Episode 99 -- Fetal Personhood
In Bed With The Right
Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan
4.8 • 661 Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2025
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fetal personhood is one of those doctrines that have moved from the fringes of the conservative legal movement (and even from the fringes of right wing theology) to the center. While it is not clear how much support there is at the US Supreme Court for the idea that fetuses are people and have rights under the 14th Amendment, this once-obscure doctrine has been filtering into abortion and pregnancy criminalization since the Dobbs decision. In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the strange history of this doctrine, and through its awful consequences for pregnant people or those who can become pregnant. (Content Warning: discussions of pregnancy loss and sexual violence)
Here is a list of the books we relied on in researching this episode -- all of these are very much worth your time:
Mary Ziegler, Persohood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction (2025)
Jennifer Holland, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (2020) (you can also watch a 2021 conversation between Adrian, Jennifer Holland and Melissa Murray here)
Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion was a Crime (new edition 2022)
Michelle Goodwin, Policing the Womb (2022)
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997)
Pregnancy Justice, Pregnancy as a Crime: A Preliminary Report on the First Year After Dobbs
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Adrienne Daugh. |
| 0:08.6 | And I'm Weaveredon. |
| 0:09.8 | And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right. |
| 0:13.7 | So, Adrian, what do you know about fetal personhood? |
| 0:19.0 | Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things that has been shaping our legal landscape for |
| 0:25.7 | some time now, and I have some sense that that's kind of new. |
| 0:29.3 | I know the 19th century fairly well. |
| 0:31.3 | I know 20th century intellectual history fairly well. |
| 0:33.4 | I know that the idea that a fetus is, you know, a tiny person and that it should have rights is a pretty new one, is my impression. |
| 0:43.2 | And especially as a legal strategy, it was sort of understood as kind of the most radical fringe of the anti-abortion movement. |
| 0:50.1 | That hasn't stopped it from being probably one of the most ascendant aspects of that movement. |
| 0:55.7 | Does that seem about right? |
| 0:57.4 | Yeah, I think that's a decent summation. |
| 1:00.0 | Fetal personhood is an idea, right? |
| 1:03.0 | And today we're going to be trying to trace the history of that idea, both in culture and in the law. |
| 1:09.9 | And the short version is that it's the notion that fetuses and also embryos, which is maybe something we should go into, are persons, the same way that you and I are persons, right? |
| 1:19.7 | Or corporations. |
| 1:22.6 | And this has kind of become something that has come to the forefront of the anti-abortion movement and the sort |
| 1:29.4 | of evolving legal landscape since stops, right? So lots of states have laws on the books that either |
| 1:38.0 | formally or in effect classify fetuses and embryos as persons or as person-like. |
| 1:45.1 | This was a major push of the anti-abortion movement during the Roe era to get these laws passed. |
| 1:51.0 | And now it's a new landscape because with Roe in place, there was an upper limit to the ability of those laws to be enforced, right? |
... |
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