If the architects of Project 2025 get their way, the U.S. government would anoint the unborn with unmatched and never-before-recognized rights over all persons already born.
For years, abortion opponents have attempted to enshrine into state and federal law the Christian fundamentalist belief that fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses are separate persons with full legal rights. So far, ballot measures specifically and explicitly seeking to accomplish this goal have failed because of the deeply unpopular implications of this legal fiction on access to abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization. That such measures could make a wide range of criminal laws applicable to pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes has also discouraged support for these so-called personhood measures.
This may be why the conservative Project 2025 policy agenda avoids “personhood” language. But a closer look at this detailed plan for the next conservative president reveals their goal to give fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses more rights than any born person and to use the protection of the “unborn” as cover for government action denying women and all people with the capacity for pregnancy equal status as full constitutional persons.
In a recent statement, Lawyers Defending American Democracy warned, “The sweeping recommendations throughout Project 2025 would effectively establish fetal personhood through agency rules and regulations, and without congressional legislation or vote.
“Under the doctrine of fetal personhood, any abortion—no matter how early in pregnancy or how endangered the mother’s life might be—would constitute murder, with no exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s health. In vitro fertilization (IVF) and other procedures could similarly be crimes. Even automobile accidents resulting in miscarriage could be manslaughter. Other consequences are easy to imagine.”
A Longstanding and Unpopular Idea Repackaged in Project 2025
The idea of “fetal personhood” has failed to gain majority support, even in conservative states such as North Dakota. In 2011, Mississippians voted down Proposition 26, a personhood measure that would have changed the state Constitution by redefining the word person to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” Similarly, so-called personhood measures were repeatedly trounced in Colorado.
Perhaps this is why Project 2025’s 887-page policy agenda largely avoids the word “personhood.” But not always. According to Project 2025, a Biden-Harris administration rule that protects patient information related to reproductive health care treats “patients in the womb” as “nonpersons contrary to law.”
But, mostly without using the term “person,” Project 2025 lays out a plan for the next conservative president to use the federal government’s executive powers to enact nationwide policies that treat fertilized eggs as persons without needing to rely on courts or legislatures to achieve their goal, overriding the majority of Americans who oppose these measures.
At the same time, Project 2025 makes clear that dismantling women’s rights and denying them personhood is central to its policy agenda. Key to accomplishing this is the Project’s call to protect the “unborn in every jurisdiction in America.” Moreover, Project 2025 proclaims, “From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race or abilities.” Missing from this litany is “sex.” In other words, one’s humanity” does depend on “sex” (assigned at birth).
Project 2025 demands that the next conservative president “work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support.” It directs federal agencies, including HHS, to serve “all Americans from conception to natural death.”
On the international front, Project 2025 directs the U.S. Agency for International Development to “protect and propel all members of society—women, children and men—from conception to natural death.”
It is possible to imagine an administration with a true commitment to life—one that promotes health and well-being, reduces maternal mortality and works to feed, clothe, house and educate all children. But Project 2025 would not promote life. Instead, Project 2025 would undermine public health, destroy and degrade women’s lives and inevitably lead to their criminalization.
Project 2025 equates abortion with homicide, using terms that invite comparisons to massive, international war crimes. It describes Roe v. Wade as facilitating “the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children.” In a section on abortion pills, Project 2025 describes mifepristone as causing the “death of the unborn child” and misoprostol as inducing a “delivery of the dead child,” and later describes these extremely well-studied and safe medications as “fatally unsafe for unborn children.”
Project 2025 Vastly Expands State Power Over Women
The growing efforts to reify the fiction of fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as separate constitutional persons have already provided the basis for a marked increase in arrests of pregnant women.
Rather than put into place policies that recognize that we can’t protect future life without protecting the lives of those who get pregnant and give birth to that life, Project 2025 and many of its endorsing organizations advocate policies that jeopardize pregnant women’s rights to life health.
Project 2025 argues that the federal law EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) protects “unborn children” in a manner that would permit hospitals to deny women emergency abortion care necessary to protect their health and lives.
Project 2025 promotes the use of state power to control pregnant women and use their bodies to gestate the “unborn,” all in the name of protecting fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses. Project 2025 would impose involuntary servitude on pregnant women by requiring them to carry every pregnancy to term, cruelly forcing them to experience pain, harm to their health, near death or actual death as well as moral injury and violations of their religious values and beliefs.
Project 2025 would allow states to prevent pregnant women from traveling, working, exercising or engaging in any activity believed to create a risk to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses. This personhood fiction could result in women being forced into cesarean surgery or detained during pregnancy for disagreeing with their healthcare providers’ recommendations.
The result? People are already dying. And in states restricting access to reproductive healthcare, both maternal and infant mortality rates have spiked.
A Super, Uber Class of “Persons”
Project 2025 repeatedly refers to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as children. In a section objecting to the COVID-19 vaccine, which they claim was developed using “aborted fetal cell lines,” Project 2025 states that “there is never any justification for ending a child’s life as part of research.” Later, they declare, “Research using human embryonic stem cells also involves the destruction of human life and should not be subsidized with taxpayer dollars.”
Project 2025 would demean all people by giving fetal cell lines, fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses more rights than any born person. We know this because no actual person has the right to use the body of another person without the other person’s consent.
In other words, even assuming fertilized eggs are separate and independent persons, why would they have the right to take over and use another person’s body in such an intimate and invasive way? In no other context can the state force citizens to donate their organs to another human.
No actual child has the right to force a parent or sibling to undergo surgery or any other medical procedure for their benefit or to force any other person to risk their lives and health for their benefit. Yet, according to Project 2025, the U.S. government should anoint the unborn with unmatched and never-before-recognized rights over all persons already born.
This is why we must understand Project 2025 as the culmination of the radical personhood agenda, launched in the 1970s, significantly advanced in 2022 by the Supreme Court decision overturning of Roe v. Wade and now poised to be fully achieved if Donald Trump is elected.
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