Fetal Positions

Fetal Positions explores how ancient Jews in Sasanian Babylonia weighed an issue that remains all too timely: the legal status of the fetus. Sara Ronis uses the Babylonian Talmud as a springboard to ask a range of questions about the rabbis’ multiple approaches to the fetus: In what ways do the rabbis construct the fetus as a legal object? A legal subject? What kinds of rights and responsibilities does a fetus have? When is a fetus "just" a fetus and when is it something more?

Ronis analyzes ancient rabbinic discourse on the fetus by combining close readings of primary texts from late antiquity with approaches drawn from religious studies, anthropology, critical animal studies, gender studies, ethics, and legal history. Fetal Positions reinscribes both Jewishness and the diversity of late antiquity into our discussions of the fetus, ultimately offering a new way to think about fetal personhood—and personhood more broadly—as both socially mediated and culturally constructed.