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W hat we is the “sound” of life? Why, and when, is it necessary that hear life in fetal form? How do our conceptions about that life—and its sensing—constitute a perhaps nascent biopolitics (the intertwined scientific and political regimes of knowing through which bodies mediate between state and population)? And what kinds of methodological and theoretical approaches help us consider the nature of such fetal claims?

In this chapter I draw on public encounters with fetuses in two seemingly disparate locales—the theatricality of US anti-abortion legislative activism and everyday interactions between doctors and patients in a southern Mexican public hospital—in which audiences were asked to recognize a fetal subject as social, prompted by the sound of its amplified heartbeat. Rather than offer them as comparative cases within equivalent reproductive politics, I query how they might together illuminate implicit propositions about fetal biosocial existence and the proof thereof. As such, this chapter offers a speculative set of methodological and analytic approaches for glimpsing the production of fetal personhood as it emerges through the mediation of diagnostic technologies. Here, I name such productions “fetal propositions” to highlight their not-yet-settled and suggestive nature, while arguing that anthropology offers a kind of tool kit for identifying and analyzing their emergent social claims about fetal