The ‘Personhood’ Controversy

Many visitors to my blog will be unfamiliar with the controversy surrounding ‘personhood’.  Briefly, the term supports the concept that every fertilized human egg is a ‘person’ as a matter of law;  proponents believe this would automatically criminalize abortion, many forms of contraception, and in vitro fertilization.  The personhood movement is the latest call to rally the pro-life troops.  Dr. Gary H. Gossen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Anthropology and Latin American Studies, State University of New York at Albany, has submitted an objective critique of the personhood movement to the New York Times.  I reproduce it below, with his permission.

The Pathetic Parenthood

Although voters in Mississippi rejected the ‘personhood amendment’ to the state constitution on November 9, this issue is not going to go away.  To prove my point, witness the Republican debate that took place in Detroit the following day, on November 10.  Only one candidate, Mr. Huntsman, chose to distance himself from this political hot potato; all the others said that they would support some form of such an amendment to the US Constitution.  Thus, it will surely reappear in the 2012 election cycle, and will ultimately find its way to the courts.  Therefore, I feel it is my duty as an anthropologist to highlight the pathetic, if not ludicrous, inadequacies of the so-called personhood amendments that are making their way through the legislative process in state governments all across the country.  Although I am not qualified to comment on the constitutionality of such amendments, I am qualified to comment on the scientific foundation of the claim that there exists an objective criterion for ‘personhood’, and that this existential and legal status ‘happens’ at the moment of conception.  This affirmation could be dismissed as the latest ranting of the know-nothing, lunatic fringe of American society were it not for the fact that it constitutes an attempted legal end-run against Roe vs. Wade, the Pro-Choice Movement, the legitimacy of Planned Parenthood, and, ultimately, against the use of a wide-range of contraceptives, in-vitro fertilization, and even against stem cell research.  This amounts to a clever, full-bore assault on individual liberty, women's reproductive freedom, and scientific inquiry.  It needs to be exposed for what it is:  aggressive ignorance.  I will explain why the ‘personhood amendments’ are grounded on false premises in three areas:  cultural, biological, and theological.

The problem of cultural construction.  In the first place, comparative studies of human societies in time and space - which is what anthropology has been doing for 200 years - reveal that personhood ranks with goodness, truth, and beauty as a cultural construction.  It has no reality status beyond its cultural and historical context and that people choose to believe one or another version of it;  it has no objective existence.  It is obvious that any attempt to legitimize and legally privilege one version of personhood over thousands of others that have existed in human history flies in the face of our own reality as a pluralistic society.  This means, simply, that we must acknowledge the diverse ethnic, religious, and cultural fabric of American society, and therefore, that many versions of personhood must coexist.

The concept of the person varies from ideas about reincarnation, i. e. that the soul of a person migrates from one body to a fresh embodiment in another body in the flow of cosmic time;  to various forms of Amerindian totemism and shamanism in which the person shares ‘personhood’ with an animal, plant, or spirit companion, or with a sacred ancestor;  to various Afro-Caribbean religions, in which the individual person has a personal relationship with a deity who, periodically, descends and enters the body of its human host to cause ecstasy, trances, and enlightenment;  to our own fairly austere notion of the person as a lonely, solitary, unique being.

The nature of the person as a cultural construction (i. e. that it is a ‘learned’ existential status) is nowhere better illustrated than in the cases of so-called feral children that have been documented since at least the l8th century.  The so-called Wild Child of Aveyron, France, thought to have been abandoned at birth, spent his entire early childhood roaming naked in the wild, and was ‘rescued’ and taken in at around the age of twelve in 1800, by a medical student named Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who attempted through nurture and Enlightenment ideas to teach him to be human.  The wild child never became minimally able to speak or even to walk comfortably as a bipedal human.  What does this tell us?  It is a profound testimony to the fact that personhood is created, nurtured, and molded by society.  In no way is it ‘given’ at conception or birth.  Personhood is a post-natal cultural creation.

The biological fallacy.  The very idea that personhood begins at conception is based on fundamental ignorance of human biology.  In truth, several eggs can be fertilized by sperm cells in any given cycle of female ovulation.  It is only the implantation of the fertilized egg in the lining of the uterus that destines it to become a human fetus.  The rest of the fertilized egg cells are sloughed off.  By logical extension, does this mean that the unsuccessful fertilized egg cells are cases of murder?  Is normal menstrual blood - the expulsion of unfertilized egg cells - a testimony to murder of potential fetuses?  Are nocturnal emissions and masturbation in males to be regarded as ‘killing’ potential babies?  What is the religious right to do with the Biblical condemnation of Onan when he chooses to spill his seed on the ground rather than attempt to impregnate the widow of his deceased brother?  God did not like this and slew him (Gen. 38: 9-10).  If all of these ‘what ifs’ were true, or believed to be true, wouldn't all men and women, by virtue of their physiology, reproductive fluids, and effluents, and disposition of them, be serial murderers?

The theological fallacy.  Some supporters of the personhood amendments turn to the Bible's affirmation that God created man in his own image (Gen. 1: 26-27) to defend the notion that destruction of fetuses and potential fetuses amounts to the murder of the nature of God and His or Her intention for humanity.  Although these passages from Genesis are so ambiguous that one may make of them what one will, both Protestant and Catholic teachings seem to agree that this doctrinal issue has to do with choice and consciousness, not with the proposition that we are all ‘baby Gods’.  The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer Catechism says that ‘to be created in the image of God . . . means that we are free to make choices:  to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with creation and with God.”  How outrageous, then, to declare that God's gift of choice and reason, i. e. consciousness, obliges us to suspend choice and reason in favor of one reading among the range of choices!  It is more likely, I believe, that God would support moderation and pluralism.

You can contact Dr Gossen at: eag97@cybermesa.com - or leave a comment below.