Fetal rights

Fetal rights or foetal rights (alternatively prenatal rights) are the moral rights or legal rights of the human embryo or fetus under natural and civil law. The term fetal rights came into wide usage after Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that established a constitutional right to abortion in the United States; that decision was overturned in 2022 by Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The concept of fetal rights has evolved to include the issues of maternal substance use disorders, including alcohol use disorder and opioid use disorder. Most international human rights charters "clearly reject claims that human rights should attach from conception or any time before birth." While most international human rights instruments lack a universal inclusion of the fetus as a person for the purposes of human rights, the fetus is granted various rights in the constitutions and civil codes of some countries.

Because a fetus develops within another person's body, the recognition of fetal rights raises the question of how those rights relate to the rights of the pregnant woman, discussed in legal and bioethical literature as maternal-fetal conflict. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists holds that pregnancy is not an exception to a patient's right to refuse medical treatment and opposes forced and court-ordered obstetric intervention. A peer-reviewed study of the United States identified 413 cases between 1973 and 2005 in which a woman's pregnancy was a necessary factor leading to her arrest, detention, or a comparable deprivation of physical liberty.