Abstract
When the Supreme Court held in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion, some people wanted it to go farther and rule that the Fourteenth Amendment protects unborn children. The Court’s discussion of this theory, which is known as prenatal personhood, is ambiguous, and scholarship on the status of unborn children under Dobbs has given insufficient attention to what Dobbs actually said. This thesis will analyze Dobbs in light of previous court rulings to understand both Dobbs’s position on prenatal personhood and the confusion its discussion of the subject has caused. First, it will provide background on the concept of legal personhood and how the Supreme Court has handled this issue in the past. Second, by analyzing the cases the Supreme Court cited in Roe v. Wade in in its rejection of prenatal personhood, it will establish a framework for understanding Dobbs and the two cases it overruled. Third, it will analyze these two cases—Roe and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey—in light of this framework. Fourth, it will analyze Dobbs itself in light of all of these cases, arguing that some of the confusion in Dobbs’s treatment of personhood results from its misconstruction of these earlier cases and its rejection of their analytical framework. Finally, it will consider legal and scholarly responses to Dobbs’s ambiguous handling of personhood.