There is a lie at the heart of most positions in support of abortion. In pursuit of a touted political, social, economic, or biological equality, the child who grows in his or her mother’s womb is said to be something other than what that child plainly is and must logically be. The word “fetus,” for example, denotes (for those who use words honestly) a stage of human development, like “toddler” or “adolescent.” It is akin to the words “puppy” and “kitten,” words for little dogs and cats, respectively, which do not in any way connote a separate species, only a smaller size. Pro-abortionists, however, use “fetus” to mean “non-person,” indicating something that is, by the sheer willpower of the observer, an entirely different entity than either of the parents from whom that fetus received his or her DNA or the adult that he or she will grow to become. By this fundamental dishonesty, many pro-abortionists depersonalize humans in order to arrive at some nonexistent universe in which human sexual activity makes fetuses, not babies.

Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. She is the author of many books and essays on legal, political, and social aspects of abortion history in the United States. You may have seen her face or name in the mainstream media, where she is known as an authority on American abortion history and policy. Rightly so. I reviewed her 2022 book Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment in these pages (“Campaign Finance and the Right to Life,” HLR Winter, 2023). I noted there Ziegler’s mastery of her subject. Ziegler is a good archivist and is also good at contextualizing her finds in the wider historical moment. But I also warned potential readers about her framing. Ziegler’s position in Dollars for Life is that anti-abortion is politics as usual for the GOP, with money sloshing through Super PACs and politicians getting elected on empty promises made to true believers in the dignity of human life. What Ziegler seems not to have understood is that dollars for life, the pittances that little people like myself donate to pro-life causes, are meant to stop innocent blood from flowing. Dollars for life, for Ziegler, is a political story; dollars for life, for pro-lifers, is about saving lives. The distinction is one that Ziegler never seems to understand.

Professor Ziegler is back with a new book about abortion history, this one tracked with fresh footprints from current events. When Roe v. Wade was remanded to the states with the Dobbs decision in the summer of 2022, many in the ivory towers and media studios that Ziegler and her colleagues dominate were appalled. The lie on which Roe hung was that preborn babies are not persons with rights any adult is bound to respect. Many prolifers thought the Dobbs court could, and should, have gone much farther, overturning Roe as not just bad procedure and based on bad legal reasoning and history, but as contrary to the plain moral fact that human beings are human beings and ought to be treated as such. In her new book, Ziegler zeroes in on this staunch assertion, rightly positing that personhood is the crux of the pro-life/pro-abortion standoff. While “in vitro fertilization,” “interstate travel for abortion,” and “abortions that rely on mifepristone” are important sub-issues, Ziegler argues that “we cannot understand any of them without understanding that the reversal of Roe was never the U.S. anti-abortion movement’s ultimate goal. From its inception in the 1960s, it has always been a fetal-personhood movement” (Ziegler vii). Ziegler’s timely Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction (Yale University Press, 2025) is an intellectual history of the idea over which prolifers and pro-abortionists have always been fighting. As Ziegler intuits, the struggle over personhood seems destined only to escalate henceforth. As she teaches, “personhood” is a multifaceted term that deserves to be seen in all its historical and legal complexity.

And yet, as in Dollars for Life, there is something off about Ziegler’s approach to her subject. It is impossible to know, of course, whether Ziegler has trouble telling the truth or is just remarkably good at reproducing the prejudices of her subjects, but on page after page of Personhood I was re-minded that many who support abortion seem incapable of honesty about basic facts of history, biology, law, or moral philosophy. Perhaps it is because Ziegler’s theme, personhood, is top-dead-central to the clash between those who want to dehumanize babies and those who want to stop them from being killed, leaving little breathing room for nuance or candor, but throughout almost all of Personhood I had trouble separating the anti-personhood lies from the scholarly reporter of them.

Take, for instance, Ziegler’s treatment of the Fourteenth Amendment, the landmark 1868 Reconstruction document meant to make chattel slavery le-gally impossible in the United States. The word “person” appears five times in the Fourteenth Amendment: three times in Section 1, which lays out citizenship standards, and once each in Sections 2 (which deals with representative apportionment and suffrage rights) and 3 (concerning eligibility for elected office). As Ziegler notes, the personhood debate before the Civil War,

centering on the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, was “about whether constitutional rights applied only to citizens or if some were also available to ‘persons’” (Ziegler 8). This was a political question, but one with grave import socially, morally, and even culturally. “Lincoln and other Republicans did not think that the Constitution guaranteed Black Americans equality in all spheres of life,” Ziegler reminds us, “but nevertheless argued that personhood itself provided them with some protection. Frederick Douglass, the most well-known abolitionist of the era, maintained in 1860 that the key determinant of constitutional rights was whether enslaved Americans were ‘persons, or . . . beasts of burden.’ If they were persons, Douglass wrote, ‘then all the thunders of the constitution may be launched at the head of him who dares to treat them contrary to the rights sacred to persons’” (Ziegler 9). All of this analysis from Ziegler is true, but it is also true that the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly gave “persons” the rights of citizens, as follows (Section 1):

