Know Thine Enemy: Fetal Personhood as Metaphorical Thinking (Repost)

Author’s Note: This post at Feministe–about the Catholic Church’s excommunication of the mother of a nine-year-old girl who became pregnant with twins, apparently after having been raped by her step-father, and the doctors who performed the abortion that ended the girl’s pregnancy–has been roiling me since I read it. It did, though, put me in mind of a post of my own, “Know Thine Enemy: Fetal Personhood as Metaphorical Thinking,” that seems relevant to me in thinking about the religious (implicit and explicit) opposition to legalized abortion. I want to say up front something that I also say very late in the post, i.e. that I am aware that there are progressive Catholics working very hard and with real integrity against the sexism and misogyny in the Church, and my purpose in this piece is not to trash Catholics or Catholicism. Rather, I am trying to tease out one strand of thinking that seems to me quite present in much anti-abortion thinking and activism, as it relates to Christianity. I posted this originally in 2006 and so some of the legislative news that it refers to is dated. I have not edited the piece much, however–except to correct a confusion in the original between the immaculate conception and the virgin birth (and I hope I got it right this time)–because, while the introduction is long, I think it is still important to work through before getting to my main argument.

I have wanted to write about this for a while, now, ever since I read through the thread called (Very) Basic Economics and Abortion over at Alas. Since then, though, a number of things have happened: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case concerning so-called “partial-birth abortions,” South Dakota has passed the most restrictive law in the country against abortion, Utah has a proposed law that would eliminate incest exceptions in its parental notification law, and I have been in another conversation, What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice, on Alas, the initial post of which concerned a common strategy used by people who are anti-choice to try to silence those of us who are pro-choice: what would have happened if your mother had chosen to have an abortion instead of giving birth to you?

At one point the thread became a conversation about whether the virgin birth was an instance of divine rape or not (start reading here). This was relevant because it went to the question of what it means for women to have real choice in terms of pregnancy and childbirth—which also means in terms of when and whether and under what conditions to have sex—and, though I don’t remember that this point was brought out explicitly, to the question of what we model our understanding of women’s reproductive choice on. (I have italicized this because it will become important later on, towards the end of what I want to say.) What I want to do here is to try to tie all these various things together under the title I have given this post because I think it goes to the heart of understanding a rarely articulated aspect of what is at stake in the anti-choice position, whether it is articulated in explicitly religious terms or not, and because, under the general strategy of “know thine enemy,” I think this is an important understanding to reach. It’s going to take a while, and I’m going to have to make a number of leaps, to get where I want to go in this, so I hope you will bear with me.

The (Very) Basic Economics and Abortion thread concerns the question of how most effectively to reduce the number of abortions, by passing laws which permit the practice or those which restrict it. Inevitably, however, the discussion devolved into one about sexual morality, the question of whether and how to teach abstinence as part of sex education, the differences between religious and other approaches to sexual morality and so on. The simple fact that the discussion evolved in this way, motivated largely by two contributors RonF and gengwall, at least one of whom (gengwall) is unambiguously anti-abortion, demonstrates that there is a great deal more at stake for the anti-abortion position than simply whether or not abortion is legal. One can assume, I think, that even if abortion were rendered completely unnecessary starting tomorrow, the debate would then shift quite seamlessly and without losing any of its heat, to questions of sexual morality, because on this level the debate is not only about whether abortion ends pregnancies or murders unborn children, it is also, and in some ways primarily, about whether the sex that resulted in those pregnancies happened under “legitimate” and “morally approvable” circumstances.

The part of this thread that really caught my eye, however, was when people started talking about the definition of personhood. As part of that discussion, gengwall wrote the following (towards the end of the comment):

As far as the personhod argument in general, it has nothing to do with patriarchy either. It has everything to do with biology. I’m afraid you are stuck with this one as the objective biological facts don’t change depending on which country you go to.

and he offered these dictionary definitions as a thumbnail sketch of his overall position:

• Person – A Living (biological state) Human (biological classification). The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
• Human – A member of the genus Homo and especially of the species H. sapiens. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Others in the conversation take on gengwall’s use of the dictionary and other aspects of his argument that are troubling, intellectually and otherwise (see comments 61, 63, 64, 71; I also should point out that the parenthetical comments in the definition of “person” are his), and so I am not going to repeat what they have said. What interests me is the way in which gengwall’s definition of the fetus fits the description of metaphorical thinking in George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By, which I happen to be teaching in freshman English this semester. Basically, Lakoff and Johnson argue that we give structure to the world through metaphor, in terms of both understanding and experience. They point out, for example, that we understand argument in terms of war. Consider these expressions:

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms are right on target.

