Epilogue: Reflections on Abortion Politics and the Practices Called Person

Hartouni, Valerie; Morgan, Lynn M.; Michaels, Meredith Wilson

doi:10.9783/9781512807561-016

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…“Who or what is called person is, among other things, a highly contingent historical formation,” says feminist scholar Valerie Hartouni. “It is both the site and source of ongoing cultural contests and always under construction as a self‐evident fact of nature” (Hartouni , 300). While the idea of embryos as persons has become a central concern for some US antiabortion activists, this notion is not universally agreed upon cross‐culturally (Conklin and Morgan ; Gammeltoft ; Howes‐Mischel ; LaFleur ; Morgan ; Morgan and Michaels ) nor is the ontological status of embryos a concern for all people (Morgan ; Roberts ; Strathern ).…”

Section: Race Recognition and Personhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Racial Politics of Frozen Embryo Personhood in the US Antiabortion Movement

Cromer

2019

Transforming Anthropology

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Opponents of abortion in the United States have long made strategic comparisons between abortion and slavery to advance their movement. Within the past two decades, a White‐led branch of the American “pro‐life” movement began invoking racial categories and movements for racial justice to advocate for the socio‐legal recognition of frozen embryos as persons. Extending from ethnographic research with proponents of “embryo personhood,” this article examines three examples of personhood advocacy—a lawsuit, promotional video, and legislative bill—that instrumentalize race through strategic comparisons between embryos and Black Americans, and personhood advocates and racial justice leaders. More than misleading comparisons, invoking race in personhood advocacy underscores this radical movement's threat to reproductive and racial justice. Antiabortion politics of recognition present another durable link between racial and reproductive politics in the United States.

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Section: Race Recognition and Personhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Racial Politics of Frozen Embryo Personhood in the US Antiabortion Movement

Cromer

2019

Transforming Anthropology

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“…“Who or what is called person is, among other things, a highly contingent historical formation,” says feminist scholar Valerie Hartouni. “It is both the site and source of ongoing cultural contests and always under construction as a self‐evident fact of nature” (Hartouni, 1999, 300). The making of persons, as anthropologist Morgan reminds, is always political: “All practices of personhood are political gestures, played out in a social matrix in which power is unevenly distributed” (2006, 13).…”

Section: Constructing Fetal Personhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deploying fetal death: “Fetal burial” laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana

Cromer

Bjork‐James

2023

PoLAR

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While abortion foes in the United States rhetorically promote “life,” discursive invocations of death are foundational to antiabortion advocacy. Pro‐life strategists have made gains mandating the mourning of aborted fetuses through fetal burial bills, which require abortion providers to cremate or bury fetal tissue from abortion procedures. Fetal burial bills are inextricably tied to biopolitical regimes that make and manage grievable life. Drawing on cultural anthropology, feminist social science, critical race theory, and long‐term research on white evangelicalism, this article examines government documents (e.g., Indiana statutes, court rulings, health reports, legislative activity, and state prosecutions) to provide a discursive critique of Indiana's fetal burial law. Constructions of aborted fetuses as grievable human life and the formations of personhood they promote undergird what anthropologist Leith Mullings called the necropolitics of reproduction—a framework explaining how reproduction is constitutive of political regimes that use systemic violence to determine who (or what) lives and dies. Legal conceptions of fetal personhood that hyper‐value fetal subjects entwine with systemic racism, Christian ideology, and anti‐environmentalism to diminish the Black and Brown bodies and environments on which their futures depend. This case is a bellwether for broader dynamics in anti‐abortion policy and activism in the post‐Roe era.

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“…It is both the site and the source of ongoing cultural contests and always under construction as a self-evident fact of nature." 31 By this view, persons do not exist apart from the social disputes that constitute them, or from the "complex acts of construction that are necessarily entailed in keeping intact and viable the world as it self-evidently appears to be." 32 Using this perspective, anthropologists analyze personhood for its ability to provide insight into the social body and the body politic, that is, the ideologies and practices through which individuals and societies imagine and reinvent themselves.…”

Section: Living Without a Bicyclementioning

confidence: 99%

“Life Begins When They Steal Your Bicycle”: Cross-Cultural Practices of Personhood at the Beginnings and Ends of Life

Morgan

2006

J. Law. Med. Ethics

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This paper examines two reasons anthropological expertise has recently come to be considered relevant to American debates about the beginnings and ends of life. First, bioethicists and clinicians working to accommodate diverse perspectives into clinical decision‐making have come to appreciate the importance of culture. Second, anthropologists are the recognized authorities on the cultural logic and behaviors of the “Other.” Yet the definitions of culture with which bioethicists and clinicians operate may differ from those used by contemporary anthropologists, who view culture as a contingent, contested set of social practices that are continually formulated and re‐negotiated in daily interactions. Using ethnographic examples, the author argues that the qualities that constitute “personhood” should be sought in social practices rather than in cognitive capacities or moral attributes.

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Epilogue: Reflections on Abortion Politics and the Practices Called Person

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Racial Politics of Frozen Embryo Personhood in the US Antiabortion Movement

Racial Politics of Frozen Embryo Personhood in the US Antiabortion Movement

Deploying fetal death: “Fetal burial” laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana

“Life Begins When They Steal Your Bicycle”: Cross-Cultural Practices of Personhood at the Beginnings and Ends of Life

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