Unborn Fictions: Fetal Persons and Their Women Containers

Abstract What do anti-abortion proponents need to claim to make “unborn children” come alive as legal persons, in active conflict with, or even favored over, pregnant persons? This article begins to answer these questions, beginning by showing how artificial, corporate personhood became part of a powerful set of strategies that attempted to secure the ground for fetal rights. As theorized by anti-abortion activists, “the unborn” (modeled on corporate persons) are rendered perfectly equal to the women who must bear them, while necessarily lacking status or publicness. Given the moniker of “unborn child” or simply “life,” they are reduced to genetic code. Each section explores how these rhetorical and analytical tools work both individually and in concert. Women are theorized as mere property—as containers—reduced to their bodily and natural destiny. More recently, human DNA has been reframed as the evidence of ensoulment, a way of making legal, moral persons out of unique genetic material. This rhetorical technique provides anti-abortion thinkers a way to bypass the long-standing religious and legal tradition of “quickening” as the moment when the fetus gains its soul and thus becomes a person. Altogether, a new quasi-legal entity can be rhetorically, performatively “born”: the so-called unborn child.