Fetal Personhood: From Women to Disposable Toys in a Resurgent Patriarchal Era
In the tightening grip of “fetal personhood”, entire states push women to the brink, treating their bodies as dispensable objects, their lives subordinate, their futures erased, this isn’t just regression, it's a brutal declaration, as cruel as it gets: women are toys, property of unborn life, puppets to a legal system resurrecting centuries of control.
When a Fetus Becomes Every Woman’s Master
Since Dobbs v. Jackson dismantled national abortion rights, dozens of states have enacted laws granting embryos and fetuses full legal personhood, in Georgia, when 30‑year‑old Adriana Smith was declared brain‑dead at two months pregnant, doctors,- bound by fetal personhood statutes - forced her family to endure months of life support to preserve a fetus against their wishes and at immense emotional and financial cost.
This is not benevolence, it is state‑sanctioned coercion, where women’s autonomy is erased, and their bodies turned into biological incubators.
Fetal Personhood Creep: A Legal Weapon
As Pregnancy Justice explains, fetal personhood is a radical doctrine granting fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses the same rights as persons, planted in statutes, court decisions, constitutional amendments, and criminal codes, the consequence? Forced medical interventions, prosecutions for miscarriage or substance use, threats to IVF access, and denial of life‑saving obstetric care, all under the guise of “protecting” unborn life.
The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice warns of stealthy “personhood creep”, incremental legal shifts expanding fetal rights and crushing pregnant people’s autonomy.
Punishing the Pregnant
In at least a dozen states, post‑Dobbs legislators have drafted bills to treat abortion as homicide and allow prosecution of women, even proposing death penalties in extreme cases, these laws stem from abortion‑abolitionist ideology, emboldened by faith in courts over popular support.
Consider Alabama’s Marshae Jones, charged with manslaughter after losing a fetus in a shooting - despite being the victim - not the perpetrator or the woman arrested after having a miscarriage, because it was stated that "they didn't have any proofs it was natural", this shows us it was never about our bodies and protecting us, as women, as human beings.
This reversal of justice is a direct consequence of fetal‑personhood frameworks that criminalize women for tragedies beyond their control.
The Irony of a Backward March
Our society proclaims progress, yet these laws resurrect pre‑modern visions of women as reproductive vessels, female agency is shrunken under fetal sovereignty, women -especially poor, black, and marginalized women - are most targeted: forced arrests, imprisonment, denial of abortion and even maternal care in emergencies.
Black women are far more likely to be criminalized for outcomes related to pregnancy, a 2023 study by Pregnancy Justice found that Black women accounted for over 50% of arrests related to pregnancy outcomes, despite representing only about 14% of the U.S. population.
Laws based on fetal personhood (e.g., criminalizing miscarriages or drug use during pregnancy) have disproportionately been enforced on low-income women of color, especially Black women.
A 2025 New Yorker review chronicles how fetal personhood rhetoric now extends to IVF, citizenship, and constitutional rights, embryos in IVF clinics suspended operations in response to personhood rulings, terrifying collateral damage for reproductive freedom.
A Poetic Yet Stark Warning
Imagine a world where women’s bodies are proxies for unborn rights, where maternal death can be postponed, prolonged, prosecuted, where abortion is redefined as murder, and miscarriage opens the door to criminal charges. This dystopia is now our fragile present.
We are hurtling backwards: from bodily autonomy to biological colonization, the line between state surveillance and reproductive policing blurs, women become extinct toys, their worth defined only by compliance, their humanity erased.
Life, Selectively Defined
And amid all this forced reverence for “life”, there’s a haunting silence where it matters most, the same lawmakers who criminalize miscarriages and ban abortion refuse to regulate the sale of assault weapons - even after countless children have been gunned down in schools.
How can a government claim to protect life when it won’t even protect the living?
Gun control remains elusive, despite the carnage, in 2024 alone, the U.S. endured over 600 mass shootings, many in schools, killing children who had already been born, loved, named, and dreaming, but no national ban, no constitutional amendments for their personhood.
The message is terrifyingly clear: it was never about children, it was never about life, it was always about control of women, of bodies, of futures.
Resistance, Hope, Reclamation
Yet resistance gathers, reproductive justice advocates insist this fight is about more than abortion, it is about autonomy, dignity, healthcare, and racial justice, the reproductive justice framework refuses to treat women merely as vessels, it centers their full lives and intersecting identities.
We must denounce fetal personhood at every turn: judge, bill, legal interpretation, and fiercely defend that no woman ever be forced into life support to serve fetal rights, no mother be criminalized for loss, no body be property of the state.
Let this stand: women are more than incubators, they are living, breathing and dreaming subjects, all of them, with rights that cannot be eclipsed by embryonic sovereignty.
Sources:
https://apnews.com/article/80b463f0f398d5a9c62f8888739025cb
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/23/anti-abortion-fetal-personhood
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/personhood-mary-ziegler-book-review
https://www.pregnancyjusticeus.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Fetal-personhood.pdf
https://time.com/5616371/alabama-woman-charged-criminalizing-pregnancy/
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