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

by Cynthia R. Daniels

Some say the fetus is the “tiniest citizen.” If so, then the bodies of women themselves have become political arenas―or, 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 cesarean section. No longer concerned with conception or motherhood, the new politics of fetal rights focuses on fertility and pregnancy itself, on a woman’s relationship with the fetus. How exactly, Cynthia Daniels asks, 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, rigorously pursued throughout this book, give us a clear 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, fetal protectionism in the workplace, and drug and alcohol use and abuse, Daniels shows us state power at work in the struggle between fetal rights and women’s rights. These cases raise critical questions about the impact of gender on 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 fetal rights suggests the depth of the current gender crisis and the force of the feelings of social dislocation generated by reproductive politics. Breaking through the public mythology that clouds these debates, At Women’s Expense makes a hopeful beginning toward liberating woman’s body within the body politic.

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Bonnie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a feminist analysis of attempts to prevent prenatal harm by controlling women's choices in conception and pregnancy. It's well-researched, well-written, and basically on the right side. But the author has an unfortunate tendency to substitute rhetoric for reasons. She doesn't consider the hard cases where there is a real conflict between what's best for the child who will be born and either the mother's well-being or what she wants. There are better books on the topic.

[Clay Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniels provides a modern and critical examination of how the modern comprehension of abortion as a war with the woman pitted against the fetus presupposes notions of personhood and legal identity that we need to call into question. Her use of legal analysis and a Foucauldian understanding of how our legal systems strip away a woman's right to her own body reveal deeper flaws of U.S. society. What began as a legal project to allow people economic redress in the case of accidental abortion was picked up by conservative fanatics that used a cultural moment to alienate people from owning their own bodies. To presuppose, as we often do, that a fetus is fundamentally a person and the choice of abortion is between two equal 'lives' is a cultural fiction created after a century of legislation and judicial action.

Rather, we need a reshift, as Nixon seems to portray it, in the paradigm of fetal identity. There is not as clean-cut physical parity as we now presuppose, and by breaking down the historical lessons, we can revivify the woman's corpus as what it is: a fully lived and actualized human body. Forcing her to suffer at the expense of a nonmaterial being just reinforced patriarchal legal systems. The same systems that Nixon does a flawless job of critiquing.

[Caitlin Killian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a catalyst in my career. A foundational book.