The Trump administration quietly rewrote the rules of an obscure federal grant program last week — and reproductive rights advocates say the small change signals something much larger.
The Department of Health and Human Services revised its Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services grant, replacing the word "embryo" throughout the document with "children" or "child," including a line describing frozen embryos as "children who already exist and are in need of a family."
The program has historically helped people struggling with infertility or LGBTQ+ couples looking to adopt embryos. But advocates say the new framing is anything but routine.
"Inserting this sort of language — referring to an embryo as a person or child — is all part of their long-term plan to eventually ban abortion," said Heather Shumaker, senior director of state abortion access at the National Women's Law Center. "In order to do that, they have to have examples of embryos being treated as children in public policy and law. So, this is just fuel for that fire."
Guardian columnist Moira Donegan noted that the new Trump administration language is "strange and conspicuous in context, even if that context itself may seem marginal."
"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," she wrote Thursday.
The move sent a stark message, even if it won't have immediate effects.
"But it does signal that the Trump administration, which has been relatively slow to pursue its most maximalist anti-abortion priorities over the past two years, may accelerate its anti-choice efforts after the midterms," she wrote.
The move carries particular political weight given recent history. The consequences of redefining embryos as children were seen most dramatically when Alabama IVF clinics were forced to shut down following a state Supreme Court ruling that granted embryos the same legal status as children — a political disaster that prompted Trump himself to distance himself from the ruling and declare his support for IVF.
This isn't the first time the White House has moved to codify fetal personhood. One of Trump's first moves after inauguration was issuing an executive order defining human life as beginning "at conception."
"When the government starts calling embryos 'children,' it's not just changing language — it's advancing a long-term strategy designed to undermine abortion access, threaten IVF, and restrict access to family planning," said Freya Riedlin, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
HHS did not back away from the framing. "As a pro-life, pro-family administration under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, HHS will continue to uphold the dignity of life," press secretary Emily Hilliard said.