Republican Motherhood Redux?: Women as Contingent Citizens in 21st Century America

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the re-emergence of republican motherhood, once used to define the unique and conditional relationship between women and the state in the nineteenth century. By examining recent developments in federal and state abortion policy, I reveal the current trend toward “devolving” women's social and political citizenship rights to the states, where they will once again be highly variable and often contingent upon women's mothering status. Alternatively, these same policy developments demonstrate the simultaneous nationalization of fetal rights and a language of fetal citizenship or patriotic natalism. While women's citizenship becomes contingent upon the caprices of local power structures, fetal citizenship emerges as a uniform, national concept.