Making Fetuses Into Babies
The Anthropology of Social Personhood
By Leigh Stuckey
This piece is a part of our Spark Series Reproductive Justice as a Human Right
When my first pregnancy ended in an early loss several years ago, I struggled to name what I had lost. It felt like more than “fetal tissue,” but less than a baby. Rather than self-help books on overcoming miscarriage, it was scholarship on abortion and social personhood from my own discipline of Anthropology that, years later, helped me make sense of my experience. I read works on these topics in the summer of 2022, as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Many in the anti-choice movement at that time didn’t seem to struggle with the classification of an early pregnancy in the way that I did, as they characterized all embryos and fetuses as babies whose “lives” must be saved. But mandating that unwanted pregnancies be carried to term fails to recognize that forced birth does not make fetuses into babies or persons.
Biological birth and social birth do not always coincide (1). Social personhood, or the recognition of a being as a member of a social group, often requires a great deal more than conception, quickening, “viability,” or even birth. No scientific, medical, or technological technique can pinpoint the moment when a fetus becomes a person. That moment varies, across cultures and individuals. As the literature I discuss below makes clear, to truly support the transformation of fetuses into babies requires attention to the social practices and contexts necessary to make all fetuses wanted and to make birth safer in the US, especially for birthing people of color (2).
Fetuses over time
In the past, while pregnancy was understood as being “with child,” it was not until a pregnancy ended in the birth of a human child that this prior state could be confirmed. Otherwise, the womb could be occupied by other forms — “growths,” “false fruit,” “useless beings,” “stagnations” — which the body would expel, clearing harmful blockages of the uterus that could otherwise limit fertility. These expelled materials were examined by early physicians and recognized as a product of conception, but they were not thought to be “real children.”
The fetus began to take on a greater significance through visual representation. For centuries, anatomical texts that illustrated the interior of the womb tended to depict the unborn as a small but fully formed little boy — the hoped for “child-to-be.” Then, at the turn of the 19th century, Thomas Soemmerring published drawings of a fetus developing over time, based on specimens that had been collected by taxidermists and physicians. Soemmerring’s images made it clear that the substance of early pregnancy was the nascent form of a developing infant. Many also removed from view any connection to a pregnant person, with the placenta, uterus, and even umbilical cord often absent. These depictions were an early step in the process of reducing pregnancy from a somatic experience best known by a pregnant person to a fetus-centered biomedical event to be managed by physicians. Ultrasound technology propelled this shift, rendering the fetus a directly accessible “patient,” autonomous from the now invisible pregnant person.
Anti-choice activists quickly tapped into the visual access provided by ultrasounds to depict fetuses as victims. Rife with visual distortions and misleading accompanying text, today the accustomed image of a fetus is distinctly infant-like: cute, clearly human, floating independently, and begging to be “saved.” These images have been effective in framing abortion as a decision about sympathetic fetuses rather than pregnant people.
Feminist activists and abortion providers have only recently begun to fight back in the visual field, publishing photographs of pregnancy tissue before 10 weeks. These images show, as childbearing people in the 18th-century knew, that nothing identifiably human or baby-like can be discerned early in pregnancy with the naked eye alone.
However, the issue is not simply the accuracy of fetal images, but the meaning of the fetus, accessible via ultrasound. That requires interrogation.
Social Personhood
Anthropological scholarship makes clear that there is no single meaning to assign fetuses. How and when pregnancies, fetuses, and even infants, become meaningful and valued varies cross-culturally. In many societies this was a two-step process: first the fetus was confirmed to be human, and then, later, recognized as a person. Infants born prematurely or deformed, or newborns who died in the first days, might not be recognized as human children at all, but other animals, ghosts, or spirit-children who mistakenly entered the womb. Fully formed infants born recognizably human often remained liminal for the vulnerable first weeks after their birth while they, their parents, and their communities underwent rite of passage rituals that marked infants’ full welcome into the community. Social birth anchored infants to the mortal world and tied them to their kin groups.
