The “Unborn Statute”: when legislatives documents are used to construct persons

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate some of the ways legislative documents are used to construct persons. Starting from the Unborn Statute, a bill a law that is running in the Brazilian House of Representatives and that defends embryos, fetuses or the unborn – as it is intended to describe beings that have been conceived, but not yet born – as a person, with the intention of exposing how documents that dialog with this bill articulate its different arguments so to construct different persons. That way, we will approach the body of documents – laws, bills, reports, separate votes, bill justifications etc. – that talk about abortion and new technologies, two moments where the unborn may appear as a person or non-person. Also, verify how different levels of personality are attributed.