The Pro Life Fetal Rights Movement :: Government Laws Fetus Papers

The Pro Life foetal Rights MovementProblems with formatPro-life rhetoric is reshaping history to make get on for a new class of citizens. The members of this new identity group ar called fetuses, and their legal protection is polar to the heritage of and future of America. Lauren Berlant, in her essay, America, Fat, the fetus describes the pro-life motivation to present fetuses as a class of citizens, and thereby add a new group of persons to the stack (Berlant, 98). To do so, pro-lifers beg the current convergence of humanity and private spheres. In the intimate public sphere, citizens are defined not by a common civil duty, but instead, by a shared morality. In this crisis of citizenship, with no champion quite sure of where s/he stands in relation to the norm, and everyone agonistic into an identity politics, the fetus represents the ideal citizen - utterly vulnerable and in desire of government protection. Pro-life arguments describing fetuses as the ultimately silenc ed, victimized minority take advantage on the shifting meanings of citizenship to find a place for the fetus at heart it.By mixing the language of minority politics (asserting distinct identities of classes of people who are victimized by society) and Reaganite ideology (affirming the politicization of the private sphere overseen by the government (Berlant, 3), the pro-lifers constructed the fetus as an image of perfect vulnerability the susceptible person, the citizen without a country or a future, the fetus unjustly confined in its mothers hostile gulag (Berlant, 97). The fetuss vulnerability and minority status speaks to the plight of the impertinently distinguished class of normative citizens (usually white, straight, middle-class men). The culture of national fetality too newly touches the previously privileged C because unmarked C unexceptional citizen His new exposure to mass-mediated identity politics makes him experience himself as all of a sudden embodied and there fore vulnerable. An entire culture can come to nominate with, and as, a fetus (Berlant, 86). Feeling suddenly embodied and vulnerable, only lately exposed to identity politics, the formerly unmarked, nondescript citizens can now, too, relate to the minority-identity that the fetus has come to represent.At the same that the fetus is achieving minority status, the pro-life ideology is also placing its fate into the tale of our nation, making protection of the fetus crucial to the countrys future. Since we are what we have always done, we violate our true selves if we act in ways that are different (Condit, 44).