Fetuses Can Be ‘People’ in Georgia Now. Here’s What It Means for the Future of Abortion.

Georgia isn’t just the latest state to ban abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturn last month. It’s also the latest state to advance one of the anti-abortion movement’s greatest goals: to legally redefine embryos and fetuses as people, granting them rights and protections that may even outstrip those given to pregnant people.

On Wednesday, hours after a federal appeals court paved the way for Georgia to ban most abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy later this summer, the court stepped in yet again and let Georgia’s abortion ban take effect imminently. Abortion access is now gone across almost all of the South and is rapidly disappearing in the Midwest.

“This is a highly unorthodox action that will immediately push essential abortion care out of reach for patients beyond the earliest stages of pregnancy,” read a joint statement from the ACLU, the ACLU of Georgia, Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Southeast, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Across the state, providers are now being forced to turn away patients who thought they would be able to access abortion, immediately changing the course of their lives and futures.”

But the legal repercussions of this ban will ripple far beyond abortion. Legally recognizing fetuses as “people” would likely dramatically rewrite enormous swaths of U.S. law.

“Fetal personhood is kind of an infinitely complicated topic with potentially infinite unintended consequences, because once you recognize a fetus as a person, they could have rights in all kinds of contexts,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at University of California, Davis, School of Law who studies the legal history of reproduction, told VICE News shortly after the Georgia ban was first passed in 2019. (Until Roe’s fall, it was blocked by a court challenge.) “So you would have to work out what it meant for everything from inheritance law to tax law to civil liabilities rules to criminal law.”

Tax law will certainly be impacted by the Georgia ban, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Technically, abortion is outlawed once a fetal “heartbeat” can be heard, normally at around six weeks of pregnancy. (Despite the law declaring this sound a “heartbeat,” the embryo does not have a developed heart at that stage of pregnancy.) At that point, people can claim their fetus on their state income taxes as a dependent, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

People can also file for child support at the point in pregnancy, while state officials must include the fetus in population determinations. 

In 2019, one Republican legislator told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that private accountants had estimated that the ban could cost the state between $10 million and $20 million in tax dollars. However, state officials didn’t perform a formal evaluation of the potential cost.

Georgia is far from the only state with “personhood provisions” embedded in its once-dormant abortion laws. Earlier this month, an Arizona judge blocked that state’s “personhood” law, ruling it was too vague to enforce.

Abortion-rights supporters in Georgia had also sought to argue that their law’s definition of “personhood” was unconstitutionally vague. The law uses a domino effect to redefine fetuses as people. First, it redefines “[n]atural person” to include “any human being including an unborn child.” Then, it goes on to redefine “an unborn child” as “a member of the species of Homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb.” 

But in its ruling Tuesday, the 11th Circuit rejected that argument about vagueness—although the three-judge panel also admitted, “There might be vague applications of that definition in other provisions of the Georgia Code.”

As abortion bans roll out across the country and anti-abortion legislators, freed from Roe’s protections, rush to push their agenda, states are likely to see even more “fetal personhood” measures and even more arcane applications of these laws. Earlier this month, a Texas woman tried to get out of a traffic ticket by arguing that, because she was pregnant, she was entitled to use the HOV lane.