Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

This study examines how the United States Federal Courts have framed questions of fetal viability, fetal rights, and women's rights in abortion cases from the past three years, from June 2019 to January 2022, using the following frames: the right to abortion, the post-viability fetal right to life, the pre-viability embryonic right to life, the recognition of fetal heartbeat, and abortion as a crime. In cases in which the court supported abortion rights, the most common frame found in their opinions is the right to abortion, often specified as a civil, human, or women’s right. Yet the conditionality of this right is emphasized in two-thirds of the cases, with the courts clarifying that abortion is only a right prior to fetal viability as stated by Roe v. Wade. On the other hand, cases in which the court restricted abortion rights most often used the frame of the pre-viability embryonic right to life. Unlike the pro-abortion rights argument which focused more so on legal precedent and the protected rights of the pregnant person, this argument is more morally focused on the belief that life begins at conception. Fetal viability matters far less to the anti-abortion rights argument as they are far more focused on the potential for life rather than whether the fetus or embryo could survive outside the womb at an exact moment in time.