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The fact of humanity is a given. The Fourteenth Amendment does not de-fine “persons,” as its authors had no need to. Once the baleful fiction of “chattel” had been jettisoned, it became impossible to speak of Black Americans as anything other than the human persons they had always been.

Ziegler chooses, however, to write in this context about Horatio Storer (1830–1922), “a young Boston doctor [who] saw the abortion issue as a way to set regular physicians apart” (Ziegler 5). Storer was the founder of the American Medical Association, which was at pains to impose standards on a wildly unregulated profession. Many claiming to be doctors were just butchers in suits, and those who claimed to be able to end pregnancies for a fee were often the worst of all. Real doctors, those with training who took seriously the duty of care, wanted nothing to do with such bloody charlatans. As an 1859 AMA report put it, “‘physicians have long been united in condemning the act of producing abortion’ which was nothing less than ‘an unwarrantable destruction of human life’” (Ziegler 6). This is important to know. The view of babies held by Storer and his colleagues impinges on the personhood history we are supposed to learn from Ziegler’s book. And yet, Ziegler paints Storer and “many of the AMA’s early recruits” as “white, Protestant men from well-to-do families,” in what reads like a very familiar tactic among Ziegler’s professorial cohort to discredit an argument by emphasizing that some White Christian guy once made it (Ziegler 5-6).

Even more disingenuous is Ziegler’s linking of fetal personhood, with which Storer and his fellow physicians were concerned, with the Fourteenth Amendment, which is not about babies but about former slaves. In a representative paragraph on page seven, for example, Ziegler begins by stating that “if a fetus was a rights-holding person, it was not clear how much of a practical difference that would make. Before the Civil War, courts, politicians, and even activists did not approach rights claims in the way their twentieth- or twenty-first-century counterparts would” (Ziegler 7). Referring to debates about the relevance of constitutional rights to Black and Native American residents, Ziegler says that Storer, “in his antiabortion rhetoric, never talked about the Constitution, only about biology and morality. He treated the fetus as a biologically separate human being and insisted that abortion violated a ‘higher than human law’ that treated ‘the willful killing of a human being, at any stage of its existence, as murder’” (Ziegler 9). The author then throws shade on Storer, claiming, rather cattily, that he was just concerned that “Catholic immigrants [were] having many more babies than native-born Protestant women” (Ziegler 10). In case you have not been awake for the past decade, the translation of Ziegler’s academic-ese is this: Storer was just a racist, so whatever he said or thought or did is anathema. The truly important point, though, is obvious—if only Ziegler would dig deeper into history and natural law, beneath the thin crust of contemporary prejudices on which much of her scholarship rests. Whatever Storer’s views on demographics and civil rights, the salient fact is that he did not argue that babies in the womb were persons in the same way that enslaved or formerly enslaved people were persons, because it would have been nonsensical to do so. When Roger Taney (1777–1864), the Supreme Court justice, delivered the notoriously racist line in the Dred Scott verdict that Blacks have “no rights which the white man [is] bound to respect,” he was addressing a political question about citizenship and rights stemming from the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which was in turn a political decision about the territorial expansion of the United States and the condition of servitude of the people who would reside in the new parts of the country. Taney was not talking about whether children in the womb are human beings or not. Storer may have been a racist. Certainly Taney was. But the upshot of personhood in the nineteenth century is that the personhood of babies in utero was never in question. Nor, to put an even finer point on it, was the basic humanity of the slave.

