At least 10 states have introduced bills for the 2025 legislative session that would allow authorities to charge people who obtain abortions with homicide¹, marking a dramatic escalation in abortion law restrictions since January 2025. The case of a brain-dead woman in Georgia being kept on life support highlights how these “fetal personhood” laws are creating unprecedented medical and legal conflicts.
The surge in fetal personhood legislation represents the next frontier in abortion restrictions, with conservative lawmakers moving beyond banning the procedure to establishing embryos and fetuses as legal persons with constitutional rights. In January 2025, Representative Eric Burlison introduced federal legislation that would “implement equal protection under the 14th amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person”².
What Fetal Personhood Laws Actually Mean
Fetal personhood laws grant legal rights to embryos, fetuses, or fertilized eggs equivalent to those of born children. “The language of these laws assigns fetuses some kind of rights that we would generally ascribe to a human person,” explains Carter Sherman, reproductive health reporter for The Guardian³.
Georgia’s Republican Attorney General Chris Carr doesn’t think the state’s personhood law restricts medical options in the brain-dead woman’s case, stating “There is nothing in the LIFE Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death”⁴. However, Republican Georgia state Sen. Ed Setzler, who authored the LIFE Act, disagrees, believing Emory’s doctors acted appropriately by keeping the woman on life support⁴.
The confusion among lawmakers themselves demonstrates how these laws create legal chaos in medical settings. “If you elevate a fetus to the status of a person and grant it citizenship rights equal to that of a pregnant person, then now you have a clash of rights,” said Rebecca Kluchin, a history professor at California State University, Sacramento⁵.
The 2025 Legislative Push
States with Active Death Penalty for Abortions Bills in 2025
Ten states: Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, have introduced bills that would categorize abortion as homicide, with nine of those states allowing the death penalty for such charges. South Carolina’s “Prenatal Equal Protection Act” would make women who obtain abortions eligible for capital punishment, while Georgia’s version has attracted unprecedented support with 21 sponsors. These “abortion abolition” bills represent the most extreme anti-abortion legislation ever proposed in the United States.
“How Republican lawmakers in 10 states are pushing to make abortion punishable by death penalty, creating the most extreme anti-abortion legislation in U.S. history”
Federal momentum
Trump’s Executive Order 14168 already defines “female” and “male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces” reproductive cells², establishing federal recognition of life beginning at conception.
Criminal penalties escalating
Oklahoma’s House Bill 1008 would make abortion a felony crime for health care providers, punishable by up to $100,000 in fines and/or 10 years imprisonment⁶. Tennessee’s House Bill 26 declares “human life begins at fertilization” and makes mailing abortion materials punishable by up to $5 million under the Comstock Act⁶.
Real-World Medical Consequences
The impact extends far beyond abortion access. In Georgia, dozens of OB-GYNs have warned the state law interferes with patient care in a state with one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the U.S., where Black women are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women⁴.
“How could you criminalize a woman who goes on a walk and she trips, and she falls, and it causes a miscarriage,” asks Danaya C. Wright, constitutional law professor at the University of Florida. “You’re going to say that’s manslaughter?”⁷
The Alabama Supreme Court’s February 2024 ruling that frozen embryos are children created national chaos for IVF patients until the legislature hastily passed protective legislation. The backlash “underscored how many lawmakers hadn’t fully considered the far-reaching implications and legal bedlam that can be created by fetal personhood laws”⁵.
Enforcement and Criminalization Patterns
Georgia authorities have attempted to use a fetal-personhood law to bring criminal charges against a woman for how she handled a miscarriage, marking what appears to be the first time the state has used its six-year-old personhood law for prosecution⁸.
According to Pregnancy Justice, between 2006 and the end of Roe v. Wade, nearly 1,400 pregnant people were arrested for allegedly endangering “unborn life”⁹. With more personhood laws in effect, these numbers are expected to rise dramatically.
“When personhood language is in criminal codes, it can be used to investigate and criminalize pregnant people and their medical providers, especially when the person has experienced a negative pregnancy outcome like stillbirth or miscarriage,” warns Planned Parenthood Action Fund⁹.
The Broader Legal Strategy
Conservative lawmakers are using multiple approaches to establish fetal personhood:
Tax Benefits for Pregnant Taxpayers
A new Ohio bill would let taxpayers claim “conceived children” as dependents on their taxes. Ohio House Bill 87 allows couples to include “each child conceived, including each child conceived by assisted reproduction that has been placed inside the taxpayer or taxpayer’s spouse’s uterus” as dependents on yearly tax returns.
