Here is a fact that exists simultaneously in American law:

In 38 states, a person who kills a pregnant woman can be charged with two counts of homicide — one for the woman, one for the unborn child she was carrying. The federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, passed in 2004, defines an unborn child as a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb. It applies from the moment of fertilization.

In most of those same states, a woman can legally choose to terminate that same pregnancy.

Both of these things are true at the same time. American law has maintained this contradiction for decades, and the legal and political system has largely chosen not to look at it directly. That is becoming harder to do.

Fetal homicide laws were not originally designed as anti-abortion measures. They emerged in response to a genuine problem: the inadequacy of the legal system to address violence against pregnant women. Under the old common law born alive rule, a fetus had to be born alive for homicide statutes to apply. Fetal homicide laws were crafted to close that gap — championed with cases like Laci Peterson, where the public intuitively felt that two lives had been taken.

But anti-abortion advocates understood something that many supporters of those laws did not: once you legally define an unborn child as a person capable of being murdered, you have laid the groundwork for a much larger argument.

The federal law handles this awkwardly by carving out an explicit exception: it does not apply to any woman with respect to her unborn child. In other words, the law says a fetus is a person — except when its mother decides it is not. That is a logical structure that cannot be sustained indefinitely.

At least 15 states introduced abortion-as-homicide bills during the 2024-2025 legislative sessions. Most have failed. But they keep coming. A 2025 survey found that 59% of likely voters opposed granting legal rights to embryos and fetuses after learning about the criminal implications. The politics are not there — but the legal architecture is being built regardless, one statute at a time.

There are two intellectually honest positions on this question. The first is that a fetus is not a legal person and that personhood begins at birth. The second is that a fetus is a legal person from some defined point, and that abortion is therefore the taking of a human life. What is not intellectually honest is the current arrangement: insisting that a fetus is a person when someone else kills it, and not a person when its mother chooses to end the pregnancy.

The question is not whether that reckoning is coming. The question is which direction it goes when it arrives.