gets us to a person, then why bother with condoms and every things else they sell to stop a "person" from being born! I will admit at this time that I need to do more reading about amendment 48, because it sounds like the right idea but wrong bill. A little extreme.


    Brian replies:
    Fertilized eggs are potential people, or as you said, "what gets us to a person." Ayn Rand has written about this distinction.

    Consider the following in the context of giving a fertilized egg legal the protection of humans - from the paper (which includes references):
    Significantly, natural or spontaneous abortion is a routine occurrence. Most fertilized eggs fail to implant; they are flushed out of a woman’s body. Due to the difficulty of detecting when a woman’s body rejects a fertilized egg, estimates of prevalence range widely. However, some researchers estimate that as many as 80 percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant.7 Even after a woman becomes pregnant with the implantation of the embryo, the risks of losing it by natural causes still hover around 10 to 25 percent.8 Nature is by far the greatest cause of death for fertilized eggs. (Notice that such natural deaths of fertilized eggs are not lamented, nor regarded as a public health crisis—not even by those who think of them as persons.) Thus Amendment 48 would ban forms of birth control that mimic the body’s natural processes. Also, as William Saletan observes, other activities that inhibit implantation include breast feeding, drinking coffee, and exercising.9 Would the defenders of fertilized eggs ban all women of child-bearing age from those activities, on the grounds that they risk killing human persons? Probably not—meaning that Amendment 48 would be selectively enforced.
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