Latest news with #Personhood:TheNewCivilWarOverReproduction
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement
default So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty. Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really 'always been a fetal-personhood movement' – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms. Fetal personhood is the belief that embryos and fetuses deserve the legal rights and protections afforded to people. If taken to its logical conclusion in US law, this belief would not only totally outlaw abortion, but also risk pitting the rights of fetuses against the rights of the women carrying them in all kinds of circumstances. In the first year after the US supreme court overturned Roe, at least 200 people were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies. Most of these cases involved charges of child endangerment, abuse or neglect – language that treats fetuses as children. A Guggenheim fellow who has published seven books on reproduction and abortion, Ziegler has long seen the fight for fetal personhood as the throughline in the anti-abortion movement's centuries-long history. In recent years, with Roe gone, she grew convinced that the movement was no longer willing to pull punches in that fight. 'The trajectory has been more and more punitive, more focused on saying: 'Justice for the fetus means punishing a larger group of people that encompasses not just doctors, but people who assist them, and potentially abortion seekers themselves,'' she said in an interview. Personhood, which was released Tuesday, argues that the anti-abortion movement did not have to be so punitive. While anti-abortion activists have never agreed on how to best implement fetal personhood, they over time started to take more cues from Republican politicians, whose own veneration of 'law and order' grew alongside its antagonism toward a social safety net. Those developments ultimately paved the way for the more extreme anti-abortion activists to grab more power within the movement. After Roe legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, anti-abortion activists organized in support of an amendment to the US constitution that would recognize embryos and fetuses as people. (The effort never gained the political traction it needed to become a serious possibility.) Around the same time, some activists broke with mainstream anti-abortion groups to push for policies that would offer more support for pregnant women, rather than just ban abortion. Yet the voices advocating for better daycare and housing for mothers faded away as the anti-abortion movement tightened its alliance with the Republican party. Anti-abortion activists understood that, by portraying fetuses as defenseless victims of the ultimate crime, they could energize conservative voters – and open their pockets. 'The Republican party, from the Reagan era onward, has really equated a kind of justice and equality with punishing wrongdoers,' Ziegler said. 'It's a natural fit for the anti-abortion movement: the more its fortunes relied on Republican politicians, the more it framed things the same way.' State-level bans on abortion still do not technically punish abortion patients. (Instead, it's abortion providers, long positioned by the movement as coercing or confusing women into the procedure, and sometimes the people who help them, who are at risk of criminal consequences.) But, over the last few years, self-described 'abortion abolitionists' have slowly migrated out of the fringes of the anti-abortion movement and moved towards its center. Unlike mainstream 'pro-lifers', 'abolitionists' believe that, if a fetus is a person and abortion is the murder of that person, women should be punished accordingly: as murderers. Neither 'pro-lifers' nor 'abolitionists' are particularly popular. After Roe's collapse enabled states to make their own abortion laws, several states – including GOP strongholds like Ohio and Missouri – passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights. According to Gallup, 85% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances, while a 2024 survey from the 19th News and SurveyMonkey found that 41% of Americans think 'a fetus has rights starting at conception that should be protected by the government.' Even people who support fetal personhood can have tangled, even contradictory views on the matter. Only 9% of people think that the government should restrict access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, even though IVF as it is currently practiced frequently involves the destruction or abandonment of embryos. None of the bills that allow abortion patients to be charged with homicide are likely to pass this year, but Ziegler doesn't think 'abolitionists' are going anywhere, for two reasons. First, the anti-abortion movement maintains a strong grip in southern Republican-dominated state legislatures, where many of these bills have emerged. Second, Ziegler believes that the anti-abortion movement is embracing 'a conviction that it matters less what voters think and more what judges think'. 'If you don't worry about what you're doing being unpopular, and you believe that ideological consistency, or even logical consistency, is paramount, you would be more inclined to go with an abolitionist argument, and you might worry less about that having political fallout in a politically uncompetitive state,' Ziegler said. 