(New York Times) – If the current legal landscape when it comes to embryos seems messy, it’s a result, in no small part, of the unsettled nature of what preceded it.

For over a century, courts generally did not grant personhood or independent rights to embryos or fetuses in utero. An 1884 decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes, at the time a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, held that when a pregnant woman slipped and fell on a road, resulting in the loss of the fetus, no claim could be pursued on behalf of the fetus against the town; he voiced skepticism about “whether an infant dying before it was able to live separated from its mother could be said to have become a person recognized by the law.” (Read More)