Bodies As Bodies: Fetal Personhood and The Politics of Reproductive Autonomy

1

I first encountered the so-called “genetic perspective” on fetal personhood in the comments section of Alas, a well-known male feminist blog, where I was a regular contributor twenty or so years ago. Rooted in Justice John D. Noonan’s argument that the possession of a human genetic code at conception is the only objective, non-arbitrary way to define what it means to be a human being, this perspective played a central role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. The strength of the genetic perspective, of course, is that it appears to be incontrovertibly scientific. An organism possessing human DNA is formed at conception; that organism is by definition a human being; therefore, ending that organism’s life is murder. This claim to objectivity lends the genetic perspective another strength as well: it is, at least on its face, entirely secular, which allows antiabortion advocates to pretend that the fight over abortion rights is between those who accept science and those who don’t. In fact, however, that fight has almost nothing to do with actual science. It is instead a clash of competing and perhaps irreconcilable cultural narratives about what a fetus is, what a pregnant person is, and what it means to be human.

Right now, the antiabortion side is winning. Not only have they managed to overturn Roe v. Wade; they’ve put laws on the books in states throughout the country that define embryos as “children” in both civil and criminal law, and they have successfully prosecuted pregnant women for alleged crimes against the fetuses they were carrying. Moreover, to the extent that these victories enshrine as women’s legal status a contemporary version of what used to be referred to as biology-is-destiny, it’s not only women’s freedom that is at stake, but also the freedom of anyone whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation violates the heteronormative ideology informing that status—because policing women’s bodies in this way means by definition policing everyone else’s body into congruence with what women’s “reproductive destiny” is supposed to be.

One thing that made debating the antiabortion commenters on Alas especially frustrating was their refusal to acknowledge that their arguments, whether explicitly faith-based or expressed through the genetic perspective, were implicitly rooted in and framed by metaphors without which the arguments themselves would fall apart. The claim that sharing human DNA renders the personhood of a newly formed zygote morally equivalent to yours or mine, for example, requires for its validity that we ignore all the ways in which a bunch of undifferentiated cells growing in someone’s womb is qualitatively different not only from an already existing adult human being, but also from the adult human being that bunch of cells might one day grow to become. That elision is how metaphor works. It excludes the differences between its tenor, the thing being described, and its vehicle, the thing the tenor is being compared to, in order to focus on the similarities between them. To take a more familiar example, the metaphor comparing a lover’s blue eyes to, say, a summer lake in which you would like to swim requires for its success that we ignore the many and obvious differences between the eyes and the lake, including at the very least the fact that one is human while the other is not.