Conceiving Life: On Socio-Legal Fictions and the Making of Law’s Persons

This article explores how ‘life’ – the fetus, the person and our relations to one another – is ‘conceived’ in reproductive law and politics through the use of socio-legal fictions. Rather than operating as neutral, technical devices, I argue that legal fictions are socio-legal instruments invoked in moments of reproductive moral controversy and uncertainty that actively produce legal persons and serve to contain and domesticate law’s excesses. Drawing on Fitzpatrick and Esposito, I argue that where socio-legal fictions are used to resolve uncertainty and contradiction in the law, they can only do so by taming relational and excessive forms of life into governable legal categories, leaving rights-based claims precarious and vulnerable to persistent challenge and undermining. I conclude by arguing for a more relational, affirmative approach to reproductive law.