Trump’s Executive Order on Gender Includes an Attack on Abortion Rights

The annual March for Life, which took place in Washington D.C. this past Friday, is the homing ground for some of the most zealous believers in the anti-abortion cause. Every year, attendees flood the streets, waving signs emblazoned with slogans like “Abortion is Murder” and “Defund Planned Parenthood” and “We are the Pro-Life Generation.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But this year, some activists were skeptical heading into the march. Donald Trump had spent the campaign insisting that he didn’t want major anti-abortion initiatives from the federal level. And when the president addressed the crowd with a prerecorded video, and Vice President JD Vance delivered live remarks, it did little to dent the dispirited mood of those who had been looking for a big anti-abortion payoff for helping send both men to the White House.

And then, Mike Johnson took the stage, and the vibe shifted. The House Speaker claimed a massive victory for the anti-abortion movement, citing two small lines in an unrelated executive order from earlier this week. 

“I don’t know if you saw [Trump’s] executive order on gender,” he crowed to the thunderous applause of the crowd below, “But it defines life as beginning at conception rather than birth!”

Johnson’s remarks confirmed the worst fears of many reproductive rights advocates: the Republicans (federally and in the states) will be eyeing aggressive restrictions on reproductive rights by leaning on personhood, the religious idea that life begins at conception and rights would be applied accordingly. And they have started their attack by sneaking inaccurate language about gender and personhood into Trump’s “Biological Truth” executive order.

This wasn’t a shock to those of us who have fought for protecting reproductive rights for decades. But it was a major change from the past year. 

The 2024 election had seemed to mark a turning point in the roiling culture wars that so often define partisan lines. For the first time in decades, Republicans avoided the topic of abortion while on the trail. Sensing Republicans’ vulnerability on the issue, Democrats flooded the airwaves with ads attacking their opponents for the fall of Roe v. Wade and promising more to come. GOP front liners, in response, issued straight-to-camera videos promising not to mess with reproductive rights. Candidate Trump went out of his way to declare he would not sanction a federal abortion ban. 

Instead, the Republican party opened a new front spending $220 million relentlessly attacking trans people, claiming they were trying to erase and endanger women. It followed then that Trump’s first executive order was on gender, pronouncing that sex is immutable and that there are two of them.

The order was bad enough at face value, designed to vilify and terrify trans people under the guise of protecting women. But hidden inside the section on “policy and definitions” were two words that Johnson now paraded triumphantly: that sex was assigned “at conception.” In other words, personhood.

The implications of personhood are radical–ranging from eliminating in vitro fertilization (IVF) to prosecuting miscarriages, to embryos being able to have standing in court. Perhaps most chilling, personhood would require that doctors weigh a fetus’ life as equal to the woman carrying it when making medical determinations. 

Voters have soundly rejected the idea every time it has been on the ballot, including in deep red states like Mississippi. But some of the state abortion bans put in place after the fall of Roe contain personhood-like language. The Trump executive order is the first time the concept is stated so plainly in a federal decree. 

For now, some legal experts warn against panic over the Trump order. Steven Vladek, professor of law at Georgetown and CNN legal analyst tells me that“the executive order reflects a clumsy effort to define what genders are, not when life begins.” The order, by itself, doesn’t do “anything to move the needle on that issue.” He added, though, that Trump’s order could be “an ominous sign that something similar may be coming down the pike with respect to life.”

But others weren’t so sanguine. “The administration is trying to lay the groundwork for defining a fetus as a person beginning at conception. They will likely try to insert this language in more regulations, bills, and judicial arguments in attempts to expand its use,” explains Jill Habig, founder and President of the Public Rights Project, a national nonprofit that works with cities and states to enforce civil rights. “If fetal personhood were to become the law of the land, it would eviscerate access to abortion in every state as well as many birth control forms and fertility treatments like IVF.”  

Right-wing leaders, for their part, are taking victory laps. Kristan Hawkins, the influential president of Students for Life proclaimed on X, “BREAKING: President Trump’s executive order that proclaims that there are only TWO GENDERS also recognizes that human life BEGINS AT CONCEPTION!” Pro-life lawyer, Mike Whitehead who serves as counsel to many churches, called the measure “masterfully precise,” saying that “personhood at conception is a foundational pro-life premise.” Rank-and-file activists projected that this move could “end ALL abortions in the United States, protecting human life at conception and keep praying that we will seize this moment.” But none of this chatter was as definitive as Speaker Johnson’s declaration from the stage, affirming that Republicans intend to continue to pursue personhood in this administration.

For that reason, supporters of reproductive rights say it needs to be taken seriously. 

“I think they are 100% committed to advancing personhood to criminalize all forms of abortion and will insert this language in every EO and bill they can—regardless of relevance,” says Dr. Dara Kass, a physician and former Regional Director at the Department of Health and Human Services. “There is no role for the term conception in this EO and it is there to confer that one’s rights and fully formed identities are set at conception, not at viability or birth.”

This move certainly follows the playbook that brought anti-choice advocates and Trump together in the first place: reject science and truth, assert radical politics and religion everywhere you can so you can normalize the unthinkable. And this is just the beginning. 

Source link