On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an anti-trans executive order that also functioned as a gift to abortion opponents. The order declared that Trump’s government recognizes only “two biological sexes” — “female and male”—and that they begin “at conception.” The language signaled to the anti-abortion movement that Trump remains an ally in pursuing its ultimate goal: giving zygotes, embryos, and fetuses the same rights as people.
This legal theory, better known as fetal personhood, “is incredibly dangerous,” says Brittany Fonteno, president of the National Abortion Federation. “It is particularly dehumanizing for pregnant people because it robs them of the ability to be able to make key decisions about their body and their lives.” Americans understand this well, as a September poll from The 19th and Surveymonkey shows that a majority of the country doesn’t believe fetuses should have equal rights. But public opinion is not stopping Republican state lawmakers, who, as of March 15, had introduced 27 fetal personhood bills so far this year in 14 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute. By comparison, there were 23 similar state-level measures introduced in all of 2024, and just five in 2023. Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, says an administration aligned with the anti-abortion movement, in conjunction with a friendly Congress and Supreme Court, has given these lawmakers permission to go further than they have before. “It’s a very clear signal — like a neon light. ‘Welcome! Pass crazy shit. We’re not gonna challenge you. We’re not gonna enforce protections. We’re gonna let your challenges move up the chain,’” she says.
Fetal personhood laws have long existed in some shape or form in more than one-third of states across the country, according to the legal advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. Historically, these laws had little to do with abortion and instead applied the concept of fetal personhood to wrongful-death lawsuits or tweaked the definition of criminal homicide to include causing the loss of a pregnancy. The laws have already led to people being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. “It is this attempt to make illegal things that generally would be legal if you were not pregnant,” says Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange. “The actual use of drugs is not prosecuted, but if you are pregnant, a lot of these states are applying child-endangerment laws to you under the guise that life began at conception or fertilization.”
At least ten states — Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas — have considered bills this legislative session that would reclassify abortion as murder by claiming fetuses are “unborn” or “preborn” children and therefore can be homicide victims, says Driver. These measures would allow abortion seekers to be charged and, if convicted, face the death penalty in states that allow it, like South Carolina. In Montana, legislators failed to pass a measure that would have defined a fetus as a child capable of being trafficked; the legislation would have made it a crime to leave the state to get an abortion after so-called viability, or about 24 weeks of pregnancy. In Ohio, Republicans introduced a bill that would allow people to claim “conceived children” as dependents on their taxes. In Kansas, legislation would codify fetal personhood by requiring a noncustodial parent to be responsible for financial support during the pregnancy. And in Florida, lawmakers re-introduced a measure that would allow parents to sue for damages for the wrongful death of a fetus, regardless of gestational age. (The revived measure had been killed last year over concerns that it would interfere with IVF and other assisted-reproduction technologies.)
For decades, the anti-abortion movement’s main legal strategy has been to manufacture increasingly outlandish attacks on reproductive rights until one sticks in the courts; that’s how we got Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion, in the first place. When Roe v. Wade was still in place, the landmark decision offered a backstop that prevented conservative lawmakers from granting equal rights to fetuses. Now, the door is wide open for those emboldened by the Trump administration’s agenda to aggressively try to redefine personhood.
Even the pro-choice state ballot measures that have passed in recent years can’t put a stop to these efforts, as many of them codified the right to abortion only up to viability, creating a loophole that conservative lawmakers are more than happy to exploit. “I live in the state of Missouri, and legislators here are not being sneaky at all. They have said very clearly that because there is a viability limit within Amendment 3, which passed in November — and viability is vague — they are now moving to define viability at conception. That’s fetal personhood,” says Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, chief external affairs officer at the advocacy organization Patient Forward. “It is a threat that we need to take seriously.”
Congress also has its own fetal personhood bill in HR 722, known as the Life at Conception Act. The measure, introduced by Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri and 69 other Republican co-sponsors, would “implement equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.” Republicans have introduced the legislation repeatedly since 2011, and it has never made it out of committee; even if the GOP-controlled House passed the bill, it is highly unlikely to get enough votes in the Senate. But just because this measure has failed in the past doesn’t mean that will remain the case in the future, says Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at the reproductive-justice legal nonprofit If/When/How — especially as lawmakers intensify their push for fetal personhood at the state level. “While these types of proposals have not generally gained traction, we are now seeing a proliferation of bills,” she says. “What we’re seeing in our politics is that the things that were once radical fringe or once completely unthinkable are now becoming more and more commonplace.”
The anti-abortion movement first began fighting for fetal personhood just one week after Roe was decided in 1973. If it is successful in that project, it would unleash “a complete reordering of society,” says Erika Christensen, co-founder of Patient Forward. “I don’t think that that’s hyperbole.” Christensen, who had an abortion at 32 weeks for an unviable pregnancy in 2016, is speaking from experience. At the time, she lived in New York, which had a viability ban and prohibited abortions after 24 weeks. She was forced to travel to Colorado for care, and because of her complicated medical history, her team of doctors had to come up with a plan that would protect her health while staying within the boundaries of abortion law. “I realized that my own humanity and personhood took a second seat to the fetus,” she says. “How completely disorienting that was.”
A world in which fetuses have the same legal rights as people is a world in which every pregnant body is a potential crime scene. Though anti-abortion advocates talk a big game about protecting life under the banner of equal rights, in practice, the fetus’s rights would actually supersede the pregnant person’s. That person’s choices — from the food they consume and the medication they take to the jobs they do and the way they travel — could open them to criminalization if they miscarry, or if the government determines they have not taken sufficient measures to protect their fetuses. “People will have a completely different relationship to their own civil rights in their country,” Christensen says of a scenario where fetal personhood is enshrined in the law. “People can be punished. They’ll be arrested. They’ll be put in jail. But then, on a lower level, people will not be able to realize their potential.”
Beyond criminalization, we already know how much chaos fetal personhood can create when it takes hold in real life. When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last year that frozen embryos are considered children in that state, IVF clinics were forced to shut down and patients rushed to figure out how to safely relocate their embryos. The nationwide backlash to the decision, as well as Alabama lawmakers’ mad scramble to protect providers and patients from liability, proved just how unpopular and far-reaching the fetal personhood doctrine is. And yet, the legislation that Republicans across the country are currently floating would likely replicate that havoc.
“The state has way too much influence on what creating a family looks like,” says Driver. “You are now seeing this emboldened attitude from anti-abortion legislators to introduce the most extreme bills possible. They are no longer having to pretend what their ultimate goal is. They are showing it front and center.”
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