Fetal Personhood and Voice in Medieval French Literature

This essay examines medieval French literary representations of fetal speech and proposes a new understanding of medieval conceptions of personhood. Placing passages from the Roman de Fauvel, Histoire de Marie et de Jésus, Pelerinage de Jhesucrist, and Tristan de Nanteuil in conversation with elements of thirteenth-century theological, encyclopedic, and scientific discourses, as well as with contemporary sound studies and theories of the voice, this essay shows that emergent human personhood is constructed in medieval texts as an audible social phenomenon. Medieval personhood is a notion reliant on sound and speech, and thus on the presence of an audience: a person is a composite of body and soul occupying a social and vocalic space shared with other persons. This relational understanding allows for a redefinition of personhood: not as a quality originating at a fixed point in human development but as a social and sensory experience.

What To Expect When You’re No Longer Expecting: How States Use Concealment and Abuse of a Corpse Statutes Against Women

Since the 1690s, women in the United States have been arrested and punished for experiencing miscarriages and stillbirths—pregnancy outcomes that are completely normal. This practice continues to the modern day, where prosecutors charge women with concealing a birth, concealing a death, or abuse of a corpse for the actions they take after experiencing pregnancy loss. This Note argues that these statutes were originally enacted to punish women who had sex outside of marriage and are now being used to control women, mostly women of color and poor women, for not adhering to society’s idealized vision of femininity and motherhood. The use of these statutes advances notions of fetal personhood and will ultimately have a chilling effect on the availability of abortion through telemedicine. The Note suggests that while repealing these laws would help, the best solution is to approach the issue through a reproductive justice lens—namely, increasing the availability of education and medical services for women.

Women in pain: how narratives of pain and sacrifice complicate the debate over the Catholic provision of obstetrical care

Disputes regarding the denial of obstetrical care in Catholic hospitals are met by well-worn responses from both Catholic and secular ethicists. Catholic ethicists often focus on fetal personhood while secular actors assert that Catholic care disaffirms the mother’s personhood. However, this debate’s focus on maternal and fetal personhood fails to encompass the divergent attitudes towards obstetrical healthcare. Attitudes towards pain, for example, are ignored. Modern medicine often approaches pain as a medical problem which ought to be treated. Catholic stances towards pain may present it as not wholly negative and, perhaps, constitutive of spiritual growth. Spiritually formative pain is commonly mapped onto obstetrical experiences; narratives of maternal sacrifice are found throughout Catholicism. Interrogating pain works to complicate and, perhaps, delegitimise the argument that Catholic care devalues the pain experience of the woman. Rather, pain is used to affirm the woman’s personhood, facilitating spiritual growth and development.

The Relevance (and Irrelevance) of Questions of Personhood (and Mindedness) to the Abortion Debate

Disagreements about abortion are often assumed to reduce to disagreements about fetal personhood (and mindedness). If one believes a fetus is a person (or has a mind), then they are “pro-life.” If one believes a fetus is not a person (or is not minded), they are “pro-choice.” The issue, however, is much more complicated. Not only is it not dichotomous—most everyone believes that abortion is permissible in some circumstances (e.g. to save the mother’s life) and not others (e.g. at nine months of a planned pregnancy)—but scholars on both sides of the issue (e.g. Don Marquis and Judith Thomson) have convincingly argued that fetal personhood (and mindedness) are irrelevant to the debate. To determine the extent to which they are right, this article will define “personhood,” its relationship to mindedness, and explore what science has revealed about the mind before exploring the relevance of both to questions of abortion’s morality and legality. In general, this article does not endorse a particular answer to these questions, but the article should enhance the reader’s ability to develop their own answers in a much more informed way.

Talking About Abortion

This essay examines the complex and contradictory nature of how the issue of abortion is discussed in the U.S. today. In political debate, on conservative news stations, and outside abortion clinics, abortion is regularly shouted about loudly and with great conviction by those who want to see the procedure recriminalized. Yet at the level of individual experience, abortion is rarely discussed, even among close friends and relatives. How is it that a medical procedure, legal since 1973, remains a source of shame and secrecy? To answer that question, this essay identifies the categories into which the subject of abortion commonly falls and argues that so many things in the U.S. are about abortion because abortion itself is about so many things: medicine, religion, rights, regulation, morality, sex, gender, families, and politics. There are complicated views toward abortion within each area, and they complications increase when one area intersects with another -- religion and law, politics and reproduction, the practice of medicine and the regulation of abortion. Disaggregating the many factors about which citizens have strong beliefs reveals how the subject of abortion is an opaque slate upon which concerns not just about fetal personhood but about states’ rights or teenage promiscuity or women’s power can also be inscribed. Talking more openly about abortion will help normalize a decision made by millions of women each year so that the decision can be made outside the parameters of shame and secrecy that so often now set the scene for women with unwanted pregnancies.