Fungibility: Exchangeable Parents and the 'Domestic Supply of Infants'

To treat a human being as fungible is to treat that human being as a mere thing.

Aug 11, 2026

Despite its Fetal Personhood rhetoric, Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (which Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett signed on to) conceptualizes both infants and pregnant people as objects—as things.

Objectification is “the seeing and/or treating of someone as an object.”1 The objectified person is seen in ways that are fundamentally inaccurate, as a person is not a thing. Having been made into a thing, the objectified person is treated in ways one would treat things, but not persons.

Objectification permeates the ideology, rhetoric, propaganda, and policies of the movement against sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR). The six right-wing justices, which hold a supermajority on the Supreme Court, are a part of this movement.

Scholars have identified ten ways of treating persons as mere things. This series discusses each.

Fungibility

The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type, and/or (b) with objects of other types

In the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the legal recognition of the right to end a pregnancy, Justice Samuel Alito brazenly claimed that no one needs an abortion anymore because those who States may now force to into involuntary reproductive servitude can simply terminate their parental rights after birth. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

To support his claim, Alito cited a 2008 CDC report. In the citation, Alito chose to include the following quotation from that report.

“[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent.”2

The choice to include this quotation is telling: “[W]ithin the capitalist math of supply and demand,” forcing human beings into involuntary reproductive servitude by outlawing abortion will “solve the adoption ‘supply’ issue.”3 In this equation of family separation, infants exist as a product (see Ownership) supplied for the enjoyment of prospective parents, and women exist to produce (see Instrumentality) a supply of infants for prospective parents.

“If you believe in fetal personhood, or that ‘abortion is never medically necessary to save a woman’s life,’ while directing shrinking resources toward parental leave, child hunger, health care, and poverty, and while threatening to cut off contraception access, you must justify forcing women to carry pregnancies to term regardless of the dangers to their own health and lives, regardless of cost, and regardless of the misery they or their children may suffer. One way around that thorny ethical dilemma is to simply assert that such children will be efficiently transferred to alternate parents who will value them.”4

Hence, the Dobbs decision “baselessly implies that [] proceeding with an unwanted pregnancy is of negligible impact as long as the mother does not have to raise the child”5 who can “be efficiently transferred to alternate parents.”6 Importantly, “this suggests that families, kinship, and parenthood are all exchangeable.”7

Objectification via Fungibility occurs when a person is seen and/or treated as a fungible object.

To be fungible is to be interchangeable (like one ballpoint pen is interchangeable with another); it is to be discardable (like discarding a pen in favor of a word processor); and it is to be exhangeable (like one model of vacuum cleaner can be exchanged for another). We treat and see many types of objects as fungible.

When a human being is treated as a fungible object, that human being is being treated “as if they are dispensable or can be traded or discarded by another person.”8 Instead of recognizing a person’s uniqueness and humanity, the objectifier sees and treats the person as a mere thing which is replaceable, exchangeable, or identical to any other thing that fills a similar role or performs a similar function.

The Dobbs court fails to recognize parents’ humanity and individuality, and instead sees and treats them as faceless, mindless, interchangeable things that perform a particular function, placeholders of a particular role. Shortly after giving birth, a new mom can simply be swapped out for a different one. This is what it looks like to view parents—human beings—as fungible objects.

The fungibility inherent in the Dobbs decision's disrespectful, consumerist, and transactional treatment of parents erases the individuals—their distinct voices and unique histories—and fails to recognize the human and parental qualities of those forced to give birth against their will. It treats every parent as though they are fungible objects which can be copied or substituted. This is objectification.

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