Abstract
An important consideration in reproductive bioethics is the question of personhood, which impacts family and medical decision-making as well as policy and law. Anthropology is uniquely suited to provide both a cross-cultural and historical and prehistorical perspective on the status of fetuses. Far from being taken for granted as a natural or biological condition, personhood is a status and identity actively negotiated, ascribed, and contested through social and cultural processes that are the particular concern of cultural anthropologists and bioarchaeologists. This chapter draws on both ethnographic and bioarchaeological research to demonstrate how and whether personhood was/is ascribed to fetuses in specific prehistoric, historic, and modern examples. While cultural anthropology has contributed to the discussion of personhood, identity, and bioethics for some time, bioarchaeology (i.e., study of human skeletal remains from the past) has only recently begun to investigate identity in the past. However, its development of a focus on fetal personhood is an important contribution to both bioarchaeology and to bioethics. This chapter demonstrates the possibilities for the meaningful integration of bioarchaeology and cultural anthropology into an evolving conversation on reproductive bioethics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Legal scholar John A. Robertson (2015) writes: “In Roe v. Wade all nine justices agreed that the use of “person” in the Constitution always assumed a born person, and therefore that the 14th Amendment’s mention of person did not confer constitutional rights until after a live birth.
- 2.
In bioarchaeology, fetuses are subsumed in the category of “perinate,” which includes individuals aged between 28 weeks in utero and approximately 7 postnatal days. Bioarchaeologists are unable to determine whether perinatal remains represent a fetus who died in utero versus one which died shortly after birth, including preterm births. In this chapter, fetus and perinate are used interchangeably.
- 3.
Additionally, Mississippian period communities have been interpreted as matrilineal societies based on ethnographic analogies of modern Southeastern tribes (cf. Knight 1990).
- 4.
A gorget is a polished circular shell pendant frequently engraved with similar recurring sets of themes, motifs, and iconography.
References
Buikstra JE, Scott RE. Key concepts in identity studies. In: Knudson KJ, Stojanowski CM, editors. Bioarchaeology and identity in the Americas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; 2009. p. 24–55.
Classen C. Worlds of sense: exploring the senses in history and across cultures. New York: Routledge; 1993.
Conklin B. Consuming grief: compassionate cannibalism in an Amazonian society. Austin: University of Texas Press; 2001.
Davies J. Death, burial, and rebirth in the religions of antiquity: religion in the first Christian centuries. London: Routledge; 1999.
DeLoache J, Gottlieb A, editors. A world of babies: imagined child care guides for seven societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000.
Djurić M, Djukić K, Milovanović P, Janović A, Milenković P. Representing children in excavated cemeteries: the intrinsic preservation factors. Antiquity. 2011;85:250–62.
Farrell RM, Metcalfe JS, McGowan ML, Weise KL, Agatisa PK, Berg J. Emerging ethical issues in reproductive medicine: are bioethics educators ready? Hast Cent Rep. 2014;44(5):21–9.
Geurts K. Culture and the senses: bodily ways of knowing in an African community. Berkeley: University of California; 2002.
Gordon C, Buikstra J. Soil pH, bone preservation and sampling bias in mortuary sites. Am Antiq. 1971;48:566–71.
Gottlieb A. The afterlife is where we come from. Chicago: The University of Chicago; 2004.
Gowing L. Secret births and infanticide in seventeenth-century England. Past Present. 1997;156:87–115.
Halcrow S, Tayles N. The bioarchaeological investigation of children and childhood. In: Agarwal S, Glencross B, editors. Social bioarchaeology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell; 2011. p. 333–60.
Han S. Pregnancy in practice: expectation and experience in the contemporary U.S. New York: Berghahn Books; 2013.
Han S, Betsinger TK, Scott AB. Conceiving the anthropology of the fetus: an introduction. In: Han S, Betsinger TK, Scott AB, editors. Anthropology of the fetus: biology, culture, and society. New York: Berghahn Books; 2017. p. 1–12.
Hatch JW. Social dimension of Dallas mortuary practices. Master’s thesis, Pennsylvania State University; 1974.
Hedgecoe AM. Critical bioethics: beyond the social science critique of applied ethics. Bioethics. 2004;18(2):120–43.
Kamp K. Where have all the children gone? The archaeology of childhood. J Archaeol Method Theory. 2001;8:1–34.
Kinaston R, Buckley H, Halcrow S, Spriggs M, Bedford S, Neal K, Gray A. Investigating foetal and perinatal mortality in prehistoric skeletal samples: a case study from a 3000-year-old Pacific Island cemetery site. J Archaeol Sci. 2009;36:2780–7.
Kleinman A. Moral experience and ethical reflection: can ethnography reconcile them? A quandary for the new bioethics. Daedalus. 1999;128(4):69–97.
Knight VT. Social organization and the evolution of hierarchy in Southeastern chiefdoms. J Anthropol Res. 1990;46(1):1–23.
