Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn

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

“…HEA 1337 and the legal complaint against it illustrate Western and Christian ideals of personhood at work in the law, which, in conjunction with pro-life state discourses, come together to form a grievable figure regarded by supporters as an autonomous individual deserving of dignity and respect. This law is one example of how fetuses have been actively included in constructions of personhood through racist and religious tropes that "inflate" fetal worth by affiliating it with humanhood and markers of social advantage (Rowland, 2017). As a result, fetuses become more legible as social subjects worth protecting and grieving.…”

“…Scholarship on pro‐life fetal memorialization efforts has amplified their legal, practical, and political implications (Fox et al., 2019; Key, 2017; Vinci, 2018), and feminist scholars (Leach, 2021; Rowland, 2017) have focused on how fetal memorialization practices confer personhood to dead fetuses. Rhetoric scholar Allison Rowland argues that “fetal memorialization relies on the rhetorical construction of the fetal entity as a full‐fledged human” (2017, 27), which she demonstrates by tracing the production of fetal humanhood at the National Memorial for the Unborn through rhetorical tropes that confer names, voices, and faces on dead fetuses. Relatedly, political theorist Brittany Leach provides a discursive critique of AUL's fetal burial legislation, concluding that state‐mandated mourning rituals and discourses of fetal death as a “tragic loss … enacts the grievability of fetal life” (2021, 151).…”

“…According to right‐to‐life activists involved in Arkansas's Crosses for Life Memorial, their goal is to make visible “the deaths of unborn children killed by legal abortion every day in America … to bring awareness to this tragic loss of human life” (Arkansas Right to Life n.d.). The National Memorial for the Unborn in Chattanooga, Tennessee, started in 1993, provides a more permanent setting for memorializing fetal death (Rowland, 2017). Based in a building where a former abortion clinic operated, the memorial's website describes it as transforming “a place of death” into “a place of life” by offering “healing and closure for families to give dignity to their children” and serving as “a witness for the nation to the value of life and the grief of abortion” (National Memorial for the Unborn, 2023).…”

“…Based in a building where a former abortion clinic operated, the memorial's website describes it as transforming “a place of death” into “a place of life” by offering “healing and closure for families to give dignity to their children” and serving as “a witness for the nation to the value of life and the grief of abortion” (National Memorial for the Unborn, 2023). Staged memorialization of fetal death such as these construct dead fetuses as human corpses—and, by extension, human persons—worth grieving (Leach, 2021; Rowland, 2017).…”