President Trump has apparently appointed a Colorado lawyer named Joshua Craddock to serve as his deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ, according to a Twitter post by Craddock announcing the appointment earlier this month.
As my colleague Josh Kovensky pointed out to me earlier today, Craddock has made the case for reading fetal personhood ideology into the Fourteenth Amendment; versions of fetal personhood contend that life begins at, or even before, conception. It has bolstered much of the Christian right’s most extreme anti-abortion activism over the years. In a May 2025 Catholic University Law Review article on the 2022 Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, Craddock unpacked his beliefs about the “unsettled questions” that supposedly “remain about the constitutional status of unborn children” in Roe’s wake.
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