Meghan Boone and Benjamin McMichael’s forthcoming article, Reproductive Objectification, blends theoretical and empirical methods to argue that fetal personhood laws, in objectifying pregnant people, correlate with increased rates of intimate partner violence and violence against women. The authors examine three types of laws – feticide laws, advanced directive laws that override the wishes of pregnant patients, and civil commitment of pregnant people. By pulling three types of law together under the ambit of fetal personhood, the authors begin their piece with the insight that personhood laws are far reaching and longstanding. Boone and McMichael summarize their main points in this way:
First, if fetuses are full, legal people, and the law cannot comprehend “two physical bodies” that “occupy the same place at the same time,” then the potentially pregnant person must not truly be a person – but something else. Next, if potentially pregnant people are not fully human – not legal subjects – then they are instead objects or reproductive vessels. Finally, if potentially pregnant people are objectified as reproductive vessels, then they are vulnerable to the same types of violence that all dehumanized and objectified people have been subject to across time and history. (Pp. 15-16.)
To support their arguments, the authors assert, as other scholars have, that the concept of fetal personhood depends on establishing legal fetal rights that are the responsibility of the pregnant person to protect, even to her detriment. Such a responsibility, at the risk of physical, mental, and social harm, turns women into reproductive vessels. In one example, Boone and McMichael highlight that “a pregnant person’s loved ones cannot discontinue life support consistent with the patient’s written wishes but are obliged to let the state utilize her body in an effort to continue the pregnancy.” (P. 12.)
While fetal personhood laws certainly are not the only means of treating people as reproductive vessels, the authors reason that imbuing the fetus with rights that can trump the pregnant person’s is a crucial step toward dehumanization and objectification. The authors marshal powerful and contemporary images of how the anti-abortion movement removes any connection between women’s bodies and fetal bodies; the posters depicted in the article make plain that pregnant people live in service to another life, which has separate, and superior, interests. Conscripting people’s bodies in the service of others lies at the core of dehumanization. Boone and McMichael offer examples of how dehumanization runs throughout the atrocities of war, genocide, or slavery: “as a result of this objectification, the moral stigma associated with violence towards another human [is] reduced or eliminated entirely.” (P. 30.) The authors highlight how marginalizing some groups, like people seeking abortion, leads to stigma, exclusion, discrimination, and, core to their thesis, violence.
Their examples ground the article’s empirical analysis. The authors argue that “fetal personhood laws are in fact associated with statistically significant increases in violence towards potentially pregnant people. While there is certainly more than one potential theory for why this association exists, we rely on the theoretical arguments that precede this evidence to conclude that the underlying mechanism that animates this association is the necessary relationship between fetal personhood and the objectification of women as reproductive vessels.” (P. 16.)
And here is the article’s novel contribution. The authors’ data show a correlation between the number of fetal personhood laws in a state and an increase in the rates of violence against women and intimate partner violence, though it does not reveal an onset of violent attacks after the passage of personhood laws. The authors reveal disturbing potential correlations: “the rate of IPV in states with all three laws increased more rapidly than states with fewer of these laws.” (P. 36, 38.)
The authors acknowledge that their data cannot prove causality, and their analysis prompts complicated questions about the directional nature of the relationship between violence and fetal personhood laws. It might be true that pregnant people will be “subject to potential increases in private violence as captured by this empirical analysis,” but it could also be the case that the correlation runs in the reverse. People who already hold objectifying views of women (or have a propensity toward gender-based violence for any number of political, regional, religious or other reasons) support politicians and policies enacting those views. In other words, law may not be promoting more objectification, but those who already objectify may be promoting personhood laws.
Even without showing causality, this important article covers a lot of ground, and demonstrates how fetal personhood laws arose in multiple corners of law, even well before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The question the authors might ask is what comes next. Students for Life and organizations like them believe fetal personhood is the defining social justice and civil rights cause of our generation. They claim such protections are not about subjugating people or stereotyping women as inevitable mothers. They would refute the claims in the article that personhood protections have anything to do with dehumanization: they would balk at the article’s assertion that the Holocaust and American slavery are apt analogs for reproductive commandeering.
What can this article say in response in this post-Dobbs moment? How can the data it offers change hearts and minds? Those are central questions, for both theoretical and empirical inquiries, for what might lie ahead in the campaign for fetal rights.
