Are premature babies citizens with rights? Provision rights and the edges of citizenship

Abstract

Premature babies are the same gestational age as the fetus that, in Britain, has no rights. However, our ethnographic neonatal study illustrates how the UN 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child applies to premature babies. Parents and staff in neonatal units offered socially and culturally constructed versions of childhood relating to versions of citizenship, duties, responsibilities and rights. Far from denying or trivialising rights, attention to premature babies’ rights and citizenship can illuminate how human rights are embodied, aesthetic, interactive, emotional, political, economic and socially contingent. The babies’ resistances also illustrated the relevance of rights to them as sentient, active meaning makers, within the private family and the public neonatal units. We review advantages and disadvantages of conceptualising premature babies’ needs as rights, and their status as citizens.