The Fetus as Political Fetish

We’ve known for a long time that they don’t care about women. Or children. Now it’s clear that they don’t care about the fetus either.

“When fetish first appeared in English in the early 17th century, it referred to objects (often amulets) believed by certain West Africans to have supernatural powers. During the 19th century, the word took on a broader meaning: "an object of irrational devotion or reverence." The object need not be physical: a person may have a fetish for an idea, such as an unwarranted belief that a particular economic system will solve society’s ills.”

The Fetus Used to be a “Super-Person”; Now It’s Clear Its “Protectors” Only Care About Their Own Power

In many of my previous writing on reproductive rights, I argued that for the (so-called) “right-to-lifer,” the fetus is not merely a “person,” but a “super-person” who has rights that supersede not just the rights of their mothers, but are more extensive than those granted to anyone else in our society. “Who else besides the fetus,” I wrote, “can make a claim on another person’s body to operate as a life-support system for them? Even those who decline to take simple blood tests to determine their compatibility with a dying relative whose life could be sustained by a donation of blood or marrow cannot be forced to.”

The denial of reproductive freedom thus turns women into less-than-equal subjects under the law—and in very real sense, deprives women of humanity. We become instead a mere fetal delivery system, and—as Samuel Alito argued in Dobbs, a necessary provider of baby “stock” who (praise be!!) will help solve the baby “supply problem.” The ready availability of abortion, you see, has made “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.”

The Dobbs decision made it clear that for Alito and the other members of the court who voted to overrule Roe V. Wade, neither women or children are valued as “persons” as much as the fetus. Before birth, women are fetal incubators and the fetus sustained by them is a kind of super-person. Yet after birth, the fetus loses all its super-privileges, and becomes part of a dwindling “supply,” diminished stock for the market in babies. Pump up the supply, get them placed, and forget about them. It’s so easy, as “modern developments” such as “safe-haven” laws (which allow mothers to drop their babies off at fire-stations or hospitals without fear of criminal prosecution) have rendered abortion unnecessary.

I’m always surprised to see pictures of Alito. He’s actually a few years younger than I—another Boomer, but of the right-wing backlash variety—but in my mind he is ancient, a relic who quotes, in Dobbs, from a seventeenth-century ideo- logue who uses religious tracts to justify his position on abortion. Even more surprising—as she has both been pregnant and has adoptive children—was Amy Coney Barrett’s support for the Alito position on “safe haven laws.” When she was pregnant herself, did she regard her own body as little more than protective padding and nourishment for a fetus? But whatever Barrett experienced or didn’t, to assert that safe-haven laws “take care of the problem” is to regard pregnancy as a less than fully human experience, to imagine the pregnant body as a “thing” (as Simone de Beauvoir would put it) rather than a profoundly transformed way of “grasping the world” and one’s situation in it. ¹

And now we know that for some—like Attorney General Ken Paxton and Amy O’Donnell of “Texas Alliance for Life”—the fetus is merely a “thing,” too. It may be ostentatiously worshipped for political purposes, but without any regard whatsoever for its present or future suffering.

Their rhetoric, to be sure, is full of talk of the protection of fetal “life”:

Paxton: “Nothing can restore the unborn child’s life that will be lost as a result” of an abortion.

Amy O’Donnell: “while it is heartbreaking to hear of any family facing a tragic diagnosis for their unborn child” the group “does not support taking the life of an unborn child because of a life-limiting or fatal diagnosis.”

But now Let’s hear from Allison Chang, whose fetus was diagnosed with Trisomy 18, the same disorder that Kate Cox’s fetus will die of if she is forced to carry it to term.

“Is she in pain?” I asked quietly as the pearlescent baby-shaped image on the screen folded its legs and then extended them.

The radiologist doing my ultrasound had just finished pointing out a cluster of alarming abnormalities in our developing daughter, using a slew of medical terms my husband and I, both medical students, were grimly familiar with. Pleural effusion: fluid surrounding one of her lungs, preventing it from expanding and developing properly. Ascites: excess fluid inside the abdomen, surrounding her organs. Cystic hygroma: a large, fluid-filled mass on her neck, strongly associated with chromosomal abnormalities.

