(ZENIT News / San Juan, 12.30.2025).- Puerto Rico enacted a pair of laws that could reshape how the unborn are understood within the island’s legal framework, reigniting an old and deeply contested debate about life, rights, and the reach of the state. With her signature, Governor Jenniffer González Colón approved two measures that together expand legal recognition of unborn children in both civil and criminal law, while insisting that existing abortion statutes remain formally untouched.
At the center of the legislative shift is Senate Bill 504, introduced by Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz. The measure revises key provisions of the Civil Code to state explicitly that every human being is considered a natural person, a definition that now includes the human being conceived in the mother’s womb at any stage of pregnancy. In practical terms, the unborn child, the nasciturus, acquires legal personality from conception, insofar as such recognition is favorable and applicable.
Supporters describe the change as an overdue alignment of civil law with what they call biological reality. Rivera Schatz framed the reform as a strengthening of protections for those who cannot speak for themselves, a message echoed beyond the island. The National Right to Life Committee in Washington hailed the law as a milestone, arguing that Puerto Rico had formally acknowledged the inherent dignity of unborn life and embedded that principle in its civil legislation.
Yet the reform arrived amid sharp resistance. The law attempts to pre-empt such fears through a safeguard clause. It specifies that the recognition of rights favorable to the unborn does not restrict a woman’s right to decide about her pregnancy under existing law. Abortion, the text emphasizes, remains governed by criminal statutes already in force. Even so, skeptics argue that legal language, once tested in court, often evolves in ways lawmakers cannot fully predict.
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