Not far down the page from where Taney delivered his hateful dicta about not having to respect any rights that might be claimed to attach to Black people, he mentions, in support of his argument, a Maryland statute about the intermarriage of races and a Massachusetts law about mixed-race children. Taney cites these to prove that Blacks do not have rights, not that Blacks are not human persons. Taney admits that the plaintiffs who have brought suit, namely Dred Scott (ca. 1799–1858) and another “negro slave” named Harriet (ca. 1820–1876), were married in 1836—with the consent of their “master and owner,” Dr. Emerson, no less—and became “husband and wife,” later bringing into the world “Eliza and Lizzie,” whom Taney refers to as “daughters,” as the “fruit of [the] marriage” between Harriet and Dred. It would have been absurd for Taney to cite laws about interracial marriage, and even more absurd for him to speak of the marriage of “negro slaves” and the “daughters” that were born to “husband and wife,” were he trying to argue that White people and Black people were separate species, that one of those groups was not human, or that Black people were incapable of entering into the same human relations and having the same human children as any-one else. Not even Roger Taney, in other words, was so blinded by politics as to dare to argue that Black babies are not babies at all.

Storer, for his part, does not embed his fight against abortion in such arguments as Taney makes, because both Taney and Storer agreed that human persons are pre-political—raw material for political will, Taney might have thought, but persons all the same—and that denying citizenship and other rights was something that affected political standing but had no effect, and could not, on whether the person whose rights were stripped was a fellow human being. “Personhood” as the Fourteenth Amendment has it, and “personhood” as doctors like Storer see it, are fundamentally different things. Until, that is, twentieth-century courts began denying that preborn babies are persons, at which point prolifers had need to argue that the opposite is true.

Ziegler displays a similar seeming inability to parse various strands of per-sonhood when she takes up the notion of personality for corporations. In a section on the controversial 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Com-mission Supreme Court decision, for instance, Ziegler returns to one of her favorite punching bags, Dollars for Life’s target and attorney James Bopp, Jr., to mock him for viewing both corporations and babies as “victims” in his drive to get the Supreme Court to recognize free-speech rights for associations. Yet Bopp, as Ziegler notes, did not even “focus on the personhood of corporations” in his Citizens United work (Ziegler 168). Ziegler chides personhood crusaders for not glomming on to the fact that “those insisting on corporate personhood [have] often contended that personhood gave corporations fewer rights”; she cites the 1839 Supreme Court case Bank of Augusta

v. Earle to demonstrate the folly of tying “constitutional rights” to “human genetics” (Ziegler 162-163, emphasis in original). But as with her Dollars for Life book, Ziegler seems still not to understand the various tactics that prolifers try in order to protect innocent children from those who deny their humanity. Bopp wants to save lives. He maps out ways to do that, playing the long game of interacting with electorates, politicians, and courts. The small stuff is tactical. The big prize is strategic.

If only Ziegler could work on these two registers at once. The bulk of Ziegler’s Personhood book is about the ways in which prolifers have adapt-ed to prevailing arguments of the day—feminism, civil rights, free speech, corporate personhood, and more—in pursuit of what even she admits is the goal: recognition of the humanity and associated rights of the preborn. And yet, along the way, Ziegler refuses to countenance what this means, both at the tactical and the strategic level. James Bopp was not being insincere or mendacious when he adopted certain tactics in advance of his cause. He was being just. Babies are denied personhood on the basis of political lies, and those who counter those lies must work within the constraints the dominant powers set down. In the end, however, personhood is not a political question but a moral one, something that Ziegler seems, for some reason, unwilling fully to admit.

This is the crucial pivot on which Personhood fails to turn. Bopp works for justice, at least as he sees it. He is a political operator, yes, but in pursuit of a higher order achievement. The fulcrum by which to pry apart personhood as a legal and political tactic and personhood as a definitive statement about human persons is the natural law. As we saw even with Roger Taney, people are persons before they are citizens. The difference is one of moral philosophy. Most prolifers are not rank materialists. We don’t think, as Ziegler mis-characterizes our view, that constitutional rights are the product of genetic code, but we do think that human beings have dignity. Ziegler’s book would have been much stronger had she taken the time to engage with natural law counter-arguments instead of dismissing them.

Unfortunately, time and again Ziegler does her readers the disservice of neglecting to provide good background to debates and to make important distinctions among logically separate strands of “personhood” ideas. To cite just three examples of many, Ziegler gives—for a scholar, I think, unconscionably—short shrift to Joseph W. Dellapenna, Hadley Arkes, and Robert George. Dellapenna gets a scant two mentions in Personhood. Both times Ziegler, again being catty, backhands him as “an expert on water law” (Ziegler 86, 203). But water law, as I think Ziegler knows full well, is not why Dellapenna is part of the personhood debate; Ziegler herself acknowledges that Dellapenna “believed Roe got the

history of abortion wrong and was planning to write a book about it” (Ziegler 86). Ziegler cites that book, Dellapenna’s Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History (Carolina Academic Press, 2006). There, he breaks with the “scholar-ly consensus” on which Ziegler places great importance because, apparently, he is one of the few people in American academia who has read extensively about abortion history. Had Ziegler taken Dellapenna seriously, instead of rolling her eyes at him as a moonlighting water law scribbler, then she might have produced a much more enlightening volume. The missed opportunity forms the empty core of Personhood.

