Making Fetal Persons: Fetal Homicide, Ultrasound, and the Normative Significance of Birth

Abstract

The task of this paper is to examine the integration of obstetric ultrasound images in moral and legal debates on the status of the human fetus, particularly through the framework of the constitution of fetal personhood. I focus on the questions about the moral and legal significance of prenatal life and birth as construed through recent shifts in law toward so-called ‘fetal homicide’ laws. Throughout, I argue that the moral status of the fetus has a performative dimension, realised in the operation of obstetric ultrasound and the interpolation of the fetus as a person that it effects. As I show, in regard to the constitution of the fetus as person, obstetric ultrasound operates as a technological means of mediation between the human body and the concept of the person.