WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — President Donald Trump’s new executive order affirming the immutable biological reality of sex includes language recognizing personhood from “conception.”
“‘Female’ means person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,”the EO “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” (emphasis added) states.
Ethics and Public Theology professor Andrew T. Walker on X called the language a “brilliantly stealth” move.
In its executive order on gender ideology, the Trump administration snuck in some brilliantly stealth pro-life language. “Person” at “conception.” The natural law finds a way…https://t.co/COjuAiIShW pic.twitter.com/WvSfe0URNn
— Andrew T. Walker (@andrewtwalk) January 21, 2025
The U.S. remains without a federal law, amendment, or policy with the express purpose of recognizing personhood explicitly from the moment of conception, and many states continue to permit the killing of human life after conception and before birth through abortion, even though the Constitution recognizes the inherent right of every person to life.
The lack of specific recognition of the personhood of human beings from conception also allows the legalization of the practice of in vitro fertilization, which kills about 93 percent of children the process creates, since many more eggs are fertilized than necessary as an insurance policy in case first attempts at successful pregnancies fail.
While Trump’s administration includes principled pro-lifers, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) quietly removed its pro-abortion webpage around the time of Trump’s second administration, Trump himself has aggressively come out against federally banning abortion to the point of promising to veto any such bill that should reach his desk.
Trump also forced a rewrite of the Republican Party platform to remove its long-standing commitment to eventually banning abortion nationwide, boasted about making the GOP less “radical” on the issue, criticized multiple state pro-life laws for purportedly being “too tough,” and proclaimed himself the “father” of embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization. Despite all this, he remains significantly less pro-abortion than the former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
It is clear from a scientific viewpoint that human life begins from conception. Human development begins at fertilization, when a sperm fuses with an oocyte to form a new human being’s embryonic cell that contains the complete genetic blueprint for their development, including everything from the color and shape of their eyes to their temperament.
However, many pro-aborts acknowledge that human life begins at conception but reject pro-lifers’ insistence that personhood is intrinsic to human life. The ramifications of this theoretical, so-called distinction between humanity and personhood include legalized infanticide, as well as the state-authorized killing of the brain-injured and cognitively impaired. Pro-lifers warn that any attempt to distinguish between humanity and personhood is ultimately arbitrary and leads to the legalization of gravely immoral acts such as abortion.
LifeSiteNews is encouraging all of you to pray and fast for the conversion of Donald Trump. Learn more here.