HHS pushes fetal personhood in new grant guidelines

A recent funding notice from the Department of Health and Human Services  seems to contain a message for the anti-abortion movement: the administration hasn’t entirely forgotten them. The announcement offers applicants nearly $2 million in grant support to promote embryo adoption—and while the program isn’t new, it’s now couched in the fundamentalist language of fetal personhood.

“This revised grant language to call embryos ‘children’ may seem small, but it could have enormous consequences for abortion, IVF treatment, and birth control access for people nationwide,” Gretchen Borchelt, vice president for reproductive rights and health equity at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement.

Embryo adoption was the Christian right’s response to the rise in popularity of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in the early aughts. The fertility treatment involves generating far more embryos than any prospective parent is likely to use, since (as with natural conception) most fertilized eggs don’t survive, often leaving IVF patients with numerous frozen embryos.

Those embryos were sought after for stem cell research, which put some politicians on the right in a bind. While supporting legislation that moved stem cell research forward, President George W. Bush first established the federal embryo adoption grant program in 2002. Ever since, it’s been a bone that conservative officials have dangled in front of anti-abortion groups in hopes of taking the political edge off of their support for IVF. 

The Trump administration’s new funding announcement sweetens the pot for proponents of fetal personhood. The total funds have nearly doubled, and the notice not only uses the words “child” or “children” a total of 37 times, but specifically refers to the unused embryos as “children who already exist and are in need of a family.” It’s far more strident than the program’s previous framing, which is still available on the website of the HHS office that administers the funds.

This opportunity is also only available to those organizations that seek to distribute frozen embryos in the name of fetal personhood. It excludes the few secular groups in this field that refer to the practice as “embryo donation,” a more medical phrasing (you might donate a kidney versus putting your kidney up for adoption).

“There has always been this interest in setting as many precedents as you can for recognizing fetal personhood” among anti-abortion groups, “even in contexts that don’t directly bear on what abortion opponents are most interested in,” says Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis who studies reproductive rights and its opposition. 

But that might be all that the Christian right is getting out of this funding announcement. “Everyone is still looking to read tea leaves about what the Trump administration is going to do after the midterm,” Ziegler says. “I think the question with all of this is whether there’s actually ever any muscle behind it, or if it’s just feel-good talk for social conservatives so the administration can keep their support without actually doing anything.”

While Trump has rolled back key protections for reproductive care, according to many anti-abortion activists, the president hasn’t done nearly enough. Some have threatened to pull their support ahead of the midterms unless they see further action from the federal government on their agenda—which would then alienate a much wider swath of the country.

“The Trump administration sees the same polling everybody else does, which is to suggest that doing a lot of what the Christian right would want would be really unpopular,” Ziegler says. Public approval hasn’t necessarily stopped Trump before, but “I don’t think these are issues about which he’s really personally passionate.”

One sign that this isn’t more than messaging is that the anti-abortion movement isn’t really interested in embryo adoption anymore. Even among proponents, very few people were ultimately interested in giving away or adopting embryos, and when the process was relabeled as an adoption rather than a medical donation, it became even pricier and more arduous, involving home visits and legal fees. That’s unlikely to change. So while the addition of personhood language might be something anti-abortion activists can chew on, that’s about it. 

“It’s like running a playbook that worked in 2002 when the movement has moved much further to the right on this issue,” Ziegler says.

But perhaps the administration realizes it doesn’t need to do more. Where else will its firmest anti-abortion supporters go? 

“The alternative here to what is still objectively a pro-life and pro-family administration—and pro-life and pro-family president—is a party that ran on abortions with no restrictions whatsoever,” a White House official told Politico. “The choice here is very clear, I think, if you’re someone on the pro-life side of things.”