What’s in the World Is in the Womb: Converging Environmental and Reproductive Justice through Synecdoche

ABSTRACT

This article examines the efforts of biologist Sandra Steingraber to promote the rights of the fetus in an environmental human rights context. Rather than dismiss Steingraber’s rhetoric as antifeminist, it posits that synecdoche enables her to simultaneously promote fetal protection and reproductive justice. In framing the maternal body and fetuses as synecdochical representations of the larger environment, Steingraber exposes the interconnectedness between human and nature, and reveals how protecting the maternal body and fetus from environmental toxins necessitates regulation of toxins in the environment. The author of this article argues that synecdoche is a rhetorical practice activists can use to transcend dichotomies, overcome the obstacles of toxins’ ubiquity and banality, and converge environmental and reproductive justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• feminism
• fetal rights
• motherhood
• reproductive justice
• Sandra Steingraber
• synecdoche

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Kelly Happe, Belinda Stillion Southard, Steve Schwarze, Sara Hayden, Isabel Fay, Kristen Hoerl, and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous and helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

A number of Steingraber’s passages quoted in this essay are italicized in the original version. All italicized quotes reflect the original unless otherwise noted.

Numerous academic essays are devoted almost entirely to fetal rights discourse. See Draper; Fentiman; Goodwin; Hayden, “Revitalizing the Debate”; Lupton; McCulloch; Oaks; and Peach.

For examples of scholarly works debating the use of maternal appeals, see Hayden, “Family Metaphors”; Petit; and Stearney.

For a strong range of scholarly essays that address the various obstacles presented by toxins’ nature and effects, see Barnett 406; Peeples, “Toxic Sublime” 374; Peeples, “Imaging Toxins” 191–92; Peeples and DeLuca 60; Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism 29; and Schwarze 316–18.

Pezzullo’s essay “Contaminated Children” does not contain page numbers. For the reader’s convenience, I have offered page numbers for passages by treating the first page of Pezzullo’s essay as page one.