'You don't need to convince most Americans you're right. You only need to convince five justices on the supreme court.' With abortion bans proving deeply unpopular in the US, circumventing popular will has become a necessity for an increasingly hardline movement. And by relying on the courts rather than voters, the anti-abortion movement can afford to ignore voters' misgivings. The movement has abandoned its earlier goal of amending the US constitution to recognize fetal personhood; instead, the anti-abortion movement is now seeking to convince courts that the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of due process and equal protection, already recognizes embryos and fetuses as people from the moment of conception. It is, according to Ziegler, yet another sign of the movement's drift away from democratic norms. This interest in the 14th amendment is also something of an about-face for the anti-abortion movement, which is predominantly white and has had a convoluted relationship with race for more than a century. At the time that the amendment passed, as part of a post-civil war effort to recognize Black people's rights, anti-abortion leaders 'didn't want to talk about race because they weren't sure that people of color were persons with rights', Ziegler said. Over time, the anti-abortion movement began using the language of civil rights and affirmative action – but primarily to argue that fetuses are the greatest victim of discrimination. 'I think that's one of the reasons fetal personhood language has been resonant for so long,' Ziegler said of the movement's co-option of civil rights rhetoric. 'It gives people a way to talk about equality and a way to elevate somebody as a victim of discrimination in a way that makes sense to a largely white group of conservatives.' As Roe recedes further into the rearview mirror, Ziegler expects the movement to become even more committed to some of the most unpopular implications of fetal personhood, such as restrictions on IVF. Although Republican politicians have shied away from limiting access to the treatment, the anti-abortion movement has grown more strident on the topic. Some of its leaders even condemned Donald Trump for his recent executive order supporting IVF. 'I think the anti-abortion movement is going to be still full steam ahead,' Ziegler said. 'There's an increasing sentiment in the movement that this is not about pleasing Republicans. This is not about pleasing voters. This is about the importance of this, ideologically, to the people involved.'
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ali Velshi: Anti-abortion activists are using the authoritarian playbook to push for fetal personhood
This is an adapted excerpt from the May 4 episode of 'Velshi.' You might think the end of Roe v. Wade, which returned the issue of abortion to the states, marked a pretty conclusive victory for the anti-abortion movement's 50-year legal fight. But you'd be wrong. As legal historian Mary Ziegler makes clear in her new book 'Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction,' states' rights was never the endgame. It was just a stepping stone toward something far more radical and far-reaching: A pseudo-legal doctrine known as fetal personhood. It might sound technical and obscure, but its implications are real — and incredibly serious. At its core, fetal personhood says a fetus, even a fertilized egg, is a full constitutional person under the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law to all citizens. Last year, the Republican Party approved a platform that supports states using the 14th Amendment to establish fetal personhood. If that's written into law, it would effectively ban abortion at every stage of pregnancy. It could open the door to criminalizing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and further empower the prosecution of abortion under state criminal codes. That's exactly what we're already seeing play out across the country. Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states have introduced bills that define abortion as homicide. In some states, those laws have led to the prosecution of women who've miscarried. According to Ziegler, the fetal personhood movement has been quietly taking shape since the 1960s. While it gained momentum after the 2022 Dobbs decision, it is rooted in that earlier era and is a reaction to the civil rights and feminist movements of the time. Back then, constitutional ideas about equality were shifting rapidly. After Brown v. Board, as civil rights lawyers pushed to enforce desegregation, anti-abortion activists developed their own concept of equality, not one rooted in history or systemic injustice, but in vulnerability. They argued that fetuses were America's most marginalized group, not because of discrimination, but because they were weak and voiceless. In their view, this — not race or gender — was the true concern of the Equal Protection Clause. Over the next half-century, these anti-abortion activists adapted fetal personhood to fit the anxieties of each era. In the 1980s, amid the 'tough on drugs' agenda, fetal personhood was reframed through the lens of criminal law. Anti-abortion leaders described the fetus as a 'victim of violence,' pushing for laws that punished pregnant women for drug use and cast abortion as a crime scene. By the 1990s, as support for women's rights grew, the movement worked to soften its image. Leaders began claiming they weren't punishing women, they were protecting them. Anti-abortion figures rebranded themselves as defenders of both women and fetuses, which they said were victims of a ruthless abortion industry, akin to Big Tobacco. By the early 2000s, the movement tapped into conservative legal networks like the Federalist Society and embraced originalist readings of the Constitution. They took notice when the Supreme Court began recognizing corporations as legal persons. If businesses could be people under the law, the thinking went, why not fetuses? In the 2010s, fetal personhood expanded again, this time co-opting the language of civil rights and religious liberty. It became an