As I write this, my daughter is thirty-two weeks pregnant with her very much wanted first child. Like any human pregnancy, hers is not simply a biological process but a purposeful activity in which she is creatively engaged. For starters, she’s had to manage some pretty unrelenting nausea by learning, through trial and error, what foods she can tolerate and how often she needs to eat; this requires her to take packets of cheese, crackers, almonds, and so on to work with her so that food will be available right when she needs it. In her twentieth week she developed high blood pressure, so she bought an exercise machine and has been forcing herself to use it regularly. In her twenty-first week, she also developed gestational diabetes, requiring her to revamp her already restricted diet, prick her finger four times a day to check her glucose levels, and give herself a shot of insulin every night before bedtime. She goes to her doctor every two weeks to be monitored for these and other possible complications.

And then there is the ongoing work, which she shares with her husband and intimate others, of calling her fetus into personhood, weaving love and welcome around it, making a place in the social world for it to occupy as soon as it is born. My daughter does not think she was a mother the moment she conceived. She believes she is making herself into a mother as she brings her baby to term, and doesn’t expect to feel completely like a mother until a good month or two after the baby is born. Her view may be wrong, but there are no publicly available means of showing that it is wrong. Certainly, the South Dakota legislature is in no position to prove that it is wrong.