North Dakota is trying to push a fetal personhood bill through the legislature this session, and I’ve been thinking a lot (at night, in bed, staring at the ceiling while my brain whirs) about the long, long history in this country of our preoccupation with the bodily rights of people capable of giving birth.
In the 20th Century, you see, we were obsessed with THE WRONG PEOPLE having babies. The justification of Eugenics (which I have written about elsewhere and address also in fiction) was used by the state to PREVENT “undesirable” people from reproducing. Mostly these people were poor and disenfranchised (though generally speaking, as a category, disenfranchisement for women was the status quo on the whole for much of history, so it feels kind of silly to use that word here.) They were people who were perceived to be mentally incapable in some way—though it’s important to note that it really WAS about perception alone.
There was no method to this madness. Just men proclaiming that such and such a person should not be allowed to reproduce for reasons that amounted to hearsay. Maybe the person in question was deemed anti-social, somehow. Maybe they were an embarrassment of some kind to their wealthy family which could not afford the risk to their reputation (remember, those wealthy families were happy to lobotomize their daughters if they were considered too uncontrollable). Maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or subject to abuse that left mental scars. It literally did not matter.
Equally as important to note: It would not have been less horrific if it had been grounded in science or any kind of real means testing.
We like to believe we’ve evolved as a society, that these kinds of programs, if they existed, were VERY PROMPTLY abandoned after World War II and Hitler’s genocide showed us the end result of giving the state the power to decide who is worthy of—well, life. Unfortunately, that isn’t true. Sterilization programs continued well into the 80s, from what I’ve found. And we still see cases of the reproductive rights of people deemed “incapable” going before the courts today.
But more pernicious still, you can hear the echo of this unexamined, unconfronted social agreement every time someone talks about how “people should have to pass a test before they’re allowed to have children.” Because we don’t talk about Eugenics, you see, or our very big role in supporting the movement, in our schools. We prefer to see ourselves as the heroes of WWII and erase our culpability in its atrocities altogether, as a result. (Convenient, really.)
In the 21st Century, plagued by the outrageous and white supremacist notion of the “Great Replacement” in combination with the Capitalist need for an unending supply of labor (as in people able-bodied enough to work), legislation has tried to move in the other direction. Instead of PREVENTING people from having children, the law wants to force them to do so (under terms, of course, still dictated by the state.) This is where Abortion Bans and Fetal Personhood bills come into play.
First you tell people that any pregnancy MUST be carried to term, and then you criminalize and punish them if they fail to accomplish that goal. There is no recognition of the fundamentally adversarial relationship of a fertilized egg inside a womb from the moment of implantation onward. No understanding of the fact that gestation is an INCREDIBLE metabolic strain for the person carrying that fetus, and not every body is capable of carrying that load while also trying to survive in a capitalist society that refuses to provide basic necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare as a baseline right, or even carrying that load under the BEST of circumstances (which these are… not). No consideration of the fact that miscarriage, is, in fact, an incredibly common experience among pregnant people, or how dangerous carrying a child to term can be for the person doing it.
Anecdotally, nearly ALL my friends with children have some firsthand experience of the heartbreak of miscarriage OR some horror story about how they nearly died of blood loss or other complications during the process of giving birth. Decades of people not talking about it because of propriety or shame does not make a thing rare. The reality of reproduction is that you can do everything right, take every precaution, employ every possible mitigation, desperately want a child, and still NOT BE ABLE to produce a baby that can survive outside the womb. There is NO MEANS by which humans can control what the outcome of the implantation of a fertilized egg in a womb will be which, fundamentally, makes legislating it ENTIRELY RIDICULOUS.
North Dakota’s personhood law does contain vague exceptions for “spontaneous miscarriage” and the “life of the mother”, but by leaving those exceptions vague, it makes the state itself the judge of what will be considered an acceptable level of risk to a person’s life, and what will or will not be ruled “spontaneous miscarriage” vs “purposeful abortion.” You can certainly see, I hope, how problematic that might be for the person who has just suffered a loss—of a child they desperately wanted, or a child they were still coming to terms with the idea of bringing into the world, or a baby they did not feel themselves capable of caring for properly.
If the person dares to express relief at a miscarriage, will they be subject to investigation? Just to be CERTAIN the miscarriage was truly “spontaneous” after all? If a person expressed reservation about becoming pregnant, and then found themselves in that state, will they be asking for the additional trauma of criminal charges in the event of a miscarriage? Just to be CERTAIN they didn’t do anything that could have caused it? If a person has a history of drug use, or mental health issues (which North Dakota already exempts from the category of threat to a mother’s life, of course, though our mental health is as physical as any other illness), and something goes awry during gestation, will we criminally investigate them, also? For a relapse, or a mental breakdown? Declare the results of either a murder though there is no knowing if that fetus would have survived to term or not, regardless?
And what will that investigation do to someone already mentally ill, already struggling with addiction? Is that not also a threat to the life and well-being of the Actual Person Living? Do you really think that anyone takes lightly the responsibility of bringing a life into the world? That they (BOTH PARENTS, THE ENTIRE FAMILY) won’t already be SUFFERING enough both physically and mentally, without also being accused of murder?
Ask yourself for a moment what you would be feeling in that scenario. And then, once you’ve reassured yourself that you’re a good person who would feel properly devastated, ask yourself why you can’t trust that OTHER people would not already be suffering in the same way that you would be? Why you feel it is necessary to impose the terror of criminal charges to ensure it?
None of this is about protecting lives, unless you don’t actually believe that PREGNANT PEOPLE are also LIVING PERSONS worthy of FULL and EQUAL protections under the law.
