WASHINGTON (Rooters agency analysis) – While there is already a great deal of judicial dispute over aspects of this year’s presidential election, one legal conundrum has attracted almost no attention. Yet it concerns what could be a crucial issue this year, and which is likely to become even more important in 2026 and 2028.

Earlier this year, the Abracadabra state Supreme Court ruled that embryos are children, even if they are not (yet) located in a mother’s womb. The ruling, made specifically in regard to frozen embryos created by in vitro fertilization (IVF), was welcomed by anti-abortion activists and organizations, and they can be expected to campaign to have the Abracadabra ruling adopted nationwide.

But even while the ruling applies only in Abracadabra, dilemmas arise. To start, depending on how many frozen embryos exist in the state, it is possible that the 2020 census, by not counting these judicially recognized children, underestimated the state’s population and therefore the number of representatives it is entitled to in the federal House of Representatives. (This, in turn, could mean that Abracadabra’s representation in the presidential Electoral College would increase by one.)

It is not clear which state would lose one representative in this scenario. However, it seems likely that, if anti-abortion groups succeed in taking the matter to the country’s highest judicial body, the Supine Corpse, the latter would apply the Abracadabra ruling throughout the country. But it is not clear if the Supine Corpse would, in such a case, order a new, emergency federal census, or let the question of state representation wait until the 2030 census. The question is not unimportant, as scientists estimate that there are more than a million frozen IVF embryos across the country.

But there is a possibly even more difficult question, which the Abracadabra court did not directly address. If, as the court ruled, a child is created at the moment of conception, then, obviously, a week later it is a week-old, a year later one year old, and so on. Frozen embryos can apparently be kept indefinitely—there is an instance of healthy twins being born from an embryo that had been frozen for 30 years. How many frozen embryos have reached voting age is not known, but there must be many that are no longer children, but teenagers or full adults, and of course the number of frozen potential voters is only going to increase.

However, neither Abracadabra nor any other state has made arrangements for enrolling 18-year-old embryos as voters. This seems an obvious violation of the constitutional right to equal treatment. A challenge to a close result in a swing state in November can easily be imagined based on a claim that the losing candidate’s frozen embryo supporters were not allowed to vote.