SHERRY MILNER
Fetus & Host
Consent, in the form of a donor card, is required even to remove organs from a dead body. If the fetus is a person, it is a person with a vastly expanded set of legal rights, rights available to no other class of citizen: the fetus may make free, non-consensual use of another living person’s uterus and blood supply, and cause permanent, unwanted changes to another person’s body. In the relationship between fetus and woman, the woman is granted fewer rights than a corpse. But it’s possible that the ban on abortion has less to do with the rights of the unborn child than with the threat to social order represented by women in control of their reproductive lives.
Sally Rooney, LRB