The US Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal alleging that fetuses have personhood rights under the Constitution.

The case involved two Rhode Island women, Nichole Leigh Rowley and "Jane Doe," who sued on behalf of their fetuses, and the anti-choice organization Catholics for Life, which joined their lawsuit.

The women alleged that Rhode Island's Reproductive Privacy Act violated their fetuses' 14th Amendment due process rights by permitting the fetuses to be aborted — even though neither woman had any intention of having an abortion.

The Reproductive Privacy Act was passed in 2019 to bring Rhode Island state law into compliance with the US Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The women filed their suit soon after the law was enacted.

A state superior court and ultimately the state supreme court ruled against them, however, prompting their appeal to the US Supreme Court on constitutional grounds. The state courts relied in their rulings on the right-to-privacy reasoning enshrined in Roe.

In its October 11 announcement declining to hear the appeal, the high court did not reveal the justices' reasoning for turning down the case.

In his opinion striking down the Roe precedent, Justice Samuel Alito was careful to note that the Supreme Court was not taking a position on the question "if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth."

Some Republican-controlled state legislatures are currently pursuing fetal personhood laws, which would grant fetuses the same constitutional protections enjoyed by already-born persons.

Georgia, for example has enacted a law that would grant fetuses a variety of legal rights starting at six weeks after conception. Under such laws, termination of a pregnancy could be considered murder, and state officials could be required to bring charges against both the doctors involved and the mother of the fetus.

More than a dozen states have enforced near-total abortion bans since the Supreme Court's June ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which reversed Roe. Most do not include language that grants legal rights to the fetus, however.