Personhood Measures
Issue Brief
Overview
In their efforts to restrict or ban certain types of reproductive health care, opponents of abortion have long worked to incorporate an ideological view of personhood into different areas of the law. However, since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned the protections set by Roe v. Wade, the idea of personhood has been invoked in legislation directly designed to criminalize, restrict, or outright ban reproductive health care. It’s important that legislators and the public understand the implications of conferring legal personhood status upon fertilized eggs (also known as zygotes), embryos, or fetuses on access to abortion care, contraception, fertility treatments, and many other types of health care.
What Are Personhood Laws?
Laws that attempt to confer personhood upon a zygote from the time of fertilization intend to apply all the rights available to human beings after birth to zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. These laws are found in different contexts, such as criminal statutes, tax codes, inheritance laws, and child abuse laws, and were central in strategies to overturn Roe before the decision in Dobbs.
What Are the Risks of Imbedding Personhood Measures in Reproductive Health Care Legislation?
Conferring personhood upon a zygote allows policy makers to argue that a zygote, embryo, or fetus has all the same constitutional rights and protections as a living person, enabling legislators to incorporate their own ideological viewpoints and biases into laws that should be based solely on science and evidence. The rights of pregnant people aren’t considered or protected in the context of personhood laws; in fact, these laws are often applied in disparate ways to marginalized populations and used to impose criminal liability to pregnant people’s conduct and decisions with respect to their own health and to health care provided by clinicians. Personhood measures effectively replace the rights of a pregnant person with the rights of the zygote, embryo, or fetus, limiting essential health care for pregnant people and making their care subordinate to that of the zygote, embryo, or fetus. People experiencing pregnancy complications can be forced to wait for needed medical care or even denied needed care outright to avoid affecting an embryo or fetus.
Considering an embryo or a fetus to legally be a person threatens the autonomy of pregnant people who need to terminate a pregnancy and leads to the criminalization of health care professionals attempting to provide evidence-based, essential health care to pregnant patients. It also drives a wedge into the patient–physician relationship by requiring physicians to assess and treat patients according to legislation based on ideology rather than science, medicine, and the individual patient in front of them, giving legislators and the courts significant power over decisions made in the exam room.
While personhood measures are often employed as a method of attacking abortion care, they don’t just threaten abortion or pregnancy care: they also have a direct impact on embryonic stem cell research, infertility treatments such as IVF, and treatments for cancer and other conditions. Even access to emergency contraception and other contraceptive methods can be denied based on ideology and misinformation about how contraception works rather than objective scientific understanding.
Recommendations
ACOG opposes any proposals, laws, or policies that attempt to confer personhood upon a zygote, embryo, or fetus; so-called personhood laws and their many iterations; and any other statutes that attach criminal liability to the conduct of pregnant people with respect to their own health or the conduct of clinicians providing care. ACOG urges the repeal and reversal of these policies because of the harm they inflict.