The Trump Admin Is Calling Frozen Embryos ‘Children’ Now

In yet another Gilead-coded move from this women-hating administration, the Department of Health and Human Services last week slyly updated its guidance on a page about embryo adoption to redefine frozen embryos as children. To be clear, they’re not—and neither are fetuses—but to say so further expands the statutory recognition of embryos and fetuses as individuals with individual rights, thus giving further sway to the fetal personhood movement, the ultimate endgame of anti-abortionists.

“This is really explicit language that has been added all at once to notice in a way that feels really insidious,” Katie O’Connor, the senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center, told Jezebel, noting also that the new guidance is a “serious deviation” from how the program, called the Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services, typically operates. “It was about serving people who are experiencing infertility and seeking opportunities to build their families. There is no mention in the past notices that I’ve found of ‘the best interest of the child,’ or ‘a child already in existence.’”

The federal grant program was first established in 2002, after Congress allocated funding to the HHS’ Office of Population Affairs. While it was initially created to help make more people aware that their leftover embryos from IVF procedures could be made available for adoption, it’s since expanded to also offer medical and administrative services to help couples seeking to adopt embryos, such as those who are infertile. 

All of which could be impacted by the new regulations. “IVF becomes impossible if embryos are defined as human beings,” O’Connor adds. “But a lot of other reproductive health care services are also at risk, [such as] getting some forms of contraception, a lot of pregnancy-related care. If you define embryos or fetuses as human beings, then all of that becomes much more complex.” So much for Trump calling himself the so-called “IVF daddy”—who, by the way, has still not delivered on his promises around expanding access and making it free.

In 2024, Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos could constitute as “children,” thus greenlighting—at the time—three couples to progress their lawsuits against medical facilities in Mobile that had accidentally destroyed their embryos. The wrongful death lawsuits were eventually dropped, but not without establishing the legal precedent that still holds today—and causing multiple clinics to pause or suspend their IVF treatment out of fear of criminal and civil liabilities. It also established the legal norm that various lawmakers had been attempting to implement themselves, and declare the “unlawful destruction of a fertilized embryo” a crime.

Alas, the ongoing crusade to give embryos and fetuses personhood has been a flourishing shadow in the wake of Dobbs, after which the Supreme Court essentially declared open season on pregnant people, allowed state-mandated abortion bans to advance, and made pregnancies a target for surveillance and unnecessary litigation. It is because of this, as well, that hundreds of pregnant people—and counting—have been arrested. 

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