So the North Dakota House  has just declared that

> "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens" is a person protected by
> rights granted by the North Dakota Constitution and state laws.

What the hell does that mean? Seems to me that this declaration, should it get through the state senate and past judicial review, will do both way more and way less than its crackpot enactorss intend. Depending on how you define "organism", pretty much all cell culturing, tissue grafting, and organ transplantation in the state would require the appointment of a guardian ad litem for the "persons" involved. As would removal of teratomas (and possibly any other tumor as well, depending on whether the "person" in question is required to have a unique genome). Meanwhile, unless the state constitution and laws include a right to be hooked up to someone else's circulatory system and derive warmth, nutrition, immune protection and so forth from their bodies, I can see how it could affect the legality of abortion in the state. (And this is even before we get to unimplanted blastocysts...)

Sometime I have to wonder whether people who have such contempt for the american system of laws really shouldn't emigrate to somewhere more in keeping with their views.