Fetal Positions: The Talmudic Construction of Personhood is forthcoming with University of California Press in March 2027!

Fetal Positions offers a timely new way to think about how fetal personhood and personhood more broadly are socially mediated and culturally constructed, while reinscribing both Jewishness and the diversity of late antiquity into our discussions of the fetus.

Fetal Positions 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? What can a fetus legally do in the world? How is the fetus treated ritually, and what kinds of religious work do the rabbis do with the fetus? When is a fetus “just” a fetus and when is it something more?

The project combines close readings of primary texts from Late Antiquity together with analyses informed by insights from anthropology, critical animal studies, post-human studies, women’s and gender studies, ethics, and legal history. As I show, in some cases, the fetus is subordinated to the pregnant person while in others they are seen either as subordinated to the non-gestational parent or as independent actors. Sometimes the rabbis treat the fetus as human; other times they treat the fetus as an animal or as an inanimate object. Rather than trying to synthesize diverse rabbinic approaches, I analyze the manifold ways that the rabbis think with the fetus, highlighting the rabbis’ own debate and disagreement over the fetus and exploring the interplays between tradition, legal and literary contexts, and cultural contexts. Rather than make normative claims about the fetus, I demonstrate that rabbinic discourse rejects the idea that the fetus could be made a coherent and consistent signifier at all.