Joni Ernst, the Republican Senate candidate in Iowa, has been criticized both for backing a proposed amendment to the state constitution on personhood and for backtracking on it. In the past she has suggested that the amendment would have protected unborn life. More recently she has said that it was merely a statement of respect for life, and that policy change with respect to abortion would have to wait for subsequent legislation.

As far as I can tell, she got it right the second time. The amendment would have added this language to the state constitution: “The inalienable right to life of every person at any stage of development shall be recognized and protected.” The people who came up with that wording may have intended it to protect unborn human beings, but if so they left a pretty big loophole. They didn’t define “person” — unlike some other personhood amendments that have said that personhood begins at fertilization. Under the Iowa amendment, then, a court could rule that a human embryo or fetus is a non-person at an early stage of development and thus does not have an inalienable right to life. A court attempting to apply the rule could cite passages from Roe v. Wade that suggest that unborn children are not “persons” under the Constitution (or, if it were in the right frame of mind, cite comments by Justice Scalia to the same effect). Or it could ignore that question and hold that human embryos and fetuses are not persons within Iowa law.

By itself, the amendment doesn’t appear to do anything. That’s not necessarily a defense of Ernst, of course: Pushing for constitutional amendments that are drafted in a way that makes them pointless does not strike me as what we should want elected officials to do.