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,........

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