The New York Times recently reported on a man who sued two friends of his ex-wife for helping her procure pills for an abortion. They have counter-sued. The lengths he went to exercise control over his ex-wife’s bodily integrity were merely a continuation of his history of controlling her through threats of violence to her, their home and their dog. As is so sadly typical, such intimate partner violence, as well as rape and incest, matters little when the life of the fetus, embryo, or even a collection of doomed ectopic cells, is at stake. In other words, upon gestation, bodies with uteruses lose all rights to citizenship. Just check the Texas laws that say pregnant patients have no rights to medical directives if decisions conflict with the life of the fetus/embryo/collection of ectopic cells. Florida too, has kept bodies in irreversible comas on life-support machines, against directives and family wishes, for months, in order to gestate.
According to the article, the fetus has gained the rights of an “adult.” So the fetus becomes a fascinating temporal traveler, skipping gestation, birth, and childhood. Additionally, this fetal adult is not just any adult. The fetus is given full rights to kill its host; rights that are usually exercised only by CISgender, heterosexual, white men in our culture.
As annihilation threats from climate crisis loom, it’s sadly ironic that the only environment the US seems rabid to “protect” through legislation, is that of the uterus. For years I’ve written about the ways bodies with uteruses are subject to invasive medical surveillance or/and patrolled and incarcerated merely because they can or are, gestating (e.g. Gentile, Citation2011, Citation2013, Citation2014, Citation2016, Citation2023). As I’ve noted, it seems our relationship to the fetus enacts Henri Bergson’s (Citation1913/2001) observations about time, such that the future as an idea, “pregnant with an infinity of possibilities,” is better than the future itself, when it becomes present. Indeed, a pregnant future idea (fetus and embryo) holds a unique and electric allure of limitless promise that often fades once the fetus is born and becomes a materialized present with demands. The fact that not all fetuses are protected equally reinforces the defensive nature of fetal protectionism as a direct outgrowth of colonial practices of eugenics, slavery, rape, and forced sterilizations, a defense of playing with time has everything to do with anti-Black heteropatriarchal temporality, and all but nothing to do with fetal health. Instead, the fetus is a fetish object for the cultural body, generating a fantasy of future wholeness in the face of a present overwhelmed with uncertainty and escalating climate crisis.
Existing in a liminal space of visible invisibility, the fetus embodies a vulnerability deserving of protection, not from the established threats to its welfare (e.g., intimate partner violence is a leading cause of fetal injury) but from often manufactured risks emanating from the gestating body itself. This move turns those who work to “save” fetuses into heroic rescuers, while collapsing all threats, including those from the environment, i.e., threats from (mother)nature, into the gestating “maternal” body. Destruction can be medically controlled (in the case of gestating white bodies) and criminalized (for gestating BIPOC bodies), incarcerating multiple generations simultaneously, further colonizing the future, all while acting out a fantasy of dominating (mother)nature. It’s a win-win for a floundering white, CISgender heteropatriarchy.
As states grant the fetus more rights than the gestating body, with looming threats to birth control, LBGTQ rights, gender-affirming medical treatment for children, cuts to education funding, childcare, medical care for all, as options for BIPOC pregnant bodies dwindle, even as their horrifically high rates of death do not, I can’t help but see fetal protectionism as a fetish embodying, reifying and protecting a violent and destructive fantasy of infinite white potentiality that only comes into being through its anti-Black and heteropatriarchal temporal patterns of affect regulation through disavowals and projections. This fetish deploys futurity through the fetus that is used to embody a fantasy of wholeness in the face of annihilation anxieties, a limitless white heteropatriarchal supremacy, colonizing “inconceivable” annihilating times.
Reference
- Bergson, H. (1913/2001). Time and free will. An essay on the immediate data of consciousness. Dover Publications, Inc.
- Gentile, K. (2011). What about the baby? Baby-philia and the neo cult of domesticity. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 12(1), 38–58.
- Gentile, K. (2013). Biopolitics, trauma and the public fetus: An analysis of preconception care. Subjectivity, 6(2), 153–172.
- Gentile, K. (2014). Exploring the troubling temporalities produced by fetal personhood. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 19(3), 1–18.
- Gentile, K. (2016). The business of being made: The temporalities of reproductive technologies, in psychoanalysis and culture. Routledge.
- Gentile, K. (2023). The irresistible lure of the fetus, or why abortion has everything to do with the colonizing temporalities of anti-blackness, “human” exceptionalism, and the climate crisis. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 24(1), 43–52.