Join us to hear about the legal and philosophical arguments at the cutting edge of the abortion debate.

In her new book, Personhood, UC Davis law professor Mary Ziegler argues that simply undoing Roe v. Wade has never been the endpoint for the antiabortion movement. Since the 1960s, she says, 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 contends would make liberal abortion laws unconstitutional.

Ziegler chronicles the internal struggles and changing ideas about race, sex, religion, war, corporate rights, and poverty that shape the personhood struggle over half a century. She 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. She 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.