On his HBO show on Sunday night, John Oliver discussed the debate over fetal personhood and how the topic has become central to the anti-abortion movement in the US.

About a third of US states have established fetal personhood by law, giving legal rights and protections to fetuses and in some cases embryos. As a result, hundreds of women have lost custody to their children for reasons related to their pregnancies.

Last year, a woman from Ohio named Brittany Watts was charged with abuse of a corpse after suffering a miscarriage, while a pregnant woman in Alabama was charged with manslaughter after she miscarried after she was shot.

“Wow, that is bleak,” said Oliver. “If you suffer a miscarriage after being shot, you shouldn’t be charged with manslaughter. That’s one of those sentences I never thought I’d end up needing to say out loud.”

Fetal personhood has been a “quiet goal” of the anti-abortion movement for some years, the host continued. In 1984, Ronald Reagan said that an unborn child “is already protected by the constitution”.

The supreme court explicitly rejected fetal personhood when it decided Roe v Wade in 1973, saying that the word “person” as used in the 14th amendment “does not include the unborn”. Yet they also said that the state has “an important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of unborn life”.

After 2022’s landmark Dobbs decision that overturned abortion rights, “state legislators felt they could push much more aggressively for fetal personhood legislation,” Oliver said. It was often a slippery slope before the individual carrying the fetus began to be treated as something less than a full human, with one abortion law sponsor referring to pregnant women as “the host”.

“There are only a handful of situations where it is acceptable to call a woman a ‘host’,” said Oliver. “If she works front of house at a restaurant, if she invites you over for dinner, if she has her own talkshow, or if you’re talking about Annabelle, the host to the demonic spirit permanently trapped inside her.”

Fetal personhood can be used to criminalize conduct during pregnancy such as drinking alcohol or using drugs. “Look, no one is saying that it’s a great idea to drink or take drugs while pregnant – after all, you don’t want your kid to come out too cool,” joked Oliver.

“But for many substances, the risk to a fetus is actually more complex and less clearcut than the law assumes.” In fact, hospitals often drug-test pregnant women and fetuses without their knowledge, and adopt a zero tolerance approach. In at least 27 states, institutions are legally required to alert child protection services of any positive test.

These harsh regulations have resulted in glaring mishaps including recent instances where pregnant women have tested positive for opiates after eating poppy seeds. Last year, an Alabama woman was only allowed supervised contact with her children for a month after eating an everything bagel.

“It should not be possible for your life to get fucked up that badly just based on what you had for breakfast,” Oliver said.

A 2025 report found that about 70,000 mothers were flagged to police in the past six years, with many results originating from false positives and flawed drug tests.

“Terrifying expectant mothers with the threat of jail time comes with its own set of risks,” continued Oliver. “The point is, clearly babies do better when their moms go to doctor’s appointments and ideally are not thrown in jail as part of a bullshit carrot-and-stick approach.”

In 2014, a Wisconsin woman was put in jail and placed in solitary confinement after she allegedly used methamphetamines while pregnant to treat a thyroid condition.

“Under fetal personhood laws, pregnancy loss can create yet another path into the criminal system,” Oliver said, adding that miscarriages and still births can also be treated as suspicious. “There are multiple stories of women being investigated or even charged with crimes including murder following a pregnancy loss, which is utterly bonkers.

“Those who push fetal personhood will insist that it’s based on a principled stance about the sanctity of life from the moment of conception,” Oliver went on. “[But] if every fertilized egg is a person, that would mean that an IVF clinic – which need to produce a lot of embryos to ensure success – probably needs to be shut down, as they wouldn’t just be storing extra embryos to maximize the chance of successful implantation.

“Under that logic, they’d essentially be warehouses where human beings regularly die.”

Oliver concluded with an unambiguous statement about the debate, saying that fetal personhood “effectively treats women as incubators”.

“They’re effectively stripping women of their rights and autonomy,” he said. “Even low-risk pregnancies are obviously life- and body-altering experiences. And it does not seem radical to me to be able to control your own life and body through that experience.”