I demolished his argument. (4)

Lakoff and Johnson then point out, however, that we don’t just talk about argument like war; we actually experience it that way. Arguments, like wars for example, are won or lost; the people on either side of an argument behave in some ways as if they are at war, taking different lines of attack, for example, or surrendering some points in the hopes of gaining others that will lead to victory. To make this point by way of contrast, Lakoff and Johnson ask us to

imagine a culture where argument is viewed as a dance, the participantsare seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. (5)

The next point from Metaphors We Live By that is relevant to the question of fetal personhood is the way that metaphorical thinking, precisely because it “allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another (e.g., comprehending an aspect of arguing in terms of battle), will necessarily hide other aspects of that concept.” Lakoff and Johnson continue:

In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […] a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. For example, in the midst of a heated argument, when we are intent on attacking our opponent’s position and defending our own, we may lose sight of the cooperative aspects of arguing. Someone who is arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity [especially in an individualistic, capitalist society like the US], in an effort at mutual understanding. (10)

So, let’s return to gengwall’s definition fo the fetus as a person, which was also, apparently, the definition endorsed by the South Dakota legislature when it passed what the Washington Post and just about every other paper I looked at called “the nation’s most far-reaching ban on abortion.” Here are the relevant section of the law:

Section 1. The Legislature finds that the State of South Dakota has a compelling and paramount interest in the preservation and protection of all human life and finds that the guarantee of due process of law under the South Dakota Bill of Rights applies equally to born and unborn human beings.

Section 2. The Legislature finds that the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm. The Legislature finds that the explosion of knowledge derived from new recombinant DNA technologies over the past twenty-five years has reinforced the validity of the finding of this scientific fact.

There is a lot that one can say about this law, and most of it has probably been said already. The Washington Post counts 97 blogs that have had something say about its article (here are a few worth reading that I didn’t find on the Post’s list), and I have no doubt there are lots more bloggers, both for and against the measure, who have either posted since I began writing this or will post in the near future. What I want to point out is that to call a fetus or zygote or an embryo a human being, a person, an entity identical in its essence to you sitting here reading this or me as I sit (sat) writing it is to engage not in scientific analysis, but rather in precisely the kind of metaphorical thinking that Lakoff and Johnson’s book is about: Because to decide that “the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm” (as if it could be fertilized by female sperm?) is to decide that there is a basis of comparison by which something that is radically not like me or you is, in fact, just like me or you.

According to those who support the South Dakota bill, in other words, if you strip away each and every one of the characterstics that make up someone’s humanity/personhood, at least as humanity/personhood has conventionally been understood, with all its messy character traits, for example, (this is what Lakoff and Johnson mean when they say that metaphorical thinking “can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor), you are still left with a set of objective biological traits that make whoever possesses them a person. These traits, as I understand the argument, boil down to the fact that a zygote, from the moment of conception onward, is “genetically whole,” which is not the term gengwall and others would use, but it’s my catchphrase for the notion that the moment a zygote forms, it possesses all the DNA it needs not only to be recognizably human at any stage of its development, but also to guide its development into a human being ready to be born.

There are a number of important things to point out about this very frightening argument: For starters, it dresses up the old biology-is-destiny argument in some very fancy, shmancy new clothes. After all, if a zygote is already a fully fledged member of the human race, which means it possesses an inalienable right-to-life, and if a woman’s body is the only place where that particular human being can grow, then the fact of a woman’s body, not her desires or her choice, is the determining factor of her fate if she becomes pregnant. There is, of course, a long tradition of this kind of thinking running all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who believed in the one-seed theory of reproduction. According to this theory, men ejaculated tiny little people—I think the Greeks called them homonculii, but I am not sure—and when a woman became pregnant, it meant that her womb was warm and moist enough (the Greeks were believers in the four humors) for one of these tiny little people to lodge itself there and begin the process of growing into the child that would be born.

The other old saw touched on by this reduction of our humanity to the genetic material of which we are made is the mind-body (or body/soul) split. It used to be that what made us human, what separated us from “the animals of the forest,” to use an old-fashioned expression to express an old-fashioned idea, was our minds and/or our souls. It was because we could think rationally and/or because we were capable of spiritual awareness, that we were better than dogs and cats, lions and bears, fireflies and cockroaches. To this way of thinking, our bodies were shells we inhabited, and we used them well or not well, morally and ethically or immorally and unethically, and then left them behind when we died. If, however, our humanity inheres in the material fact of our bodies, then neither the rational mind nor the soul can play the role it once did in the spirit-flesh duality. The humanity of the body must be able to make its claims as well, and here is where I think the question of whether Mary was raped by the Holy Spirit and what it means for her to have conceived a child with the god of the Christian Bible becomes important.

