“Personhood” laws are dangerous laws that seek to give fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses the same legal rights as people. By doing so, they devalue the legal rights of pregnant women and in some cases, even put pregnant people’s lives at risk. Anti-abortion politicians in some states have been pushing personhood language for decades. But after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, states and the federal government pushed new, extreme efforts to codify fetal personhood language in legislation.
Currently, 17 states have fetal personhood laws on the books that apply to criminal and/or civil laws. 38 states have fetal homicide laws that authorize homicide charges for “causing” a miscarriage or pregnancy loss. And at least 24 states have fetal personhood language in their abortion bans.
Under personhood laws pregnant people are no longer treated as humans but instead as reproductive objects. The dehumanization of pregnant people puts all birthing people’s safety at risk of interpersonal, state, and medical harm.
Here are 10 things everyone needs to know about personhood laws
1. Leads to Involuntary Medical Treatment
Fetal personhood laws are used to force pregnant people into medical treatments they and their families have not consented to. Some hospitals have gone so far as to hold virtual court hearings directly in examination rooms to order people on how they must experience pregnancy and birth. These decisions have resulted in hospitals and courts forcing pregnant people to undergo court-ordered cesarean sections, treating women as incubators instead of as people with personal agency and autonomy. Personhood laws have also been used to invalidate advance directives – legal documents that direct a person’s wishes for their end-of-life care. 29 states permit hospitals to keep terminally ill pregnant patients on unwanted life support solely to experiment with fetal survival. Pregnant and birthing people must be protected from these non-consensual, invasive, and medically unnecessary interventions.
2. Delays and Denies Miscarriage Care
Personhood laws create significant barriers for patients seeking access to miscarriage and pregnancy loss care. Miscarriage management utilizes the same medications and treatment protocols as abortion care. But providers, pharmacists, and insurers living in states with abortion bans have become increasingly hesitant to provide miscarriage care. 40% of OBGYNs report that their ability to manage miscarriages and other pregnancy-related emergencies is extremely limited due to the legal risks surrounding state abortion bans, as anti-abortion laws can subject providers to consequences such as fines and/or jail time. As a result, pregnant people have been turned away from hospitals, denied life-saving emergency care, and forced to navigate courts during a miscarriage for legal clarity to receive such care. Delayed and denied miscarriage care is associated with an increase in preventable maternal deaths. Too many women and pregnant people experience unnecessary suffering, health complications, fertility loss, and death due to personhood laws.
3. Exacerbates the U.S. Maternal Health Crisis
There are at least 24 states with “fetal rights” language in their abortion laws. Abortion bans with fetal rights language create a division between the rights of the pregnant person and the rights of a fetus, which makes pregnancy more dangerous in a country that already has higher rates of pregnancy-related deaths than any other high-income country. Since the passage of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), 65 labor and delivery units, emergency departments, women’s health clinics, and freestanding birth centers have closed across the country. Additionally, the Trump administration’s promotion of crisis pregnancy centers seeks to prevent pregnant people from seeking timely access to abortion and miscarriage care. Personhood laws only make pregnancy more dangerous in the United States.
4. Hurts People Seeking Infertility Treatment
In February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled on a case about the destruction of frozen embryos, declaring that the state’s wrongful death law applies to all “unborn children,” including those “not located in the utero at the time they are killed.” Immediately after the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision, three fertility clinics paused their IVF treatments out of concern that continuing meant risking civil penalties. Patients also struggled to move frozen embryos to safe storage facilities outside of Alabama because of the legal chaos.
The push for granting embryos personhood is not just seen in the state supreme courts; the Trump administration recently issued a new notice of funding opportunity for the Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services Program that defines frozen embryos as “children.” The government treating embryos as people limits fertility care and treatment for all people. These limitations are particularly harmful for LGBTQ+ parents seeking to build their families. According to a 2019 survey from Family Equality, 63% of LGBTQ+ people planning families expect to use assisted reproductive technology, foster care, or adoption to become parents. Granting personhood to embryos leads to limited fertility care services and ultimately makes fertility treatment inaccessible for people seeking to build families.
5. Promotes Intimate Partner Reproductive Coercion
Controlling partners can weaponize fetal personhood laws as a tool to maintain power over their pregnant partner’s body and reproductive health. When policymakers grant fetuses the same legal rights as people, these laws give abusive partners the ability to sue on behalf of the fetus and seek control of their pregnant partner’s reproductive decisions. In the context of abortion bans, multiple ex-husbands have filed wrongful death lawsuits against abortion providers and supporters of the abortion seekers. These cases send a message to all pregnant survivors that their decision on whether or not to continue their pregnancy is at risk of being controlled by abusive partners. All people deserve to live free from intimate partner violence, and fetal personhood laws prevent that from ever being a reality.
