Questions of Personhood: When Lawmakers Regulate Pregnant Bodies

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

After passing both the Ohio House and Senate, a bill restricting access to abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat is sitting upon the desk of Governor John Kasich. Dubbed the "Heartbeat Bill," it could potentially be one of the most restrictive pieces of legislation passed by the state in an effort to restrict abortion and access.


According to CNN, the provision restricting abortion comes from an amendment added to another bill in the Ohio legislature that seeks to streamline the process for medical professionals to report child abuse situations.

Senator Charleta Tavares, said "I believe everyone has a right to their body. We allowed a good bill that protects the health and safety of our children to be bastardized into a government takeover of women's wombs."

Let's break it down why this bill is a new level of disaster for those who can become pregnant in Ohio.

First, while it allows for abortions when there is a “serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman,” it allows no provisions for incest or rape, the typical caveats of most anti-abortion legislation, as reported by USA Today.

Secondly, abortions cannot be performed once a heartbeat is detectable, placing the abortion window at around 6 weeks after conception. That's right, six weeks. And this early date is quite important when we consider the timeline of pregnancies and the consequences this deadline may have.

Ovulation Calendar, WebMD

Often, the first sign of pregnancy is a missed period, even two. But even if you've missed a period, how long would you wait before you were sure you were late? One, two? As you consider how many potential weeks that may be (6-8 but who's counting?), let's consider some other some reasons many women don't know they're pregnant for multiple weeks/months.

Approximately 1 in 450 will not know they are pregnant until they are 20 weeks along. Even more, 1 in 2,500 women do not know they pregnant until they are in labor. In labor. It may be easy to blame these individuals and call they irresponsible, but there are a variety of reasons that lead to not knowing. They are often called cryptic pregnancies and are much more common than I think these legislators would care to realize.

A great article by Bustle walks through some of the reasons women, and others who may become pregnant, might not notice a pregnancy until months into carrying. Some do not experience regular periods and a missed one may not raise a red flag in the same one to someone on a schedule. It's also possible to experience spotting and breakthrough bleeding, which may be taken as a sign of a light period, even though it's completely normal for women to experience as a part of the pregnancy process.

Also, those who suffer from poly-cystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) or endometriosis may be infertile, or believe to be infertile, and since these conditions already inhibit or influence periods, it may be harder to detect a pregnancy. Also, if you're told you're infertile, how often are you taking a pregnancy test? Let's be real, no one has the time, energy, and money for that.

Progression of Pregnancy Test Results

Speaking of which, the most common way that women come to understand that they're pregnant is through an in home pregnancy test. According to the American Pregnancy Association, pregnancy tests tend to be either blood or urine tests. Since urine tests are about as accurate as blood tests, and can be taken either in at a doctor's office or at home, they tend to be more economical and available.

Urine pregnancy tests work by testing for the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) - a hormone emitted by a fetus. A negative result on a pregnancy test may indicate that the test was taken too early to detect the pregnancy, was taken wrong, or that the fetus is not putting out a detectable amount of hCG. While blood tests can detect even the smallest doses of hCG, if a woman is not showing other signs of pregnancy (weight gain, hunger, morning sickness, etc.) coupled with negative read outs on her urine pregnancy tests she may not even think to go get tested. Or honestly wants to spend that kind of money to confirm what she thinks she already knows, that she's not pregnant as the urine test indicates.

All of this is to say, if legislators are proposing a bill to restrict abortion to the detection of a heartbeat (and doctors will be held accountable by law if they do not first perform an ultrasound, or proceed with knowledge of a detectable heartbeat), they are potentially limiting the window for a very small fraction of individuals with early detection.

If we add in the fact that clinics are closing, leading to longer trips and waiting times for appointments, coupled with 24 hour waiting periods for the procedure from initial appointments, we can see how even those with early detection will fall outside of the 6 week window.

This essentially cuts off a women's right at all to choose and punishes her if she seeks to terminate her pregnancy later. She will now be forced to carry that child to term, essentially forcing all women to carry to term there pregnancies within the state.

When we consider pregnancy and women's agency in this light, it is not hard to understand how Susan Bordo conceptualizes a woman's body as a mere "incubator to her fetus," (79).

"The essence of the pregnant woman...is her biological, purely mechanical role in preserving the life of another. In her care, this is the given value, against which her claims to subjectivity must be rigorously evaluated, and they will usually be found wanting insofar as they conflict with her life-support function. In the face of such a conflict, her valuations, choice, consciousness are expendable." (79, author's emphasis).

In many ways, the attacks against reproductive rights and the shift in ideology surrounding the personhood of a fetus have left women vulnerable to continued attacks upon their own personhood. When she is reduced to her "life-support function," made to bear children regardless of her choice (especially with restrictive abortion against cases involving rape and incest as the new "Heartbeat Bill" would mandate), women lose the essence of their own person, the value of herself. Her rights are easily sacrificed in a current state for the potential life that her body may bring to bear.

A woman embracing her child, Northwest Texas Healthcare

Sure, you're saying, I can see this with abortion maybe, but a shift in an entire ideology? Crazy.

Yet this is only the latest segment in a long stream of attacks against the ability of a woman to determine her own value, her own choices, her own consciousness. Not only does this abortion bill hope to restrict access, granting increased importance to the life (deemed in Ohio as the point where a heartbeat is detectable), it prevents women from intervening in the process of their body. It restricts their access to the work that their body is doing, relieving them of  say in their natural body processes.

However, other states have started introducing bills to require funerals for fetuses, regardless if from abortion, miscarriage, stillborn, etc. While typically disposed of as medical tissue waste, this new shift, while a large financial and emotional burden, serves to re-conceptualize how we think of this tissue. A clump of medical tissue waste or a life form deserving of the ritual reserved for beloveds (family, friends, pets, etc.).

This is at a time where it is rumored that Sofia Vergara is being sued for child neglect of her frozen, fertilized embryos with her now ex-boyfriend. This grants agency and rights to frozen embryos not yet implanted in a uterus in a larger capacity than we seem to be witnessing for living, breathing potential pregnant mothers.

The "Heartbeat Bill" has many material ramifications for women, and other individuals, who have the potential of becoming pregnant in Ohio. But taken within a wider shift of ideology surrounding the identity of potential growing life we can begin to see the shifting legal structures that are working to disrupt women's relationship to her own personhood. Crazy indeed.