Apostrophe as Abortion Ethic

with Barbara Johnson's article Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion

Obituary Photo of Barbara Johnson via Folsom Funeral Service, August 27, 2009.

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.  
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.

—Gwendolyn Brooks

Barbara Johnson’s article Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion proposes a foundational repositioning for the political and ethical implications of fetal sentience. Johnson challenges state-disciplined reproduction through a close study of the rhetorical apostrophe to cast light on the lyrical paradox of anthropocentric address. Ultimately, Johnson makes the argument that to speculate about the ethics of an unborn, absent, or inanimate fetus is always to do so within a system that speaks for nearly autonomous subjects.

The traditional “I/thou” method of address figures subjects are always speaking from one determined subject to another. With the help from poets Baudelaire, Shelley, and Brooks, whose work harnesses apostrophe, Johnson destabilizes this structure by exposing the many audiences implicated, whether addressed directly or not. Apostrophe as a rhetorical device accounts for this phenomenon of speakership, defined as, “a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness.” Such skilled oration blurs the boundaries, responsibilities, and capacities of subjects, which has powerful a/effects when we apply it to abortion ethics. 

Turning back to Brooks’ poem we can see how these impacts manifest. A mother speaks to her unborn child who, as with all apostrophes, cannot respond. Brooks asks how is the truth to be said when the child—who may suffer consequences whether it lives or not—is silenced? At once steadfast, then apologetic, the mother fluctuates between affective registers, speaking toward and then away from the child, as seen in the third line in the poem: Since anyhow you are dead. / Or rather, or instead, / You were never made. There is a conflict present, posed toward a larger audience or what Irene Kacandes calls a “receiver-audience.” The receiver-audience are the implicated. They are the literal and figurative subjects, both absent and present. Their presence is omniscient and therefore Godlike; they are the political, religious, social, and ethical opinions that swarm the subject. The impact of this imposed kind of address can read in two ways. First, that all agency is lost to overwhelm. Second, that the singular subjective is destabilized to a degree that returns autonomy to the speaking subject.

Much of what undergirds Johnson’s concerns on abortion is a question of vitality. At what point does a fetus live? What risks are we willing to take against the living mother? These are the stakes of abortion ethics writ large, which are liberated and stripped at intervals through political policy. Just this year, in April of 2024, The New York Times reports strict abortion bans in states like Idaho are using theories of fetal personhood and terminology like “unborn child,” to advocate against abortion in federal court following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June of 2022. This argument seeks to establish both the mother and the “unborn child” as patients with abortion as an option only when a live birth is ruled unfeasible. In the words of Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, “What Idaho is doing is waiting for women to deteriorate and suffer the lifelong health consequences with no possible upside for the fetus. It stacks tragedy upon tragedy.”