One of Donald Trump’s new executive orders, which claims there are only two genders, quietly incorporates tenets of fetal personhood – the legal doctrine, pushed by the anti-abortion movement, that life begins at conception and that embryos and fetuses therefore deserve full legal rights and protections.
“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” reads the order, which was issued just hours after Trump took office on Monday. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
The words “at conception” have set off alarm bells among abortion rights supporters. If fully enacted, fetal personhood would have sweeping repercussions for all US law; not only would it outlaw abortion nationwide, but it could even lead governments to treat abortion as murder and treat people who undergo the procedure as murderers.
“I don’t think it was a mistake. I don’t think it was a coincidence. I think this was an intentional way to continue to normalize the idea that embryos are people,” said Dana Sussman, senior vice-president of Pregnancy Justice, a reproductive justice group that tracks efforts to enshrine fetal personhood into law.
“This is yet another attempt to codify it in one form or another.”
During the campaign, Trump veered between taking credit for engineering the supreme court conservative majority that overturned Roe v Wade and claiming that he didn’t want to implement a national abortion ban. But the 2024 Republican platform evoked fetal personhood, stressing Republicans’ commitment to “the issue of life” and suggesting that fetuses are included in the 14th amendment’s guarantee that “no person can be denied life or liberty without due process”.
Advocates of fetal personhood hope to ultimately bring a case to the supreme court that will lead the justices to declare that the 14th amendment applies from the moment of conception. (The 14th amendment also protects birthright citizenship, which Trump is now attempting to end.)
Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis, School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction, stressed that the executive order did not establish new protections or legal status for embryos and fetuses.
“It’s unclear if this is Trump starting down a road towards much bolder steps on abortion or IVF or if this is just Trump throwing anti-abortion insiders a bone that most readers wouldn’t necessarily understand,” said Ziegler, who studies the legal history of reproduction.
But, she added: “It’s always a big deal when you have something, a seed like that, planted in federal law that someone could maybe make something out of later.”
In the weeks and days leading up to Trump’s return to the White House, abortion rights supporters feared that the new president would take steps to cut off access to the procedure, such as by using a 19th-century anti-vice law to ban the mailing of abortion-related equipment or ordering the FDA to roll back its approval of a common abortion pill.
So far, Trump has not yet taken decisive action on the issue. However, his administration did seemingly dispose of the website reproductiverights.gov, which included information about access to abortion pills and abortion coverage.