Practices of naming and burial are illustrative: infants and children may not be given individual names until they have achieved social personhood, sometimes months or years after their births. Communities might not publicly mourn the death of an infant or small child that had not drawn breath or been collectively welcomed, and its body was likely to be buried someplace other than the burial grounds of recognized community members, or without a funeral.
For the Wari’ of the Amazon, personhood developed incrementally. Conception was thought to occur via the accumulation of semen during multiple instances of intercourse. The developing fetus merged with its mother by sharing fluids (blood and breastmilk) during pregnancy and early life, and at first the two were called by the same name. Sustained acts of nurturance, beginning with breastfeeding, conferred social status. Babies who died before being breastfed were buried without a funeral. Infanticide, preferable in some cases where the support of a father could not be guaranteed, was not murder if the infant had not yet been nursed. The Wari’ protected children who would be cared for as social beings, prioritizing long-term nurturance over conception or birth.
Supporting the biological and social personhood of fetuses
To recognize that the value of fetuses is variable is not to say that no fetuses are social beings — recognized, desired, and loved. Rather, to do so highlights that the conditions in which a person conceives and carries a fetus, and into which they will deliver and raise a baby, shape their evaluation of it. When a pregnancy is wanted, many parents begin the process of constructing a new person and bonding with it while the infant is in utero — a process made easier by ultrasound and genetic testing technologies that can provide information about biological sex and make the fetus feel “real” even before its movements can be felt. Many whose wanted pregnancies end unexpectedly grieve losses deeply and undertake efforts to memorialize the unborn infants they had already granted personhood.
To give life to fetuses, biological and social birth are necessary. Rather than forcing pregnancy to end in birth by limiting access to abortion, a true interest in the “lives” of fetuses requires supporting childbearing families such that fetuses and infants can be safely welcomed as persons into communities that can nourish them.
There are many wanted fetuses that do not achieve biological birth. The United States has among the worst outcomes in infant and maternal health of any developed nation. This is especially the case for birthing people of color. Living in a racist society exacts costs to health, manifesting in higher rates of preterm birth, pre-eclampsia, and pregnancy and delivery complications among pregnant people of color, whose pregnancies are further threatened by obstetric racism. Care under Medicaid, covering a population that is overwhelmingly poor and minoritized, often features excessive testing and dehumanization. Black birthing people are three times more likely to die from pregnancy related complications than their white counterparts. Black and Indigenous American infants die at approximately twice the rate of white infants. One way to ensure that more fetuses can become babies, then, is to improve our system for managing health care and birth (investment in midwifery has been effective elsewhere) and address racism in health settings and in society.
A fetus can be socially born and embraced as a person when it is wanted. A range of practical measures and major societal shifts are needed to ensure that pregnancies are not unwelcome, then, from ensuring access to contraceptives (and, yes, abortion); to overhauling patriarchal norms that equate male power with sexual conquest and allow for rape and the impregnation of children; to cultivating a culture that cherishes and supports parenting by addressing the financial costs and excessive burdens of bearing and raising children, disproportionately borne by women. For wanted pregnancies to develop into nurtured children, safe environments are needed in which to raise them, protected from gun and police violence and environmental destruction.
The anthropological scholarship on fetal and infant personhood shows that the assurance of a future infant’s survival and nourishment, rather than its forced birth, makes babies out of fetuses. Birth is not just medical or biological. Fetuses are attached to pregnant people, who are attached to communities, within societies. To deny this reality is essentially to deny the potential personhood of the fetus. To affirm it acknowledges that to care about a fetus is to care about the person and social world in which it grows.
Dr. Leigh Stuckey is a Lecturer at the University of Michigan. She is also a cultural anthropologist specializing in homelands, heritage tourism, and hospitality in Greece and Turkey and a scholar of pregnancy, childbirth, and pregnancy loss.
