Hoping for a philosophical discussion, not a political one.
The passport wouldn't make sense, because it's not like the child can go off on their own. It would be more needless paperwork to make a padantic point.
These documents are also “needless” if a born child dies, doesn’t make them any less required.
Agree on passport, was just picking random examples to illustrate my point.
“Spontaneous abortion was found to be: i) the predominant outcome of fertilization and ii) a natural and inevitable part of human reproduction at all ages.”
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/372193v1
Admittedly, most of those wouldn’t be classified as miscarriages because many fertilized ova don’t implant, and many more are lost as part of what the woman will consider a “regular” period: the blastocyst being so undeveloped that its loss isn’t noticeable.
Still, most fertilization never make it to term, regardless of access to healthcare services.
Like you mention, miscarriages happen 10-15% of the time, but the infant mortality rate was 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2020 [0], that's less than 1%. So once a child is born there is a significantly higher chance of that paperwork being meaningful.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/...
I hope the debate evolves to center around the real questions rather than SCOTUS. What can science tell us (about when a fetus experiences pain or consciousness)? How does this inform our beliefs and the laws?
Legally, for purposes of homicide laws in the several of the trigger law states, it does (“fertilization”, actually.)
> What can science tell us?
That life is a 4+ billion year continuum, and that division into separate “lives”, some of which are deemed worthy of various levels of protection, is an arbitrary categorization based on subjective values.
Stop trying to hope approaches that are about determining what is will give you a shortcut to what ought to be.
The fundamental truth is pregnancies often have bad outcomes. That runs head first in to conservative beliefs about chastity, tendency to frame everything as a moral issue, and to punch down when assigning blame. The result of conservatives banning maternal care for women is going have really bad consequences because their ideology doesn't match hard reality.
I was actually also curious if anyone would notice that this doesn't invalidate any astrology since it only means they missed their mark on causality by roughly 9 months (ofc, there's plenty more evidence to invalidate astrology without that :), but nobody came up with that.
As for full person-entitlements at conception, for anyone who's ever gone through IVF, not all early embryos are "viable": in other words, they wouldn't ever result in an actual human baby developing (I also found this to be a helpful way to look at inseminated eggs to reduce the psychological toll of failed embryo transfers; my wife didn't find anything helpful though, so your mileage may vary). Most of these "die" out (actually, stop their cell division and proper cell differentiation) by 8 weeks, though some only do that later in the cycle.
Anyway, all this to say that it's ridiculous to consider an embryo a person, at least until it's clear it will develop into one (finding a biological age where that happens is hard though, but it's not for a number of weeks). Should people whose embryos die out by that point be taken to court for murder (negligence or intentional): embryos are persons, right?
If you want to go there, I am not sure why stop at embryos, when you could treat all human eggs and sperm the same way: they are on their way to becoming a person, and we need to make sure that all the eggs are inseminated, and all the millions of sperm cells get their job done (otherwise, you are killing those cells by not letting them fulfill their destiny). I hope the absurdity of the stance is clear. So if life exists right after conception, it exists just as well before that as eggs and sperm are living cells.
Finally, a legal matter, especially the one that does not even concern itself with the particular question, does not decide when "life begins". It's decided by people agreeing on scientific conditions of what constitutes a new live being, and in particular, a new human being. Science is objective, but people still need to agree on particular terms.
As far as I understood it, reversing this decision on a federal level will simply put existing anti-abortion laws back into validity in a number of states. They can still change those laws.