6. Worsens Gender-Based Violence
Personhood laws objectify women and promote the idea that pregnant people are merely incubators. Studies established a link between the objectification of women and gender-based violence. The United States’ history of forced sterilizations of disabled, Black, Native, immigrant, and incarcerated women is chilling proof of the government treating birthing people solely as bodies capable of reproduction instead of full humans deserving autonomy and dignity. Homicide is one of the top causes of maternal deaths in the United States. And approximately 1 out of 3 women experience intimate partner violence. Anti-abortion proponents of fetal personhood urged the passage of these laws claiming it would reduce violence against women, when in fact personhood language does the opposite. A recent study found that an increase in fetal personhood laws is associated with an increase in violence towards pregnant women. These laws exacerbate this gender-based violence crisis through dehumanizing pregnant people.
7. Leads to Overpolicing and Surveillance of Pregnant People
Since the overturning Roe v. Wade, prosecutors and law enforcement have increasingly used laws that established fetal rights as a tool to track, police, and criminalize pregnant people. They have used digital data, search histories, and informants to trigger police investigations. This policing does not impact everyone equally. Historically, the tracking and criminalizing of pregnancy has targeted poor women, disabled women, and women of color due to deeply rooted racism and gendered discrimination. Over 1,400 cases of pregnancy-related criminalization have already occurred across the U.S. These charges include prosecuting women for seeking abortion care, managing a miscarriage, or choosing a birth method. They extend to accidental injuries, managing chronic health conditions, or struggling with substance use and addiction.
Surveilling and criminalizing pregnant people only makes access to healthcare worse. For example, punishing drug use during pregnancy scares people away from accessing early prenatal care and support. Anti-abortion laws that ban treatment based on how far along a pregnancy is denies access to essential, life-saving care. To end criminalization, policymakers must respect pregnant people’s humanity, bodily autonomy, and their right to consent and refuse treatment.
8. Weakens the Rule of Law
Legal personhood has been a powerful tool to protect individual rights in U.S. history. From the First Amendment right to free speech to the Reconstruction Amendments grant of citizenship, legal personhood has been at the core of civil rights in our country. But when anti-abortion extremists and courts grant fetuses the same legal protections as a person they weaken the rule of law. This includes the dangerous expansion of personhood to entities like corporations and artificial intelligence (AI). Big technology companies have pushed to humanize AI technologies to give them certain legal rights. If AI is granted personhood protections under the law, it would make it harder to hold companies accountable for the harms of their AI models. State lawmakers have advanced legislation to ban granting legal personhood to AI. Advocates must guard against any attempts to erode what it means to be an autonomous person under U.S. law.
9. Rolls Back Gender Equality
The fetal personhood legal doctrine upholds the sexist expectation that birthing people’s only role is to carry fetuses, give birth, and raise children. Personhood laws mirror the “trad wife” social media trend where influencers promote “traditional lifestyles” and seek to glamorize a conservative, patriarchal home life. Add to this the Trump administration’s goal of pushing women to motherhood regardless of the birthing person’s wants. The Tradwife agenda seeks to roll back decades of progress made on women’s economic, educational, and political power. And perhaps most ironically, these same influencers are most often the economic breadwinner in their homes. Personhood laws reinforce dangerous expectations that birthing people’s only role in this world is to be mothers.
10. Undermines Social Safety Nets like Tax Credits and TANF Eligibility
Pregnant people need economic security. However, embedding personhood language into tax credits, child support bills, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits is not financial help. Instead, it is a deceptive trade-off designed to normalize personhood language in state laws, while offering families little economic support. Some states allow pregnant people to claim a fetus on tax returns, require child support payments during pregnancy, or base TANF eligibility around the fetus rather than the financial needs of the pregnant person. These efforts fail to address the restrictions in state-level assistance programs, including the 17 states that enforce TANF family caps that reject growing families from receiving increased benefits, and the strict state laws that heavily dictate which families can receive child support. Additionally, only one U.S. state offers refundable child tax credits. These state-level changes also ignore federal attacks on economic security.
Recently, the Trump administration cuts to SNAP stripped food assistance from over 770,000 children, while more than 35,000 federal job cuts have disproportionately pushed women out of the workforce. To improve economic policies, pregnant women and their families must have access to quality healthcare, workplace protections, and the right to bodily autonomy. Women and pregnant people should never be forced to trade their reproductive freedom for financial security.
Conclusion: Reproductive Freedom requires the Elimination of Personhood Laws
Personhood laws dehumanize pregnant people and result in increased state and interpersonal violence in their lives. To end the criminalization of pregnancy, we must listen to and follow the guidance of people criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, currently incarcerated mothers and pregnant people, and the advocates working at the intersection of reproductive justice and prison abolition. Fetal personhood is a threat to all of us. As Professor Dorothy Roberts said in 1991, “It is only by affirming the personhood and equality of poor women of color that the survival of their future generation will be ensured.”
Acknowledgment: Thank you to Rosann Mariappuram and Erin Mackay for their contributions.