Personhood

The next phase of the war over reproduction in America

Personhood is a field guide to the seemingly boundless tactical resourcefulness of the anti-abortion movement.”—Margaret Talbot, New Yorker

What’s next for the battle over abortion? Mary Ziegler argues that simply undoing Roe v. Wade has never been the endpoint for the anti-abortion movement. Since the 1960s, the larger goal has been to secure recognition of foetuses and embryos as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a step that the modern anti-abortion movement argues would make liberal abortion laws unconstitutional.

Personhood chronicles the internal struggles and changing ideas about race, sex, religion, war, corporate rights, and poverty that shaped the personhood struggle over half a century. The book explores how Americans came to take for granted that foetal personhood requires criminalisation and suggests that other ways of valuing both foetal life and women’s equality might be possible.

Ziegler ultimately shows that the battle for personhood has long been about more than abortion: it has aimed to overhaul the regulation of in vitro fertilisation, contraception, and the behaviour of pregnant women; change the meaning of equality under the law; and determine how courts decide which fundamental rights Americans enjoy. This book is necessary reading for anyone seeking to understand the era launched by the reversal of Roe.