Imaginary Citizens United….

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

Eggs Are People Too!

| March 21, 2012

It’s an interesting time to ponder the meaning of life and death in the eyes of the law. On one hand, Christian conservatives increasingly seek to sacralize embryos from the moment of conception. On the other, the Supreme Court just heard a case that, among other things, considers the extent to which the corporeal death of a parent is really the “end of the line” with regard to “survivor” benefits for children conceived by artificial insemination from the frozen sperm of a deceased father. On one hand, Citizens United granted First Amendment rights to corporations that are identical to—and some would say exceed—those of natural persons; on the other, the Second Circuit recently ruled that individuals, but not corporations, can be sued for human rights abuses.

It’s interesting to consider the larger social anxieties at play when it comes to the “right to life” debates. Rick Santorum recently made a great show for personhood amendments, declaring, “Personhood is defined as an entity that is genetically human and alive.” But unfertilized eggs are “genetically human.” And sperm swim, so technically they’re “alive.” (Or, as an irreverent friend suggested: fellatio must therefore be a form of cannibalism.) If egg and sperm are sacralized even before they meet, it goes a long way to explaining why the evils of contraception are back on the table.

But if we push this figuration only a little, “conceptually,” life begins with DNA. Conceivably, every cell in our body is brimming with generative potential, particularly given new technologies of assisted reproduction. Santorum’s stance thus becomes a peculiar cross between the theological imperative to be fruitful and multiply and the fetishism of microbiological cellular promise.

The oddity of this discourse is best revealed by a recent rash of satiric bills pressed by clever female legislators. Virginia State Senator Janet Howell wrote an amendment to the requirement that women be subjected to vaginal probe before being able to have an abortion: “Prior to prescribing medication for erectile dysfunction, a physician shall perform a digital rectal examination and a cardiac stress test. Informed consent for these procedures shall be given at least 24 hours before the procedures are performed.” (Her amendment was defeated, but by a satisfyingly narrow margin of 21 to 19.) In Oklahoma, Constance Johnson introduced the “anti-spillage” amendment, which holds that “any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

Frankly, I respect the Oklahoma Personhood Amendment’s proposal that life is sacred, “regardless of place of residence, race, gender, age, disability, health, level of function, condition of dependency, or method of reproduction.” But this expansive notion never seems to translate into policies that would provide actual food, shelter, healthcare or material succor for those precious lives, either pre- or post-birth. (In New Hanover, North Carolina, the County Board of Commissioners recently turned down a family healthcare grant, with one commissioner remarking that “if these young women were responsible people and didn’t have the sex to begin with, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”) Those claiming to give “voice to the voiceless” entities within the womb pit the interests of conceptual life against the bodies of living women. In any event, I’m not sure why regard for incipient humanity should make us feel bound to breed like bunnies within marriage or be constrained from copulating outside of it—particularly given that 99 percent of American women use some form of birth control.

At the same time, there are important principles being tested in these debates: the degree to which we feel sex to be a natural bodily function, whether pregnancy is always wholly a woman’s autonomous choice. Framed this way, our discussions of life and death seem oddly incoherent and disconnected. We love the very thought of life, but we disparage “anchor babies,” “welfare children” and teens of color like Trayvon Martin. We spend billions on fertility treatments for the wealthy but speak of pregnancy among the poor in terms of economic surplus, burden, free rider.

These discussions also vivify proxies of personhood in much the same way that corporations are enlivened: our updated Puritanism about reproduction is peppered with overly deterministic images of what DNA “says” and with marketed avatars of human perfectibility. Cytoplasm has been personified and given life and active voice; you’ve got to probe a woman’s body to see if there’s a separate life in there in need of rescue. You have to show her pictures of her blastodermic vesicles in case she doesn’t know.

Some anti-contraception arguments seem to cast birth control as actively harming real, microscopic little people, wee homunculi waiting to materialize, as though menstruation were a sinful waste. Eggs are people too! The maternal sanctity of the inspired neo-egg is posited in constant battle with the hot, sluttish moral disregard of any woman who has sex that is not at the behest of a husband’s procreative mission. Thus it is that Sandra Fluke becomes pluralized into all the women in her testimony; and all those women are reduced to a throbbing red light of a single really dirty body part.

But this is not mere political hyperbole. If we are not yet a theocracy, then it seems appropriate to observe that Santorum’s comprehensive invocation of “life” as a theological concept is, in the law, no more than a literary device—one that is employed when we construct legal fictions of all sorts. It is no different from granting “legal subjectivity” to a municipality or bestowing “personhood” on a corporation. This is not about what God endows. Rather, the law’s concern is what we as a constituted polity choose to animate and what we don’t. How “we the people” come alive in language, not merely in the womb, is the challenge of social justice: our love of life must not be locked away in the perpetually future contingent but fully engaged in the embodied present tense.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/166939/eggs-are-people-too

Culture of Death: Who Gets to Be a Person in Mississippi?

