I don’t know what it is with GOP presidential candidates (he ran in 2008 and finished second after McCain), but Mike Huckabee expressed his support for the Personhood campaign:

In essence what Personhood is lobbying for is that from the moment of conception someone is a person. With the goal of getting this put into law and via this route banning abortion.

But there are huge problems with the idea of giving a zygote the same full protection of the law as granted to a person. Just take for example IVF where multiple eggs are fertilized, and a few are implanted at the 6 to 8 cell stage. The ones that are viable and aren’t used are often destroyed. Before that embryos can already be lost during the selection process.

This can be just because they aren’t viable, which can happen. But what if they aren’t viable anymore because of an accident? As they are a person this would mean you are responsible for its ‘death’ and it needs to be investigated if it wasn’t preventable. Which then could result in jail time for the person, or persons, involved.

Or what about ectopic pregnancies? With an ectopic pregnancy the embryo lodges itself outside the uterus, this situation can be life threatening for the mother. Aborting the pregnancy is the only treatment we have to save the life of the mother. This raises some interesting legal questions if this is, or isn’t, killing a person.

With just a few simple examples you can see that this is an incredibly bad idea to implement. And if it does get adopted it will create one hell of a legal mess.