Reproductive Objectification

By MEGHAN M. BOONE and BENJAMIN J. MCMICHAEL. Full Text.

The American system of rights is individualized—premised on the concept of singular, physically separate, and autonomous people. The rise of the fetal personhood movement complicates this basic understanding. If rights attach to singular, autonomous people, and fetuses are legally people, then the body of a pregnant person becomes conceptually unintelligible as it contains potentially two, interrelated people. Such a circumstance is fundamentally a contradiction within a framework that insists that rights attach to people who are, by definition, singular, separate, and autonomous.

This Article argues that, as a result of this apparent contradiction, fetal personhood laws make the humanity of the pregnant person precarious. If the law has no framework for two rights holders in one body, then the pregnant person must be something else entirely. She becomes less of a subject and more of an object— a reproductive vessel, merely the container for another individual rights-holder. Reproductive justice scholars and advocates have long argued that laws purporting to endow the fetus with personhood exacerbate the “maternal-fetal conflict” and undermine pregnant people’s rights. This Article argues, relying on both decades of feminist legal theory and original empirical evidence, that granting full personhood to a fetus has an even more insidious outcome—undermining the legal personhood of women entirely and recategorizing them in the eyes of the law as non-person objects. Looking across cultures and eras, it is unfortunately not difficult to ascertain what might happen when human beings are treated as objects. Such objectification results in almost certain abuse, sometimes of the most horrifying variety.