'Personhood' argues fetal rights are the next frontier of the anti-abortion movement

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Mary Ziegler is a law professor at UC Davis and a leading scholar on the abortion debate. In her new book Personhood, she argues that the anti-abortion movement's ultimate goal is fetal personhood, which would give fetuses and embryos the rights of people under the Constitution. Ziegler's book makes the case that the history of this movement is crucial to our understanding of where the abortion fight is headed next. In today's episode, Ziegler talks with Here & Now's Tiziana Dearing about the legal meaning of fetal personhood, the way conservatives might reimagine constitutional equality, and whether this debate amounts to a new Civil War.

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Transcript

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0:48.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Mary Ziegler is a professor at
0:53.2	UC Davis who thinks big picture about the anti-abortion movement.
0:57.4	And while that movement is a big tent, one of the loudest voices is arguing for fetal personhood.
1:04.0	Ziegler's new book is a history of that argument. It's titled Personhood, the new Civil War over reproduction.
1:10.2	And she's not being hyperbolic when she uses that term, civil war, to describe this
1:14.8	fight. She's being pretty literal. Ziegler explains why to hear now as Tiziana Deering.
1:20.5	After the break.
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