Fetal Personhood, ‘Once a Moon Shot,’ Has Never Been More Possible

The movement’s goal is to establish enough legal precedent so that “eventually…if a question of fetal personhood reaches the Supreme Court, lawyers can say, ‘See?’” Mary Ziegler, author of Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, told Jezebel.

By Kylie Cheung | April 18, 2025 | 4:13pm

Photo: iStockphoto Abortion Books Politics

Fetal Personhood, ‘Once a Moon Shot,’ Has Never Been More Possible

Since January, at least 11 state legislatures have introduced bills that would recognize having an abortion as homicide. The point of these laws, legal experts warn, is establishing fetal personhood: statutory recognition of embryos and fetuses as separate, living people, with rights that are often at odds with those of the pregnant person. Implicit recognition of fetal personhood has already existed all around us for decades—take, for instance, women who face criminal charges for losing their pregnancies, or who are charged with “child endangerment” if they struggle with substance abuse while pregnant.

But the fetal personhood movement has been thrust into the limelight since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health allowed a tidal wave of state abortion bans to take effect, with some of these laws directly asserting that “life begins at conception.” In Mary Ziegler’s new book, Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, the historian and law professor traces the long, absurd history of the movement, rising from the fringes of American politics to the alarming, central place it holds today.

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The Dobbs decision, Ziegler writes, was really just the beginning for the fetal personhood movement; its endgame is a Supreme Court ruling establishing equal protection for fetuses under the Constitution. Today, there’s a real path for that, Ziegler told Jezebel—a path paved by flooding the zone with state legislation recognizing abortion as homicide, or requiring “fathers” of unborn fetuses to pay child support, or equating pregnancy loss with “wrongful death,” or even, say, legislation to allow pregnant people to drive in carpool lanes. The goal is to normalize and establish as much legal precedent for fetal personhood as possible, Ziegler said, so that, “eventually, you’ll have enough state laws or lower court decisions that if a question of fetal personhood reaches the Supreme Court, lawyers can say, ‘See? Look at all the precedent for this.’” One example of a lower court ruling that attorneys could reference? The Alabama Supreme Court’s 2024 decision recognizing frozen embryos as “extrauterine children” whose destruction is eligible for wrongful death lawsuits.

Historically, fetal personhood wasn’t a mainstream or serious political movement, and it occupied a much narrower role in anti-abortion spaces, Ziegler writes in Personhood. If a fetus is, in fact, a full person with rights, then someone who has an abortion is necessarily a murderer who must be punished. But this—criminalizing someone for having an abortion—is a pervasively unpopular position. So, fearing political backlash, the mainstream anti-abortion movement long condemned the idea of punishing the patient, often framing them as victims alongside the fetus and focusing their ire instead on the abortion providers. Now, here we are, with at least 11 state legislatures that recently introduced bills to classify having an abortion as homicide.

“Now that fetal personhood is a realistic possibility, where it used to be a moon-shot, we’ll see more extreme legislation,” Ziegler told Jezebel. “We’re seeing a shift from trying to appeal to voters, to anti-abortion leaders seeing the makeup of the courts very much favors them, and they can use that to impose things voters don’t want.” Another driving force in anti-abortion lawmakers increasingly zeroing in on potentially punishing patients and not just providers, Ziegler says, is the modern pervasiveness of self-managed abortion with pills, blurring the line between patient and provider. “If there’s a zero sum of either punishing the patient, who provided their own abortion, or not punishing anyone, they’ll punish the patient,” she explained. A sect of the anti-abortion movement who call themselves “abolitionists” pursuing the total abolition of all abortions have always advocated for punishment for abortion patients, in some cases, calling for the death penalty.

Ziegler’s Personhood walks readers through the varying, nuanced legal tensions that arise with fetal personhood—but the book is primarily a detailed historical analysis charting the fetal personhood movement’s demands and growth over time. Through every social movement in U.S. history, from gains for women’s rights in the 1920s, to the Civil Rights era and mass organizing against segregation in the 1960s, Ziegler describes how fetal personhood activists “tried to co-opt the language of these movements and use these gains to advance their own,” she told Jezebel. They often tried to present fetuses and embryos as the most marginalized class in America—more marginalized, even, than Black Americans forced to live as second-class citizens in the Jim Crow era, and more marginalized than white women who were barred from voting.

While the fetal personhood movement wields more power than ever post-Dobbs, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Since the first pregnancy via IVF in 1978, five years after Roe, fertility technologies involving the routine destruction of unused, frozen embryos have been a point of contention within the anti-abortion movement. Anti-abortion leaders largely tried to avoid the subject but held conflicting or hostile positions on IVF, Ziegler wrote. “The pro-natalist tilt of their movement obviously wants more babies, but not the destruction of embryos they see as people,” she told Jezebel. The Alabama court’s 2024 ruling briefly caused fertility clinics across the state to pause IVF services until the legislature passed an emergency bill protecting IVF—which top anti-abortion organizations across the country condemned. In a joint letter, they wrote that the law “will ultimately harm these families and jeopardize the lives of precious children”—referring, of course, to embryos—and stating, “IVF is not a morally neutral issue.”

Meanwhile, anti-abortion leaders are increasingly saying the quiet part—that they outright oppose IVF—out loud, because they’re emboldened by how possible their goal of fetal personhood appears to be. This would inflict maximal chaos on the legal and medical systems, as we’re already seeing. Criminal charges for pregnancy loss and self-managed abortion tripled between the periods of 1973 to 2005 and 2006 to 2020, from 413 to 1,331 cases, primarily involving allegations that the pregnant person “harmed” their fetus. The organization Pregnancy Justice recorded more than 200 such cases in the year after Dobbs—the most in a single-year period since the organization has been tracking this data.

Sometimes, on the surface, fetal personhood looks beneficial for the pregnant person, Ziegler concedes: What if you could receive tax credits for your embryo? Avoid jail time because your fetus isn’t guilty of crimes? But in reality, any amount of legitimizing embryos as people can lead to devastating outcomes for pregnant people. All of these policies, even the more insidious ones, still contribute to the same goal. The “endgame of fetal personhood,” Ziegler told Jezebel, is “a federal court ruling that an embryo is a person.” At that point, whether a state is red or blue, it won’t matter: “No one will be able to protect reproductive rights.”