Rachel Schreiber
This essay examines the history of the deployment of spectacles of death in the fight over reproductive rights in the United States. Antiabortion activists have staged fetal funerals to capture media attention and confirm the concept of “fetal personhood.” The apotheosis of antiabortion spectacularized death occurred in the mid-1990s with the homicides of abortion doctors and care providers. While such domestic terrorism waned considerably following the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994, antiabortion groups have continued to utilize spectacles of “fetal death” as a key strategy to further erode what reproductive rights remain in this country, with fetal burials and monuments to the “unborn” proliferating in recent years. Meanwhile, abortion rights groups represented female death in a number of ways, from the use of photographs of women who had died due to unsafe abortions, to carrying women in coffins at protests, to “die-ins,” to the use of the coat hanger as a stand-in for the lost lives of women. After the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, some activists re-thought this strategy and called for a move away from invoking female death. Assessing all the visual strategies deployed in the fight over reproductive rights, and in particular the historical context of contemporary efforts to ensure fetal personhood rights through images of “fetal death,” is crucial to the ability of the reproductive justice movement to identify a path towards a durable future in the post-Dobbs era.