Patricia J. Williams 

The Nation Online,  blogpost of November 3, 2011 – 12:38pm ET, http://www.thenation.com/blog/164299/culture-death-who-gets-be-person-mississippi

On November 8, Mississippi is set to vote on Measure 26, a ballot initiative that would redefine the state’s Bill of Rights to extend the protections of personhood to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” It is striking that the measure, which is largely motivated by religious concerns about the sanctity of human existence, crops up in a state that has one of the lowest indices for overall quality of life—whenever it might begin—in the entire country: the infant mortality rate over the last decade is about 10 per 1,000 live births, with black babies dying at twice the rate of white babies. Mississippi leads the country in obesity and ranks forty-sixth in the number of state residents who have health insurance. It suffers from high death rates from cancer and heart disease. Twenty-three percent of the population lives below the poverty level, giving Mississippi the unenviable distinction of ranking dead last in the nation.

With the odds of survival so relatively skewed, it is no wonder that there might be some anxiety over preserving the very idea of life. Then, too, the legal category of “personhood” seems particularly capacious since Citizens United; if such a label protects corporations, banks and homeowners’ associations—and don’t they seem to be thriving!—what blessings might it extend to a zygote, that abstracted conception of future stock, human capital, mortal enterprise?

As I write, the seven billionth person is said to be entering this earthly dimension. That statistic has been reported with Malthusian apprehension, as well it might. The resources of the world are not infinitely replenishable; much of the planet’s ecology risks systemic collapse as a result of habitat degradation, global warming, invasive species and thoughtless exploitation; and the superpowers continue to go to war with one another over dismally non-sustainable energy sources like oil, gas and coal. Add in the uncertain-to-teetering economies just about everywhere, and it isn’t hard to fathom the dangerous contradictions of those who feel both deep resentment about the mad global competition to make ends meet, and simultaneously, a frantic “need” to propagate more of “our kind” because “we” are too few—regardless of actual numbers or common well-being. It’s as though we are walking a tightrope stretched between fetishism of the fetus and an abyss of human disposability.

When, during a recent Republican debate, the audience cheered the fact that Rick Perry had overseen more executions than any governor in modern history, there was at least a momentary shudder among the punditocracy. What did it mean that a numbered batch of bodies was cause for such applause? Perhaps this is the new metric for presidential success: executions and summary assassinations, as though the scales of justice were measured in people-poundage, with some being heavier or lighter, depending on strangely monetized equivalences. There have been too many events of late that have been framed by our political and media spokespeople as measured by some curious human exchange rate. Does the targeted killing of unindicted US citizens like Anwar Al-Awlaki and his 16-year old son “equal” resolution for the violence he may have preached? Does the grisly display of Muammar Qaddafi’s body flung in a refrigerated meat locker “account” for the lost lives in Lockerbie? And whether you deem the late Troy Davis guilty or innocent, his execution was a stark example of how much habeas corpus has been whittled away in recent years, his death an indirect product of curtailed access to judicial appeal and substantive justice—limitations that are justified with reference to “time spent,” and “tax dollars.”

Indeed, Davis’s legal representation was severely compromised by crippling cuts in state and federal funding for the Georgia Resource Center, which represented him and other indigent prisoners in post-conviction hearings. His appeal was also hobbled by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which prohibits prisoners from raising, post-conviction, evidence that they might have presented at trial, no matter how probative or substantive.

Embryos notwithstanding, we seem less and less invested in protections for the sanctity of life in the here and now. Can’t let things go on forever, after all. Costs a bundle.

Recently, the state of Texas decided to do away with the last meal for death row inmates, that terminal rite of agency, of choice, of taking leave of the sensory. From now on, the condemned will have to eat whatever hash is being dished up in the commissary. Of course, the tradition of granting requests in one’s last meal is premised on a superstition of sorts, a fiction of making peace, of showing mercy, of stilling spirit. In Louisiana’s Angola Prison, for example, the warden shares that meal with the doomed, a kind of final communion. In other places and times, a last drink or a coin to the executioner might serve as the bridge between life and impending death, a marking of the day as Unlike Any Other. The killing of a human being, whether considered legally justified or not, is momentous, mysterious, a repercussive tragedy no matter how reprehensible the record of that life. There will always be those who wreak havoc in society, and who then sneer from the grave or the brink of it; there is, no doubt, a very human urge to give them a little shove into the great beyond. But the entire purpose of just governance is to model respect and to provide restraint in the face of such urges.

When, instead, our government is viewed solely as something to protect “us” against “them” to the exclusion of it being a constitutive force as well, the social world turns into a zero-sum game, in which others’ success at survival means less for you. That mindset engenders a mean little flare of relief every time there’s news of one less ne’er-do-well post-born mouth to feed. That not-so-subtle channeling of emotion toward the facile rendering of death distracts us from the policy choices that might make life more tolerable—preventive healthcare, basic housing, public education—even in our unnatural numbers. It allows us to ignore the inconsistency between gracing the mute quiescence of a fertilized egg with personhood while failing to endow the more lively political quests of the American Dream.