Knudson KJ, Stojanowski CM. The bioarchaeology of identity. In: Knudson KJ, Stojanowski CM, editors. Bioarchaeology and identity in the Americas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; 2009. p. 1–23.
Larsen CS. Bioarchaeology: interpreting behavior from the human skeleton. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2015.
Lewis M. The bioarchaeology of children: perspectives from biological and forensic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2007.
Lewis M, Gowland R. Brief and precarious lives: infant mortality in contrasting sites from medieval and post-medieval England (AD 850-1859). Am J Phys Anthropol. 2007;134:117–29.
Lillehammer G. A child is born: the child’s world in an archaeological perspective. Nord Archaeol Rev. 1989;22:89–105.
Marshall P. Anthropology and bioethics. Med Anthropol Q. 1992;6(1):49–73.
Mays S, Eyers J. Perinatal infant death at the Roman villa site at Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, England. J Archaeol Sci. 2011;38:1931–8.
Muller JH. Anthropology, bioethics, and medicine: a provocative trilogy. Med Anthropol Q. 1994;8(4):448–67.
Murphy E. Children’s burial grounds in Ireland (Cilliní) and parental emotions toward infant death. Int J Hist Archaeol. 2011;15:409–28.
Nelson JL. Moral teachings from unexpected quarters: lessons for bioethics from the social sciences and managed care. Hast Cent Rep. 2000;30(1):12–7.
Orme N. Medieval children. New Haven: Yale University Press; 2001.
Pearson M. The archaeology of death and burial. College Station: Texas A&M University Press; 1999.
Rakita G, Buikstra J. Bodies and souls. In: Rakita G, Buikstra J, editors. Interacting with the dead: perspectives on mortuary archaeology for the new millennium. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; 2005. p. 93–5.
Robertson JA. Fetal personhood and the constitution. In: Bill of health. August 20, 2015 [viewed Sept 14, 2017]. 2015. Available at: http://blogs.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2015/08/20/fetal-personhood-and-the-constitution/.
Saunders S. Juvenile skeletons and growth-related studies. In: Katzenberg A, Saunders S, editors. Biological anthropology of the human skeleton. Hoboken: Wiley; 2008. p. 117–47.
Schroedl GF. Toward and explanation of Cherokee origins in East Tennessee. In: Moore DG, editor. The conference on Cherokee prehistory. Swannanoa: Warren Wilson College; 1986. p. 122–38.
Schroedl GF. Mississippian towns in the Eastern Tennessee Valley. In: Lewis B, Stout C, editors. Mississippian towns and sacred spaces. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press; 1998. p. 64–92.
Scott E. The archaeology of infancy and infant death, BAR international series 819. Oxford: Archaeopress; 1999.
Scott E. Killing the female? Archaeological narratives of infanticide. In: Arnold B, Wicker N, editors. Gender and the archaeology of death. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press; 2001. p. 3–21.
Scott AB, Betsinger TK. Excavating identity: burial context and fetal identity in post-medieval Poland. In: Han S, Betsinger TK, Scott AB, editors. The anthropology of the fetus: biology, culture, and society. New York: Berghahn Books; 2017. p. 146–68.
Sofaer Derevenski J. Age and gender at the site of Tiszapolgar-Basatanya, Hungary. Antiquity. 1997a;71:875–89.
Sofaer Derevenski J. Engendering children, engendering archaeology. In: Moore J, Scott E, editors. Invisible people and practices: writing gender and children into European archaeology. London: Leicester University Press; 1997b. p. 192–202.
Sullivan LP. The late Mississippian village: community and society of the mouse creek phase in Southeastern Tennessee. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; 1986.
Sullivan LP. Mississippian household and community organization in Eastern Tennessee. In: Rogers JD, Smith BD, editors. Mississippian communities and households. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press; 1995. p. 99–123.
Sullivan LP. Those men in the mounds: gender, politics and mortuary practices in late prehistoric Eastern Tennessee. In: Eastman JM, Rodning CB, editors. Archaeological studies of gender in the Southeastern United States. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; 2001. p. 101–26.
Tocheri M, Dupras T, Sheldrick P, Molto J. Roman period fetal skeletons from the East Cemetery (Kellis 2) of Kellis, Egypt. Int J Osteoarchaeol. 2005;15:326–41.
Turner L. An anthropological exploration of contemporary bioethics: the varieties of common sense. J Med Ethics. 1998;24:127–33.
Turner L. Anthropological and sociological critiques of bioethics. Bioeth Inq. 2009;6:83–98.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this paper
Cite this paper
Han, S., Betsinger, T.K., Harle, M., Scott, A.B. (2018). Reconceiving the Human Fetus in Reproductive Bioethics: Perspectives from Cultural Anthropology and Bioarchaeology. In: Campo-Engelstein, L., Burcher, P. (eds) Reproductive Ethics II. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89429-4_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89429-4_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89428-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89429-4
eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)