Ms. Valenti continues to be my go-to source as I want to keep up with the continued attacks on women’s body autonomy across the country.
Tennessee GOP Using AI Bill to Codify Fetal Personhood
This is wild: Rachel Wells at TN Repro News flags that Tennessee Republicans have introduced a bill (HB 0849) that would redefine personhood as beginning at fertilizationâand theyâre doing it through an AI regulation bill.
Fetal personhood is already written into Tennessee abortion regulations and criminal code, but as Wells points out, this legislation would establish personhood in the stateâs Title 1 definitions. âThat means, if passed, this phrase could be used as a legal framework throughout the Tennessee code,â she writes.
They really are coming up with some new nonsense every day.
Republicans Want to Change the Definition of Abortion
While weâre on the topic of Republicans futzing with language, letâs talk about the latest legislative trend: anti-abortion lawmakers in multiple states are trying to change the definition of âabortionâ.
Longtime readers know that Iâve spent years tracking this tactic: in 2023, I warned in The New York Times that anti-abortion legislators and activists were increasingly claiming that women didnât need life-saving abortions because they could have âmaternal fetal separationsâ instead (aka c-sections and forced delivery). And in 2024, I laid out the goal: to divorce abortion from healthcare entirely and eliminate exceptions for womenâs lives.
Conservatives Want to End ‘Exceptions’ for Womenâs Lives
Jessica Valenti
Now, Republicans are ramping up those efforts.
Utah lawmakers, for example, want medical records to distinguish between âelectiveâ and âmedically indicatedâ abortions. Under HB 480, patients who miscarry, face ectopic pregnancies or fatal fetal abnormalities, need life- or health-saving abortionsâor are pregnant after rapeâcould have their medical records formally changed to note they had a good abortion. Not like those other bad women who wanted their pregnancy to end.
A sign that the bill is part of a coordinated national strategy? Utah isnât alone. A pre-filed Louisiana bill would do much the same thing: HB 288 mandates that when doctors code pregnancy loss as âspontaneous abortionââwhich is standard medical languageâthat they add a parenthetical that says âmiscarriage.â
Meanwhile, the South Dakota Senate just passed HB 1257, which would change the definition of abortion to exclude treatment for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and âany medical procedure performed for the purpose of saving the life or preserving the health of the unborn child.â (aka, c-sections.)
South Dakota lawmakers say theyâre just trying to âclarifyâ the stateâs abortion ban because pro-choicers have scared doctors out of providing legal care. That, of course, is the same excuse anti-abortion legislators and activists have used across the country to pass other so-called âclarificationsââbills that actually further restrict womenâs rights. (See: Kentucky)
The ACLU of South Dakota points out, for example, that HB 1257 defines an âunborn childâ from fertilization, which âcould create a legal domino effect that triggers broader restrictions on hormonal contraception, emergency contraception and in vitro fertilization.â
All of which is to say, these bills are not being introduced to help women! The goal is to eliminate all abortionâeven to save womenâs livesâand to attack any bit of freedom we have.