The Snowflake or the Handmaiden?

The recent article on the Daily Kos brings several disturbing questions to mind:

If embryos are to be recognized as "fully" human, what is stopping the state from insisting that they have a "right to life", even if it means requiring women to carry these embryos to term? What is stopping the state from requiring any woman who undergoes infertility treatment to be implanted with each and every embryo produced by her eggs? Will women who donate their eggs be tracked down and required to be implanted with the unwanted embryos produced from her eggs? Will the state start "recruiting" unrelated women to carry embryos to term? If the embryo has a right to life, and, as anti-abortion advocates believe, the right to inhabit a woman's body (and to leech off her body systems)against her will, will it matter to a Gileadian* state whether or not the embryo's assigned uterus is related?

The mind boggles and there is no escaping this conclusion: If the embryo has a right to gestation invested in it by the state, there is no limit to what the state could do to coerce women into providing the gestation. The only defense against this sort of reproductive slavery is abortion rights, which are actively being dismantled even as you read this post. If a woman has no right not to be pregnant, and an embryo has a right to gestation, who will win out: The Snowflake or the Handmaiden*?


*In Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic state which reduced women to their reproductive capacities was known as "The Republic of Gilead". Women who were "recruited" as surrogate mothers for infertile families were known as "handmaidens".