Trump’s executive order on gender uses language pointing to ‘fetal personhood’
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Words ‘at conception’ in order gesture to push by anti-abortion movement to give embryos and fetuses legal rights. One of Donald Trump’s new executive orders, which claims there are only two genders, quietly incorporates tenets of fetal personhood – the legal doctrine, pushed by the anti-abortion movement, that life begins at conception and that embryos and fetuses therefore deserve full legal rights and protections.
“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” reads the order, which was issued just hours after Trump took office on Monday. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”.
The words “at conception” have set off alarm bells among abortion rights supporters. If fully enacted, fetal personhood would have sweeping repercussions for all US law; not only would it outlaw abortion nationwide, but it could even lead governments to treat abortion as murder and treat people who undergo the procedure as murderers.
“I don’t think it was a mistake. I don’t think it was a coincidence. I think this was an intentional way to continue to normalize the idea that embryos are people,” said Dana Sussman, senior vice-president of Pregnancy Justice, a reproductive justice group that tracks efforts to enshrine fetal personhood into law.
“This is yet another attempt to codify it in one form or another.”. During the campaign, Trump veered between taking credit for engineering the supreme court conservative majority that overturned Roe v Wade and claiming that he didn’t want to implement a national abortion ban. But the 2024 GOP platform evoked fetal personhood, stressing Republicans’ commitment to “the issue of life” and suggesting that fetuses are included in the 14th amendment’s guarantee that “no person can be denied life or liberty without due process”.