all-purpose vessel for conservative grievances, used to claim Christians were being persecuted, IVF clinics were committing genocide, and birth control amounted to state-sponsored murder. But for all its rebranding and strategic pivots, the movement remains deeply unpopular with the American public. Most Americans say criminalizing abortion is wrong. They don't believe frozen embryos are people. They don't want IVF banned or birth control criminalized. Still, Republican legislators in some states are aggressively pushing fetal personhood bills. Others have proposed 'abortion trafficking' laws, seeking to criminalize women who cross state lines for care by treating the fetus as a trafficked human being. So, how has this fringe idea gained so much traction since Dobbs, despite its deep unpopularity? Because the fetal personhood movement has stopped pretending it needs democracy. Instead of persuading the public, the movement is building legal machinery, counting on friendly prosecutors, ideological judges, and anti-democratic allies to do what voters won't. Ultimately, it's betting on five sympathetic Supreme Court justices. We see this in Texas, where prosecutors are trying to investigate abortion providers across state lines, not because those cases are likely to win, but because they could reach the Supreme Court. Though Donald Trump mostly avoided talking about abortion on the campaign trail, the legal infrastructure he helped build in his first term is still very much in motion. Most recently, Trump elevated fetal personhood in subtle but telling ways, one of them being his anti-trans executive order, which includes a coded reference to fetal personhood. The order defines a female as 'a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell' and a male as 'a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.' Aside from the dubiousness of the claim that sex can be determined at conception, Trump's referring to a fetus as a person from conception essentially legitimizes fetal personhood. Anti-abortion activists saw this language as a quiet but significant nod to federal recognition. House Speaker Mike Johnson even praised Trump for declaring, in his words, 'life as beginning at conception rather than birth.' Critics say it's all part of a broader strategy to push the federal courts toward recognizing fetal rights under the Constitution. The movement's biggest obstacle has always been the American people, but by aligning itself with authoritarian tactics, that's no longer seen as a barrier to their goals, or so they think. As Ziegler notes, 'It is more important than ever to think through what it means to value life, in the womb and for people who are pregnant — and to make sense of whether equality really requires punishment rather than support for the woman carrying a fetal life.' 'That's because regardless of what we mean by personhood — and whose rights or humanity it might erase — the truth is that fights over reproduction in the United States are just getting started,' she writes. 'And the meaning of equality well beyond the context of abortion is on the line.' This article was originally published on
Bloomberg
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Bloomberg Law: The Next Battle Over Abortion
Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis Law School and an expert in the law of reproductive rights, discusses her new book, "Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction." Trial attorney David Ring, a partner at Taylor & Ring, discusses the murder retrial of Karen Read. June Grasso hosts.
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
How the anti-abortion movement embraced fringe ‘abolitionists' and became more punitive
So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty. Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really 'always been a fetal-personhood movement' – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms. Fetal personhood is the belief that embryos and fetuses deserve the legal rights and protections afforded to people. If taken to its logical conclusion in US law, this belief would not only totally outlaw abortion, but also risk pitting the rights of fetuses against the rights of the women carrying them in all kinds of circumstances. In the first year after the US supreme court overturned Roe, at least 200 people were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies. Most of these cases involved charges of child endangerment, abuse or neglect – language that treats fetuses as children. A Guggenheim fellow who has published seven books on reproduction and abortion, Ziegler has long seen the fight for fetal personhood as the throughline in the anti-abortion movement's centuries-long history. In recent years, with Roe gone, she grew convinced that the movement was no longer willing to pull punches in that fight. 'The trajectory has been more and more punitive, more focused on saying: 'Justice for the fetus means punishing a larger group of people that encompasses not just doctors, but people who assist them, and potentially abortion seekers themselves,'' she said in an interview. Personhood, which was released Tuesday, argues that the anti-abortion movement did not have to be so punitive. While anti-abortion activists have never agreed on how to best implement fetal personhood, they over time started to take more cues from Republican politicians, whose own veneration of 'law and order' grew alongside its antagonism toward a social safety net. Those developments ultimately paved the way for the more extreme anti-abortion activists to grab more power within the movement. After Roe legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, anti-abortion activists organized in support of an amendment to the US constitution that would recognize embryos and fetuses as people. (The effort never gained the political traction it needed to become a serious possibility.) Around the same time, some activists broke with mainstream anti-abortion groups to push for policies that would offer more support for pregnant women, rather than just ban abortion. Yet the voices advocating for better daycare and housing for mothers faded away as the anti-abortion movement tightened its alliance with the Republican party. Anti-abortion activists understood that, by portraying fetuses as defenseless victims of the ultimate crime, they could energize conservative voters – and open their pockets. 