ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I show how the concept of personhood played an important role in the anthropology of reproduction from the start because of a confluence of events, namely the abortion debate in the US and the emergence of new assistive reproductive technologies (most importantly prenatal testing, sonograms, and home pregnancy tests as well as IVF). Initially, the focus was on fetal personhood but later developed with regard to infants with disabilities, and more recently still, on the attribution of personhood to sperm in third-party reproduction. I also describe another line of scholarship which has developed in parallel. Rather than focusing on the medical dimensions of reproduction, some anthropologists, especially in Britain, developed notions of relatedness. Some of this work explores concepts of distributed personhood, which extends beyond a single individual spatially and temporally to include ancestors, spirits, elements of the landscape.
