Republicans tucked an irrelevant anti-abortion provision into the tax bill

The far-reaching implications of the Republican tax plan may include a sneaky attempt to use the sweeping piece of legislation to attack abortion rights.

Nearly 100 pages into the House version of the bill — and likely in the Senate bill as well, though Republicans have not yet released the text of the bill to the public, despite their intent to vote on it Friday afternoon — Republicans attempt to codify an anti-choice priority known as fetal personhood. The provision is, on its face, a move to allow fetuses to be named as beneficiaries of popular college savings plans known as 529 accounts.

“Nothing shall present an unborn child from being treated as a designated beneficiary or an individual under this section,” the bill reads.

It goes on to define the term “unborn child” as a “child in utero,” and then, even more explicitly, “The term ‘child in utero’ means a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.”

President Donald Trump has called the Republican tax plan a “big beautiful, Christmas present” for the country, and, at least where anti-choice activists are concerned, he’s right.

Anti-choice activists believe that if fetuses are legally defined as people — “fetal personhood” — then abortion will be outlawed. Their argument rests in the 14th Amendment, which says that “no person shall be deprived of life… without due process of law.” Activists at the state and federal level have attempted to pass legislation and ballot initiatives in recent years that would codify fetal personhood, but the attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Just two states, Kansas and Missouri, have “personhood” language on their books.

The Oklahoma and Alaska Supreme Courts both struck down fetal personhood ballot initiatives — in 2012 and 2013 respectively — on the grounds, as the Oklahoma Supreme Court put it, that the initiative was “clearly unconstitutional.”

Nonetheless, Congressional Republicans buried the definition deep in a tax plan likely to become law, and anti-choice advocates are applauding the move.

“By this simple measure, more families will start accruing the benefits of a 529 account earlier in the child’s life,” anti-abortion activist group Susan B. Anthony List wrote in a letter earlier this month.