At Women's Expense: State Power and the Politics of Fetal Rights

Abstract

Some call the foetus the "tiniest citizen." If so, the bodies of women themselves have become political arenas or - as recent cases suggest - battlefields. A cocaine-addicted mother is convicted of drug trafficking through the umbilical cord. Women employees at a battery plant must prove infertility to keep their jobs. A terminally ill woman is forced to undergo a Caesarean section. No longer concerned with conception or motherhood, the new politics of foetal rights focus on fertility and pregnancy itself; on a woman's relationship with the foetus. How does this affect a woman's rights? Are they different from a man's? And how has the state helped determine the difference? The answers, pursued throughout this book, give us a look into the state's paradoxical role in gender politics - as both a challenger of injustice and an agent of social control. In benchmark legal cases, concerned with forced medical treatment, foetal protectionism in the workplace, and drug and alcohol use and abuse, Daniels shows state power at work in the struggle between foetal rights and women's rights. These cases raise critical questions about women's standing as citizens, and about the relationship between state power and gender inequality. Fully appreciating the difficulties of each case, the author probes the subtleties of various positions and their implications, for a deeper understanding of how a woman's reproductive capability affects her relationship to state power. In her analysis, the need to defend women's right to self-sovereignty becomes clear, but so does the need to define further the very concepts of self-sovereignty and privacy. The intensity of the debate over foetal rights suggests the depth of the current gender crisis, and the strength of feelings of social dislocation generated by reproductive politics.