And so with George and Arkes. Robert George, a famed philosopher and moral thinker whom Ziegler caricatures as “the son of a West Virginia liquor broker,” showed at length, in a brief he wrote for the Dobbs court with an-other natural law philosopher named John Finnis, that Dellapenna got the abortion history right in his meticulously researched book. (See my review of George’s most recent work on this subject in the Summer 2025 issue of HLR.) At no point does Ziegler cite any of George’s substantial writings on natural law or legal history, however. Apart from a handful of George’s pieces for the popular press, as well as some sniffy wind-ups of George by her friends in the liberal media, Ziegler gives us no indication of the richness of George’s thought or the rock-solid grounding in legal, social, and political history that Dellapenna, George, and other scholars have given us.

Perhaps most disastrous is Ziegler’s treatment of Hadley Arkes, the towering moral philosopher who has been arguing for the humanity of children in the womb for much of his career. Ziegler says that Arkes “founded the James Wilson Institute in 2000 to promote the argument that the framers of the Constitution abided by natural law” (142-143). Ziegler might have engaged with the natural law as Arkes explicates it, might have dug deeper into why Arkes and so many other prolifers in America and elsewhere insist that human beings be treated with dignity and respect regardless of physical or mental ability. But Ziegler, in what seems to me to be but one of many cowardly performances in Personhood, shifts gears, giving us the book’s last mention of Arkes in a pique of disingenuity. After telling us that, following the 9/11 attacks, “hate crimes against Muslims in the United States increased dramatically,” “Bible sales surged in 2001, as did purchases of American flags,” and a “record 90 percent of Americans approved of George W. Bush’s performance in the White House in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attack,” while “the figure among conservative Christians was almost certainly higher,” Ziegler concludes: “Bush signed Arkes’s born-alive bill into law in 2002” (Ziegler 144). Are we to believe that Hadley Arkes is an anti-Muslim religious nut whose rah-rah jingoism got him in good with GW?

If Ziegler thinks this is a fair reading of Arkes’ body of work, then I feel she might need to go back and read it again.

It is not just the petty point-scoring at which Ziegler excels that gets old by the end of the book. To wit: Ziegler tells us that Donald Trump’s press secretary exaggerated the size of Trump’s January 2017 inauguration parade, but doesn’t also report that the pro-abortion media virtually ignore the massive March for Life every January running (Ziegler 180). Much more important is that Ziegler appears to be afraid of the natural law, unwilling to meet powerful intellectual adversaries head-on, incapable of admitting the extent of the darkness of pro-abortion ideology (Personhood whitewashes Margaret Sanger, for instance), and almost obsessively opposed to attributing any human aspects and experiences to fetuses at all. In her brief discussion of Bernard Nathanson (1926–2011), for example, Ziegler describes him as a former abortionist who joined the “antiabortion movement,” but says noth-ing about Silent Scream, the blood-curdling 1984 film showing a tiny fetus fighting for his life against an adult abortionist wielding a scalpel. Ziegler also dwells at length on murdered abortionists, seemingly desperate to paint “antiabortionists” as zealous would-be felons, but says nothing of Kermit Gosnell, a prolific in utero serial killer, or of the dozens of millions of hu-man beings thrown out in the trash in the name of a political ideal to which Ziegler and her friends subscribe.

That one word, “antiabortionists,” repeated throughout Personhood, lays bare the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of Ziegler’s cause. The term “an-tiabortion” makes it seem as though prolifers are somehow against a procedure—railing against abortion on Mondays, maybe, and against tonsillectomies, chiropractic massage, and dental implants the rest of the week. People, however, fight for personhood because babies are being killed in the womb. That is the plain fact. Biologically, morally, and, yes, legal-historically, fetuses are human persons, full stop. Personhood could have been about arguments on this level, but instead it is a rather inelegant skirting of central truths in favor of a political ideology.

If only Mary Ziegler had had the courage to tell the truth about humans in the womb, or even the integrity to treat her opponents’ arguments as worth understanding, Personhood would have been a splendid intellectual history. As it is, though, it’s a failure—much like the attempt to deny the obvious humanity of children in the womb.

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Original Bio:

Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.