Life Begins At Conception laws are being pushed in a lot of states as a way to outlaw abortion. But I don’t want to talk about abortion. Let’s talk about the other effects of a Life Begins At Conception law.

So, Life Begins At Conception is basically the idea that a fetus, once conceived in the womb, has full legal rights. Our current legal system is based on the idea that you become a legal person once you’re born, not once you’re conceived. American society has a lot of age-based gateways: drinking age, driving age, voting age, age of consent, definition of a minor, senior citizen discounts, Social Security.

Here’s some things to think about:

• If life begins at conception, could you legally argue that the drinking age gets pushed back approximately 9 months? In most states, that means you could legally buy alcohol once you were 20 years and roughly 3 months old.
• Assuming a crime like shoplifting, should an 18-year old defendant argue that he should be tried as a minor, because his life legally began 9 months prior?
• In most US states, age of consent becomes 15.25 years, not 16 years old.
• If a fetus is conceived overseas, but born in the US, what legal ramifications does that have on citizenship? Could one argue that such a child is an illegal alien smuggled across borders?
• Are young men in the US required to register for selective service 9 months earlier?
• What happens to our laws about transporting a minor across state lines, coercing a minor to commit criminal acts, etc? Couldn’t one argue that a person ceases to be a minor once 18 years have passed from the moment of their conception? In most cases, that means you achieve the age of majority almost 9 months earlier.
• What effect does a 9 month rewind have on the Social Security system? Arguably, one can start collecting Social Security benefits 9 months earlier.
• HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently overruled an FDA recommentation that the Plan B emergency contraceptive be made available without a prescription to all females of child-bearing age. Sebelius instead made it so that women under the age of 17 need a prescription to purchase Plan B. You see where this is going.
• Your teenage daughter can start her legal consenting relationship with a 46 year old man a full 9 months earlier.
• One for the early achievers: age of candidacy for President, Senator, Representative, and most other elected officials gets pushed back, too.
• A small victory: you can probably get your senior citizen discount coffee at McDonald’s a few months earlier.

Obviously, these are just thought experiments, and in reality, it’s more complicated than that — these changes would depend on the actual wording of the law. A clause based on “date of birth,” for example, would remain unchanged, but one based on “years of age” could arguably be altered by a law stating that life begins at conception.