North Dakota looks to be well on its way to becoming the first American jurisdiction to recognize human personhood as beginning legally at the moment of conception.

On Feb. 17, the North Dakota House approved H.B. 1572, a bill that defines human personhood as beginning at the time a human egg is fertilized to commence a new human life, by a 51-41 vote.

The bill is now before the state Senate, where it has a solid chance of passing and then being signed into law. Both houses of the North Dakota legislature are controlled by the Republican Party, and Gov. John Hoeven is also a Republican.

According to the group PersonhoodUSA, which promotes the concept of legally defining personhood as beginning at fertilization, five states have now introduced such legislation. Along with North Dakota, the states are Alabama, Maryland, Montana, and South Carolina.

As well, Oregon has begun a personhood amendment petition drive and a similar petition drive is expected to launch in Mississippi within weeks.

At the national level, according to a Feb. 18 PersonhoodUSA press release, “Rep. Duncan Hunter has introduced H.R. 881, the Right to Life Act, on the federal level, propelling the personhood movement forward.”

As The Washington Times notes in this Feb. 24 article, both pro-lifers and pro-abortion activists see the personhood initiatives “as a vehicle to challenge the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion.”

That’s because once an unborn child is recognized in law as a person, the question of whether it has a right to life like all other legal persons in the United States must be confronted, both legally and morally.

“This is groundbreaking stuff for us in the pro-life movement,” Keith Mason, founder of Colorado-based PersonhoodUSA, told The Washington Times. 

Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups are reacting with horror to the possible passage of personhood legislation.

“HB 1572 is dangerous, far-reaching and allows the government, not women and families, to make critical decisions about health care,” Sarah Stoesz, president of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, told the Times. “This bill is not representative of the majority of North Dakotans; it is merely another attempt by a narrow minority fixated on an agenda that most Americans simply don’t support.”

The abortion lobby is aresponding to the bill with the kind of linguistic misrepresentation for which it has become famous. In their propaganda war against personhood initiatives, abortion activists ridicule them as merely conferring personhood on “fertilized eggs” when in fact these initiatives affirm the legal personhood of all human life from the moment of conception onward through all its stages of development, before and after birth.

For example, H.B. 1572 states specifically that, “‘Person’ or ‘individual’ means the legal recognition of a human being’s full status as a human person that applies to all human beings, irrespective of age, health, function, physical dependency, or method of reproduction, including their preborn offspring at every stage of their biological development.”

In their recent book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, Robert George and Christopher Tollefson provided a comprehensive compilation of all of the powerful scientific and philosophical evidence that demonstrates that human personhood begins at the moment of fertilization and exists continually from that moment onward.

Despite its lack of scientific and philosophical credibility, the pro-abortion misinformation campaign against personhood legislation isn’t without its successes, as witnessed by this editorial opposing personhood legislation, entitled “Fertilized eggs granted human rights,” published Feb. 23 by the Rutgers University student newspaper, The Daily Targum.

The student scholars at The Daily Targum might want to turn their finely-honed academic minds towards an analysis of the logical implications of this linguistic scam.

After all, if personhood bills can be fairly dismissed as merely conferring legal recognition on “fertilized eggs” even though they formally define all human beings from the moment of conception onwards as being human persons, this means everyone of every age should be called a “fertilized egg.” That includes Planned Parenthood activists, and even editors of pro-abortion campus newspapers.

Don’t get us wrong: The Daily Blog isn’t saying these folks are all bad eggs. But it does go to show that it’s hard to make a pro-abortion omelet without breaking a few semantic eggs.