The Future is Now
Fetal personhood and the collapsed future perspective
Anti-choice billboards are a common sight along Texas highways. I’ve noticed that while they describe embryos, they depict babies. I think these billboards are a great everyday example of what feminist philosopher Zoë Sofia calls the “collapsed future” perspective.
This perspective takes what’s a potential future outcome and “collapses” it into the present, fusing the beginning and end into a single point. It’s how an embryo growing inside a woman can be considered equivalent to an already-born baby, and portrayed as such.
I think the collapsed future is a handy concept to know. It succinctly sums up an anti-choice perspective that puts a potential baby who *might* be born before a woman who is already here. Since I’ve come across the concept, I’ve been spotting it everywhere in anti-choice messaging and imagery. There were plenty of examples at this year’s anti-choice March for Life in Washington, D.C., which occurred this past Friday, just two days before what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
In this post, I want to explore the collapsed future perspective more fully by introducing Sofia’s paper and highlighting some examples from it. I also want to call attention to Sofia’s suggestions for what should inform reproductive ethics. Instead of collapsing all that’s important about pregnancy into the act of conception, it recognizes that process and setting matter. Our status as placental mammals is not incidental.
The paper is called “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism” and it was published in the humanities journal Diacritics in 1984.1 As you might suspect from the title, it’s a bit of a wild ride. The paper is an interesting and energetic blend of psychoanalysis, feminist advocacy, and media critique. Sofia references ancient myths and sci-fi media – particularly “2001: A Space Odyssey” and its famous Star Child – to illustrate key themes. Some of these themes are literally illustrated with hand-drawn comics, which appear as figures in the paper.
I don’t agree with Sophia on every point, and, honestly, there’s some points I’m still trying to work out! But the paper’s core idea is how the collapsed future perspective is shared by fetal personhood activists and technology evangelists, particularly ones who advocate for nuclear armament. While the fetus is “always already [a person],” technological development is a “bound to be” part of progress.2
Although the comparison is interesting and compelling, I’m just sticking to describing Sofia’s analysis of anti-choice activists in this post because it’s more relevant to my interests.
Sofia is among a long list of feminists and commentators who note that the “pro-life” movement isn’t all that interested in nurturing life in a broader sense. The real energy and organizing is behind stopping abortion and advocating for a “right to life” for the fetus – the right to grow and develop uninterrupted for the duration of the pregnancy, no matter the circumstances of its conception or the effects on the pregnant woman, potentially even death.
Sofia describes this intense focus on fetal life at all costs as the “negation of life’s negation.”
The idea boils down to this: the “unborn” must be “born,” even if pregnancies are doomed, or women and girls harmed or sickened by them. It’s an expression of the collapsed future perspective because no matter the point or state of the pregnancy, there is just one legitimate outcome: birth. Any action that could potentially prevent that birth is viewed with suspicion or worse.
Another illustration of the collapsed future perspective is granting “personhood” at the moment of conception.
Sofia writes: “The pro-life fetus arises as the negation of life’s negation, through which the male ego resurrects itself as a spermatic creation.”
Whether you agree with her psychoanalysis, any definition of fetal personhood that starts at conception inherently prioritizes the male’s contribution over the female’s. The momentary act of fertilization – a man’s sole contribution to pregnancy – is considered just as important as the development that occurs over the course of a pregnancy, which continuously and exclusively relies on a woman’s body.
An anti-abortion flyer3 that Sofia excerpts shows exactly where a sperm-centric perspective leads. Text from the flyer reads:
Did you “come from” a human baby?
No! You once were a baby.
Did you “come from” a human fetus?
No! You once were a fetus.
Did you “come from” a fertilized ovum?
No! You once were a fertilized ovum.
A fertilized ovum? Yes! You were then everything you are today.
A fertilized ovum isn’t much more than a genome surrounded by a cell membrane. It can be in a fallopian tube or a petri-dish in the case of in-vitro fertilization. From setting to structure, it is plainly not “everything you are today.” By seeing DNA alone as a sufficient marker for personhood it ignores the substance of what people actually are – a living body, one that is separate from the confines of another.
This collapse of person into gametes, and gametes into a person makes it easier to ignore the corporality of pregnancy. It makes it easier to ignore what the process of pregnancy actually entails for women on a physiological level. In fact, Sofia describes the pro-life fetus as an “exterminating fetus” because of how anti-choice rhetoric often disappears its environment – that is the womb and the woman.
Sofia has a name for the idealized environments in which the fetus is frequently portrayed: “Jupiter Space.” She describes it as an any setting where life is cut off from its means of survival but is nevertheless depicted as thriving.
The term is a reference to the plant Jupiter – the inhospitable world that is the destination of voyagers in “2001: A Space Odyssey”— and the Roman god, who was able to birth the goddess Athena by swallowing his pregnant first wife Mentis and usurping her power.
Sofia describes the pro-life movement as “devalue[ing] the visible orderings and multiple-embedded character of terrestrial life in favor of the decontextualized abstractions of Jupiter Space.”
Those billboards that show babies while describing the early weeks of pregnancy, when many women don’t even know they’re pregnant, are a vision of Jupiter in Texas.
The collapsed future takes a potential outcome and treats it like it’s already here. But in reality, the future can unfold in many different ways from the same starting spot. Sofia suggests that instead of the “collapsed future” we seek out the “pluripotent space of the future conditional.” That is, a vision of that future that may have different outcomes depending on different situations, and that is subject to change as conditions change.
She puts forward a short description of a type of reproductive ethics in line with this outlook where decisions are made based on contextual criteria. These criteria include “the contiguity of the decision makers to the implementers and the effects of their decisions; and the duration, the scale and the character of these effects.”
Under this system, distinctions are considered rather than collapsed. A woman’s bodily connection to her pregnancy is considered and respected rather than exterminated. It brings the realities of human development back down to Earth – back to the realm of placental mammals – rather than the fantasy of Jupiter Space.
I think this is exactly where human reproduction, an effort of the body, belongs.
Photo: An anti-abortion billboard along US-290 East, near Brenham, Texas. Credit: MK.
If you can’t access the paper and want to, send me an email.
For the technology arguments, Sofia focuses on nuclear weapons. I’m happy to say that the the world has actually made some progress in slowing their proliferation since the 1980s when the paper was published. But Sofia’s main point still stands. Just swap out nukes for some other research with existential implications, like gain of function in infectious diseases or AI weapons.
Interesting discussion, MK. Thanks.
In that vein, I have long thought that if we called embryos and fetuses "unborn teenagers," the forced birth movement would collapse.
Sophia is far out - or maybe her work is rather a relic of more interesting times.
Ultimately conservatives are less comfortable with processes, blends, and intermediate transformations than liberals are. It's either the baby or the mother; it's either an ape or a human; it's either a drug or a medicine. Transitions from child to adult, unmarried to married, and even alive to dead are often ritualized and legalized with a ceremony so that one can clearly say whether a person is one thing or another without having to accept the interstitial or intermediate.
Two-and-only-two is the conservative's favorite number: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/how-many-genders-are-there