Shortly after Donald Trump took office on January 20, several extreme anti-abortion bills were filed in the House of Representatives, including a fetal personhood bill.
Filed by some of the most hardline anti-abortion representatives in Congress, one bill —HR 722—stood out as particularly drastic. HR 722 seeks to codify into law what is colloquially known as fetal personhood. This is the idea that a human being exists from the moment of conception, granting the fetus the same legal rights as a person.
While many people flagged the bills—especially HR 722—as extremely concerning, experts believe it’s not time for pro-choice advocates to panic just yet.
“There is no way [these bills] can pass the Senate, and maybe no way they can pass the House,” Robert M. Shrum, a political strategist and the director of the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, tells Glamour.
Sonia Suter, a professor at George Washington University Law School, agrees.
“I think there's no question that there are those who want to push a personhood bill, but I don't think they're going to have the votes for that,” she says.
Glamour consulted with Shrum and Suter about what these bills mean, what the authors are trying to do, and what we should be paying attention to as the Trump administration moves forward.
What does the bill say?
The most prominent of these bills, HR 722, filed by Republican Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri, would “implement equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person,” aka fetal personhood. There were 69 cosponsors on the bill, all of them Republican.
Wait, what is fetal personhood?
It’s an extreme anti-abortion concept that gives all the legal rights to an embryo as any other human being. Basically, as soon as sperm meets egg and becomes an embryo, the resulting fetus is a child, with the same protections.
The problems with this sort of dogma are obvious, as it essentially means that the fetus is a separate, legally-protected entity inside of the pregnant person. As the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice puts it, “fetal personhood directly challenges the rights of women and anyone capable of pregnancy and creates a direct conflict between pregnant people's rights and those of so-called ‘unborn children.’”
It also introduces a host of other legal issues. Remember how Alabama shut down IVF procedures temporarily last year because of a court ruling that said embryos are “extrauterine children?” (after a national outcry, a bill to protect IVF in the state was subsequently passed). A fetal personhood bill would similarly put these sorts of procedures in jeopardy.
What are the other bills introduced?
While many people are specifically outraged about HB 722, it's only one of several anti-abortion legislation introduced in the past few weeks.
These include HR 629, which would ban medication abortion (19 co-sponsors), HR 795, which would prevent pregnancy from being “treated as an illness,” (8 cosponsors) and HR 682, which would ban abortion after a fetal “heartbeat” is detected (37 cosponsors).
Will these bills get traction?
Experts say it’s highly unlikely, essentially because lawmakers know how unpopular they would be. A majority of Americans, 63%, support legal abortion, and even in red states legislation to codify abortion rights have overwhelmingly passed since the fall of Roe.
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