Here are the relevant verses from Luke:

26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, 27 to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. 29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. 30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. 34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? 35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible. 38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

Rather than start with the question of whether Mary consented or could have meaningfully consented to bear God’s child, given the disparity of power between them, I want to start by thinking about the nature of the fetus that grew in her body. I know that there is some difference of opinion, and even controversy, between and among the various Christian denominations over whether Jesus was human or divine or both, whether he was conscious of his dual status (if it was dual), or of his divine status (if he was divine), but this is an internal debate that is not relevant here. What is relevant is that the source of this debate, as far as I know (I am not Christian) is the very anxiety producing fact—for people who believe in a disembodied god—that the male half of the genetic material which produced Jesus had to have come from God’s body or it was a piece of human DNA divinely manufactured inside Mary’s womb; in either case, the material itself, coming directly from God, is divine in a way that, say, my own sperm, which is at least once removed from God, cannot be. In other words, it is not simply the soul that entered the zygote-that-would-become-Jesus at the moment of conception that made the zygote holy; the zygote itself, in its material essence, was holy too.

Replace “God’s touch” with DNA and you have the rationale for life-begins-at-conception by which the South Dakota legislature justified its anti-abortion measure. The DNA, in other words, is a metaphor for inviolate divinity, which means that every normal conception that takes place is, in fact, a metaphor for the conception of Jesus, and every woman who becomes pregnant is a metaphor for Mary pregnant with Jesus, and every act of heterosexual intercourse is a metaphor for the act by which God entered Mary, and every man who engages in heterosexual intercourse is therefore a metaphor for God, and, most importantly, every conceived child, from the moment of conception through the rest of its life, is a metaphor for Jesus himself.

Now, play this out a little further. If I, in my body, in my desire for children, am somehow a metaphor for God of the Christian Bible and his desire for a child, then, metaphorically speaking, I have the same right to conceive that child as God did with Mary. Or to put it another way, to the degree that I am a metaphor for God in my heterosexual relationships, then—again, metaphorically speaking—I have the same power in relation to the women in my life as God did to Mary. Now, please, let me be clear about what I am not saying: I am not saying that men as a class consciously think this way—though I know there are more than a few who do. What I am saying is that if you play the logic of this metaphor out, the description I have just given of the sexual power dynamic between men and women is the conclusion you will inevitably arrive at, and the description I have just given, it seems to me, is no different than an entirely secular description of heterosexual relationships under patriarchy.

Here is where the question of Mary’s consent comes in. Or, to be more accurate, the nature of her consent. Look at these verses again:

28 And [Gabriel] came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. 29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. 30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. 34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? 35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible. 38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

Gabriel comes to Mary and tells her that God favors her, and this disturbs Mary. She wonders what kind of a greeting this is—not unlike the way a woman might wonder why a man who has never taken notice of her before is suddenly being so nice to her—and then the angel tells her, he does not ask her, he tells her that she will bear God’s child. Mary says, basically, “I am your servant; I will do as you wish,” a sentiment that you can read either as a statement of fact or as consent. Here’s the thing, though: even if you read it as consent, even if you read it that Mary was absolutely thrilled and eager to bear God’s child, the question of whether, once she was confronted with the omniscient and omnipotent God, she could have felt it possible meaningfully to say no is an open one at the very least. As Barbara put it in the “What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice Thread” on Alas:

It seems to me that the disparity in power between God and Mary (even if it is just Gabriel speaking) is at least as great as that between the average high school student and her male teacher.

Or, if you happen to live in Utah these days, between a father and his daughter. “Utah lawmakers,” wrote Rebecca Walsh in the Salt Lake Tribune, “refused Monday [February 27, 2006] to make an exception for incest victims in a proposed law that would require parental consent and notification before a girl’s abortion.” Think about what that means: A girl is pregnant because her father raped her; she does not want to have the child; but in order for her to obtain the abortion she wants, and that most people would agree she needs and ought to have, she has to take the risk that her father will be the parent whom either the doctor she goes to or the courts–because she can go to court to override the doctor’s responsibility under the law–will tell what she is planning to do. (And if you take in account the possibility of either domestic violence or her mother’s complicity in the incest, this situation becomes even more complex.) One of the supporters of this legislation had this to say:

Abortion isn’t about women’s rights. The rights they had were when they made the decision to have sex […] This is the consequences. The consequence is they should have to talk to their parents.

In other words, because a woman should not be able to choose to have an abortion, because the life that supposedly begins at conception trumps her life and her autonomy, no matter what the circumstances were when it was conceived, she is held by default to have consented to the act of intercourse during which conception took place.

