Fetal personhood and the anti-freedom Republicans

I’m not sure how we got to the point where comedians are some of our best political commentators. Maybe a bit of dark humor makes it easier to keep paying attention when there’s so much bad news to digest.

John Oliver’s recent show exploring the concept of fetal personhood — and the horrifying consequences when that concept is put into law — demonstrated that he is one of the best of our comedians-turned-explainers.

Personhood advocates are the hard-core, no-compromises wing of the anti-abortion movement, insisting that fertilized eggs deserve full legal and constitutional rights from the moment of conception. A defining trait is their opposition to any exceptions for rape or incest in laws banning abortion.

Not long ago, these were considered fringe positions even within the pro-life movement. But anti-abortion extremism has increasingly become the norm among today’s Republican politicians — even though voters often reject it when given the chance. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has pushed legislation to enshrine in law his belief that life begins at conception.

And, as Oliver noted, once the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority overturned Roe v. Wade, all the guardrails have been eliminated . That has meant more women being brutalized by the legal system in states with abortion bans.

The consequences of politicians defining a fertilized egg as a legal person deserving the full protection of the law are far-reaching. In states that treat the rights of an embryo or fetus as predominant, pregnant women lose their agency as human beings. Instead, they are treated, in Oliver’s words, as “incubators” — or, in the words of an anti-abortion politician he quoted, “hosts.”

Women have suffered grievous harm, and some have died , because they were denied urgently needed lifesaving care because doctors and hospitals feared persecution by anti-abortion zealots if they carried out emergency abortions.

Oliver highlighted the case of a Wisconsin woman who had engaged in drug use but stopped once she realized she was pregnant; officials arrested her and put her in prison to “protect” the fetus she was carrying — as if the stress of being in jail and solitary confinement did not carry its own health risks.

Other women who lose pregnancies may have their grief compounded by criminal investigations into whether they may did something to cause a miscarriage. About one-quarter of pregnancies end in miscarriage, so that’s a lot of opportunities for intrusive government officials to traumatize women and their families needlessly.

These abuses of power make it clear that anti-abortion strategists were lying when they said for so many years that they were not interested in punishing women. It turns out that they are very interested in punishing women.

Princeton University Professor Robert George — one of the most prominent anti-abortion and anti-gay and transgender advocates in the country — filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case challenging Roe v. Wade. He urged the Supreme Court to rule that “prenatal persons” are persons under the 14th Amendment from the moment of conception. States should be required to treat abortion as homicide, he argued, adding that Congress would have to enforce such a ruling “if states failed in their duties.”

Personhood laws also threaten to criminalize some common forms of birth control as well as in-vitro fertilization techniques that are widely used by couples facing fertility challenges. A 2024 Alabama Supreme Court ruling declared that a couple’s frozen embryos, which someone had allegedly negligently destroyed, must be treated as persons for purposes of a wrongful death lawsuit in state court.

The relentlessness of anti-abortion advocates and politicians has threatened other tools that empower women and families, like apps that track menstrual cycles. Once Roe v. Wade was overturned and Republican politicians started passing ever-more-draconian abortion bans, women have been rightly concerned about whether data from period-tracking apps could be misused by aggressive prosecutors.

In other words, the same movement that tells women their primary purpose is to have lots of babies is taking steps to make it harder for many women to have children.

That same disconnect was evident in the way some right-wing activists freaked out when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) decided to speak with admirable openness about her decision to freeze some of her eggs, another step many women take to preserve the option of becoming parents.

It is undeniable that Republican politicians have become increasingly hostile to freedom, individual rights, and bodily autonomy, adopting Christian nationalists’ eagerness to use government power to impose their worldview on all of us.

We see it in the cruelty of Republicans’ aggressive attacks on transgender people. We see it in the religious-right’s energetic campaign to overturn marriage equality. And we see it in the expansive efforts to censor books and classroom materials and impose right-wing ideology on libraries and museums.

We also see it in the eagerness of Republican politicians like Ken Paxton to distort the truth and try to score political points , as he has by loudly inserting himself in a high-profile surrogacy dispute.

The last thing any American should want is some cynical politician like Paxton inserting himself into families’ most difficult moments and consequential decisions. It sounds like a sick joke, but it is all too commonplace — and deadly serious.

Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way .