'The Republican party, from the Reagan era onward, has really equated a kind of justice and equality with punishing wrongdoers,' Ziegler said. 'It's a natural fit for the anti-abortion movement: the more its fortunes relied on Republican politicians, the more it framed things the same way.' State-level bans on abortion still do not technically punish abortion patients. (Instead, it's abortion providers, long positioned by the movement as coercing or confusing women into the procedure, and sometimes the people who help them, who are at risk of criminal consequences.) But, over the last few years, self-described 'abortion abolitionists' have slowly migrated out of the fringes of the anti-abortion movement and moved towards its center. Unlike mainstream 'pro-lifers', 'abolitionists' believe that, if a fetus is a person and abortion is the murder of that person, women should be punished accordingly: as murderers. Neither 'pro-lifers' nor 'abolitionists' are particularly popular. After Roe's collapse enabled states to make their own abortion laws, several states – including GOP strongholds like Ohio and Missouri – passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights. According to Gallup, 85% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances, while a 2024 survey from the 19th News and SurveyMonkey found that 41% of Americans think 'a fetus has rights starting at conception that should be protected by the government.' Even people who support fetal personhood can have tangled, even contradictory views on the matter. Only 9% of people think that the government should restrict access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, even though IVF as it is currently practiced frequently involves the destruction or abandonment of embryos. None of the bills that allow abortion patients to be charged with homicide are likely to pass this year, but Ziegler doesn't think 'abolitionists' are going anywhere, for two reasons. First, the anti-abortion movement maintains a strong grip in southern Republican-dominated state legislatures, where many of these bills have emerged. Second, Ziegler believes that the anti-abortion movement is embracing 'a conviction that it matters less what voters think and more what judges think'. 'If you don't worry about what you're doing being unpopular, and you believe that ideological consistency, or even logical consistency, is paramount, you would be more inclined to go with an abolitionist argument, and you might worry less about that having political fallout in a politically uncompetitive state,' Ziegler said. 'You don't need to convince most Americans you're right. You only need to convince five justices on the supreme court.' With abortion bans proving deeply unpopular in the US, circumventing popular will has become a necessity for an increasingly hardline movement. And by relying on the courts rather than voters, the anti-abortion movement can afford to ignore voters' misgivings. The movement has abandoned its earlier goal of amending the US constitution to recognize fetal personhood; instead, the anti-abortion movement is now seeking to convince courts that the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of due process and equal protection, already recognizes embryos and fetuses as people from the moment of conception. It is, according to Ziegler, yet another sign of the movement's drift away from democratic norms. This interest in the 14th amendment is also something of an about-face for the anti-abortion movement, which is predominantly white and has had a convoluted relationship with race for more than a century. At the time that the amendment passed, as part of a post-civil war effort to recognize Black people's rights, anti-abortion leaders 'didn't want to talk about race because they weren't sure that people of color were persons with rights', Ziegler said. Over time, the anti-abortion movement began using the language of civil rights and affirmative action – but primarily to argue that fetuses are the greatest victim of discrimination. 'I think that's one of the reasons fetal personhood language has been resonant for so long,' Ziegler said of the movement's co-option of civil rights rhetoric. 'It gives people a way to talk about equality and a way to elevate somebody as a victim of discrimination in a way that makes sense to a largely white group of conservatives.' As Roe recedes further into the rearview mirror, Ziegler expects the movement to become even more committed to some of the most unpopular implications of fetal personhood, such as restricting on IVF. Although Republican politicians have shied away from limiting access to the treatment, the anti-abortion movement has grown more strident on the topic. Some of its leaders even condemned Donald Trump for his recent executive order supporting IVF. 'I think the anti-abortion movement is going to be still full steam ahead,' Ziegler said. 'There's an increasing sentiment in the movement that this is not about pleasing Republicans. This is not about pleasing voters. This is about the importance of this, ideologically, to the people involved.'