Now, go back to Mary and God. I don’t think that anyone will disagree that to imagine there was anything like a level playing field between Mary and God is to perform a profound act of denial; more to the point, I also think people will generally agree that to suppose that disparity of power between Mary and God had nothing to do with how Mary thought about what was going on and what was going to happen to her would be, in its own way, delusional. These facts, however, do not mean that one has to read the Biblical passage I quoted above to mean that God raped Mary in the sense that Mary was unwilling and God forced himself on her, but it does mean that one has to take into account the possibility that Mary, because she was God’s servant, would never even have conceived, and might not even have been able to conceive, of the possibility of saying no and that her unwillingness or inability to entertain the possibility of saying no to God would raise questions about whether her consent was fully informed or not. In the logic of the anti-choice movement, however, once she becomes pregnant, the nature of Mary’s consent is irrelevant, because once she becomes pregnant what matters–just like what matters in the case of the girl in the Utah-bill-scenario above–is the child-to-be growing inside her. Taken to its logical conclusion, in other words, the anti-choice logic licenses rape, and it licenses rape, or at least those rapes that result in pregnancy, at least in part because it draws on the metaphorical link between the zygote growing inside a raped woman who becomes pregnant and the zygote-that-would-become-Jesus growing inside Mary in such a way that it erases the significance of the circumstances of the conception.

Read this way, the whole process of the virgin birth, from conception to birth, becomes what Tim Beneke calls, in Men On Rape, a rape sign, an image or narrative through which rape is normalized largely because its rape-related content is so well hidden that people aren’t even aware that it’s there. The example Beneke gives in his book—which, unfortunately, is in storage and so I can only paraphrase—is the image of the caveman dragging “his” woman home by the hair. The humor of the image both hides its violence and establishes the stance towards that violence that is considered culturally appropriate. In the case of the immaculate conception, the holiness of the image both hides whatever questions one might raise about consent and establishes the stance towards sex and conception that is considered culturally appropriate—at least by the anti-choice movement.

It is important to acknowledge that there many other ways to read the virgin birth, especially because there are seriously progressive, feminist Christian people engaged in the process of rereading their tradition in light of progressive, feminist values. My goal in offering the reading I have outlined here is not to invalidate theirs, or to trash Christianity, but rather to highlight the metaphorical and therefore ideological infrastructure of the anti-choice movement, not only in its misogyny, which would hardly have required this many words to demonstrate, but also in its undestanding of what it means to be human—because if our humanity, all our individual personhoods, has nothing to do with the myriad intangible things that make up the content of our character (and for the purposes of this argument, I do not care whether that content is good, bad or indifferent), but is rather a consequence of the fact of DNA; if I am, in other words, essentially no different from the bundles of cells that result from the coming together of egg and sperm, then protecting the children-to-be growing in the wombs of pregnant women from the “capricious” choices of free-willed women is a kind of retroactive self-preservation; it is a way of making sure that people are born not simply because parents want them, but because they have a right to be born.

The difference is important: In the second, anti-choice scenario, we were, all of us, potential antagonists against our own pregnant mothers, and they were, all of them, potential antagonists against us. On the other hand, if one is not fully human until after one has been born, this pre-birth antagonism doesn’t exist (unless you’re talking about medical issues where the life of the mother and/or the fetus is at stake.) And so to be human, as the anti-choice movement has defined humanity, is on some level to have been at war with free will even before you were born, not so much your own free will, but rather the free will of others, especially of women, and this war, if you accept the anti-choice logic, is one we are all in together, because we all came from the bodies of women, which means that to win the war it is the bodies of women that we need to control. Humanity, in other words, according to this logic, demands the subjugation of women because women hold the power to end humanity. More to the point, this logic implies that to have survived the pregnancy during which you grew to be born is on some level to have escaped women’s power.

The power of a male God, of course, is one sure fire method of ensuring that we keep on escaping, and so is the power of government. Giving the government the kind of power the South Dakota law does, however, can have unexpected consequences. Look again at the first section of the law:

Section 1. The Legislature finds that the State of South Dakota has a compelling and paramount interest in the preservation and protection of all human life and finds that the guarantee of due process of law under the South Dakota Bill of Rights applies equally to born and unborn human beings.

Essentially, it seems to me that this opens the door to all kinds of government interference in our personal and family lives, kinds of interference that I don’t think the anti-choice movement would appreciate. If a zygote is a human being, for example, couldn’t this section of the law be expanded to include the government’s interest in how my behavior effects the health of my sperm, which is, after all, half a human being? (Okay, this may be pushing things too far, but then I thought declaring a zygote a human being would be pushing things too far.) Couldn’t it be expanded to criminalize behaviors a woman might engage in that could harm her child-to-be, like, say, going skiing in the early months of pregnancy? In other words, doesn’t the state’s interest in the preservation and protection of all human life give it the authority legally to regulate the treatment of that life from start to finish?

I think it’s time for me to stop writing and put this up. I do want to say this, though: A guy named John O’Neill wrote a remarkable book called Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society, that addresses the kinds of questions I’ve been talking about here, though not from an explicitly feminist perspective. Nonetheless, it is very worth reading. The book was originally published in 1985, which is the edition that I read. It has, apparently, been republished in a revised edition. It is worth taking a look at.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.