At women's expense : state power and the politics of fetal rights

Stories of pregnant women's experiences vis-a-vis coercive state practices are almost always shocking examples of gender oppression. The stories in Daniels' book are no exception. Forced medical treatment, workplace exclusion policies, and imprisonment for drug trafficking via the umbilical cord are the usual ways that claims of fetal protectionism have excluded pregnant women from participating in public life with equal rights of citizenship. Cynthia Daniels is a political scientist teaching in the United States whose work deals with so-called "fetal rights" cases in her own country. The book under review begins with a discussion of significant social, medical and legal developments that have altered the socio-political status of the fetus. Daniels' work illustrates how the use of the law to protect the fetus from behaviour of pregnant women deemed harmful and/or criminal is made all the more effective through appeals to a particular ideology of proper motherhood.The conception of the fetus both in law and medicine as a rights bearing individual is further aided by biomedical imaging and sampling technologies used in the governance of pregnancy which effectively establishes the individuality of a fetus as a free-floating entity separate from the pregnant body, According to Daniels, these changes have radically transformed the popular cultural understanding of the fetus in ways that compromise women's autonomy. In particular, Daniels argues that the anti-abortion movement capitalized on these technological developments, seizing the opportunity to wage an effective media war against women's reproductive rights and freedom. Using visual imagery of a fetus to promote their moral agenda, the movement's advocates effectively transformed the fetus into the tiniest, most innocent citizen in dire need of protection from the selfish desires of pregnant women who seek abortions and/or behave in ways that put the fetus -- and by extension, society -- at risk of harm. Rather than viewing pregnant women's and fetal interests as unitary, these cultural narratives reinforce a false perception of fetal personhood.Daniels' book deals with three important cases that address the main issues at stake when agents of the state begin to assert rights claims on behalf of the fetus: the case of Angela Carder, forced to undergo a cesarean section that killed both her and her fetus within days of the operation; Johnson Controls' fetal protection policy which required that women submit to sterilization procedures or prove infertility before being allowed to work in their manufacturing plant; and finally the case of Jennifer Johnson, charged with "delivering" cocaine to her twin fetuses via the umbilical cord. All three cases are illustrative of the emergence of an era of "fetal dominance," and Daniels critically evaluates them in terms of their impact on women's differential claims to the liberal rights of citizenship and self-sovereignty.While in each case reviewed by Daniels the courts ultimately ruled in women's favour, the cases themselves "...represent an attempt to establish the boundaries within which women reproduce and to encode these boundaries in law" (p. 145). In the Carder case, the rights of pregnant women to refuse medical treatment was upheld, the workplace protectionist policy in Johnson Control was unanimously struck down by the Supreme Court, and the conviction of Jennifer Johnson for drug-trafficking was eventually overturned, albeit on a technicality. …