Embryonic Properties and Fetal Frontiers: Potential Life in U.S. Property Law(Proprietăţi embrionice şi frontiere fetale: viaţa potenţială în Legea proprietăţii a SUA)

Abstract

Within the English common law tradition, there is a principle which prohibits property of the human body. Taking property to be a protean concept, this paper examines how property is defined and applied in recent legal disputes in the United States over "potential life" entities, such as embryos and fetuses. A brief genealogy of theoretical and common law approaches with respect to property of the body highlights an analysis of six U.S. legal cases in which sperm, zygotes, embryos and fetuses have become new legal subjects of property against the background of assisted reproductive technologies. This paper concludes that property can operate not just in order to privatize, commodify and circulate, but in order to bring "potential life" entities closer to people and deeper into relational networks.

Keywords

• property
• body
• embryos
• personhood