The Trump administration quietly declared frozen embryos to be children last week. In a call for grant applications related to a nearly 20-year-old program meant to raise awareness about frozen embryo adoption, the Department of Health and Human Services referred to frozen embryos using the terms “child” and “children”, calling for screening standards for frozen embryo purchasers to be raised to those applied to parents seeking to adopt actual children. The document refers to frozen embryos as “children who already exist and are in need of a family”.

The language is strange and conspicuous in context, even if that context itself may seem marginal: what the Trump administration has done here is change its phrasing in the guidelines for a longstanding and somewhat obscure grant program.

But the move represents a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s pursuit of fetal personhood, the doctrine that anti-abortion forces aspire to enshrine in law whereby fertilized eggs are granted constitutional rights as persons – a regime that would ban all abortion and many kinds of birth control and miscarriage management, would curtail the basic freedoms of women of child-bearing age, and would reclassify many fertility treatments as murder.

The language lends ammunition to anti-choice groups that have sought recognition of fetal and embryonic personhood in the courts, and who can now........

© The Guardian