Victimhood Without Personhood.

Abstract

New York's Reproductive Health Act 2019 (RHA) reshaped the legal treatment of pregnancy-loss violence by confining homicide to the death of a "person" and removing earlier provisions that integrated certain late-term abortion and abortive offences into the homicide framework. This article traces New York's statutory development from the 1965 Penal Law to the RHA and uses the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act 2004 (UVVA) as a comparator. It argues that the apparent tension between abortion permissibility and fetal-protection liability is better explained by jurisdictional triggers and consent-based gating than by fetal personhood. After the RHA, New York generally channels pregnancy-loss harm through offences against the mother. In contrast, the UVVA can create a consent-gated two-victim structure for specified federal crimes while exempting consensual abortion and medical treatment. Bioethically, these victim categories function as governance tools protecting women's decisional authority without resolving fetal moral status.