Meanwhile, Georgia already allows a $3,000 dependent tax exemption for any unborn child with a detectable heartbeat (typically around six weeks of pregnancy). Georgia taxpayers must be prepared to provide medical documentation if audited, though the deduction doesn’t automatically trigger an audit. Critics argue these measures establish legal precedent for fetal personhood rather than provide meaningful relief, as the complex requirements make them difficult to utilize.
Child Support in Kansas via House Bill 2062
Republican lawmakers in Kansas introduced a bill to guarantee child support payments to mothers from the moment of conception. Wichita Republican Rep. Susan Humphries called on legislators to override House Bill 2062, which creates what critics call “fetal personhood” language within a bill that cements child support payments for mothers based on pregnancy costs before a baby is born.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Eligibility
Oklahoma has enacted legislation that allows pregnant individuals to be included in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) calculations as if the fetus is a child in the household. This means that a pregnant person can receive a larger TANF benefit based on the presumed existence of a child, even before the child is born, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
This approach is part of a broader trend of “fetal personhood” measures where laws are being enacted that grant legal protections to unborn fetuses. In Oklahoma’s case, the state’s approach to TANF eligibility frames the benefits around the fetus, rather than the pregnant person. This aligns with how some states treat fetuses in wrongful death and fetal homicide bills.
While this legislation aims to provide increased financial assistance to pregnant individuals, critics like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argue that it’s a tactic to restrict reproductive rights. Critics suggest that framing eligibility around the fetus, rather than the pregnant person, can be a step towards further limiting access to abortion and other reproductive healthcare services.
“These bills often look, on their face, like they’re trying to be helpful to pregnant people,” said Carmel Shachar of Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. “But oftentimes the way they’re drafted, they’re almost impossible to take advantage of”.
Current Abortion Data Context
An estimated 1,038,000 abortions were provided by clinicians in states without total bans in 2024, a less than 1% increase from 2023¹¹. More than 169,000 US abortion patients traveled to other states to obtain care in 2023, representing 16% of all abortions provided in states without total bans¹¹.
In states with total bans, 63 clinics have stopped providing abortions, and doctors face criminal charges for providing abortion care in at least a dozen states¹². Arkansas, South Dakota, and Idaho reported zero or fewer than five abortions in 2023¹², though researchers question these statistics’ accuracy.
Medication abortions now account for 53.3% of all abortions nationally, increasing 129% from 2013 to 2022¹³, making them a primary target for personhood legislation.
What’s Next for Abortion Law
One goal of recent fetal personhood bills is to get a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, with the conservative bent of the current court creating an environment where lawmakers are saying, “Let’s try it”⁵.
The Heritage Foundation has gathered examples of abortion pills given to pregnant women without their consent and recommends states ban telemedicine and mail-order abortion pills¹⁴, providing a roadmap for future restrictions.
As legislative sessions continue throughout 2025, the collision between fetal personhood laws and medical reality will likely intensify. The Georgia case may be just the beginning of complex legal battles that will shape abortion law for years to come.
For those following these developments
Track your state’s legislative session through official state websites, and consult reproductive rights organizations for updates on pending legislation. The landscape of abortion law is changing rapidly, with new bills introduced weekly across multiple states.
References
- TIME: “Some States Consider Bills That Punish Abortion Patients” (March 18, 2025)
- Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy: “The Legal Consequences of the Fetal Personhood Movement” (March 4, 2025)
- NPR: “Abortion opponents push for ‘fetal personhood’ laws, giving rights to embryos” (April 4, 2024)
- NPR: “Does Georgia’s fetal ‘personhood’ law mean a pregnant woman must stay on life support?” (June 7, 2025)
- Stateline: “Conservatives push to declare fetuses as people, with far-reaching consequences” (July 31, 2024)
- Virginia Mercury: “Some states on track to restore abortion access, while others push for fetal rights in 2025” (January 2, 2025)
- The Independent Florida Alligator: “Florida’s fetal personhood bill raises concerns over criminalizing pregnancy” (March 29, 2025)
- National Partnership for Women & Families: “NEWS: A disturbing advance in fetal personhood” (April 10, 2025)
- Planned Parenthood Action Fund: “MEMO: The growing threat of ‘fetal personhood’ measures across the country” (March 19, 2024)
- Stateline: “GOP lawmakers push to charge women with homicide for seeking abortions” (March 6, 2025)
- Guttmacher Institute: “Abortion in the United States” (May 3, 2016, updated 2025)
- NPR: “Some red states report zero abortions. Researchers fear for data integrity” (February 13, 2025)
- CDC: “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2022” (November 27, 2024)
- Virginia Mercury: “Some states on track to restore abortion access, while others push for fetal rights in 2025” (January 2, 2025)
