Maybe Bad Bunny wasn’t all wrong in championing the virtues of Puerto Rico:
Puerto Rico’s governor on Thursday signed a bill that amends a law to recognize a fetus as a human being. . . .
Gov. Jenniffer González, a Republican and supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, said in a brief statement that “the legislation aims to maintain consistency between civil and criminal provisions by recognizing the unborn child as a human being.”
The amendment, in Senate Bill 923, was made to an article within Puerto Rico’s Penal Code that defines murder. . . . The amendment complements a law that among other things, classifies as first-degree murder when a pregnant woman is killed intentionally and knowingly, resulting in the death of the conceived child at any stage of gestation.
This is the sort of thing that may give Democrats pause at rushing to enact Puerto Rican statehood. The island’s politics are complicated, in ways that reflect both its unique neither-fish-nor-fowl status as a U.S. territory and its poor, economically populist but socially more conservative Latino population.