Something was very wrong with our baby.

A few hours later, I lay on a hospital exam table. Arms folded over my head, I tried to stay still as a specialist in maternal/fetal medicine used a large needle to pierce my abdominal wall and then my uterus in order to take a sample of the placenta for genetic testing. After an agonizing two weeks, the results came back: our daughter had trisomy 18. My husband and I immediately understood the gravity of this diagnosis — it is one of those rare conditions we expected to encounter on a medical board exam, not in real life.

Trisomy 18 is rare, occurring in about 1 in 2,500 pregnancies. The cells of these babies have three copies of chromosome 18 instead of the usual two. There is no cure. Most babies with trisomy 18 die before they are born. The majority of those who make it to term die within five to 15 days, usually due to severe heart and lung defects. The few who live past one year have serious health problems, such as a toddler lacking abdominal wall muscles, revealing the slithering movement of intestines beneath his skin, or a 1-year-old who cannot not defecate on her own, requiring anal sphincter dilation multiple times each day….

….As parents, we felt it was our duty to protect our daughter from the inevitable suffering she would meet if she were to make it to term. And so, at 15 weeks of gestation, we made the painful decision to end our very wanted pregnancy.

As the date approached, I wore bulky clothing in an effort to hide my protruding belly — I was terrified someone would congratulate me on my pregnancy. Each day, I hoped that our daughter had not developed sufficient neural connections to begin sensing that her organs were failing. Using our home Doppler monitor, a Christmas gift from my sister, we listened to her heartbeat. Two days later, I tried to hear her heartbeat again, but it was no longer there. She had already died.

When I woke up from the dilation and evacuation procedure, during which her remains were removed from my body, I cried. I had never felt such profound emptiness.

My husband and I were given a small box sealed with a bow. It contained a tiny baby’s hat and a thick piece of paper marked with purple footprints the size of my thumbnail. Her footprints.

We had her remains cremated and placed her ashes in a tiny white urn small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. It felt good to have her home, even if it wasn’t in the way we had expected.

….I don’t understand why we are so keen to make women carry to term babies with severe impairments. These include babies whose brains are missing (anencephaly) or whose lungs aren’t developed enough to sustain life (Potter syndrome). These are deadly diagnoses. What is being accomplished by forcing women to carry these babies to term other than ensuring that these children are as aware of and sensitive to their pain as possible?

We could not protect our daughter from trisomy 18, but we could shield her from any pain or agony that would come with it. All parents should be able to protect their unborn children in this way — to spare them from having to feel pain. These are horrific decisions that no parent should ever have to make.

But when they do, we — as health professionals and as a community — should be there to support them emotionally and financially. Even if you believe you would not choose to end a pregnancy under these circumstances (although I encourage you to remain humble when it comes to anticipating what you might do in an extreme situation), these should be choices that families are able to make.”

In Kate Cox’s case, both her fetus and her own health and life are at stake:

In an interview, Ms. Cox said that she and her husband had been excited at the prospect of a third child joining their 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son. The couple only glancingly followed the rapidly shifting legal landscape around abortion in Texas as Roe was overturned and bans went into effect.

“I thought I would never need an abortion,” she said. “I want a big family.”

“We knew abortion was illegal in Texas,” Mr. Cox said, but not how limited the exceptions were. “We had no idea the scope of that.”

The diagnosis of trisomy 18 was devastating, Ms. Cox said, because it meant that the fetus would not survive until birth, or, if carried to term, the infant would die within a short time. That feeling was compounded, she said, by her inability to end the pregnancy despite her doctors telling her that continuing it could endanger her own health. Ms. Cox delivered her previous pregnancies by C-section, and doctors have told her that the risk of scarring from a third C-section could threaten her chances of having another child.

“It’s deep sadness,” she said. “I feel like I should not have to put my body through the risks of continuing this pregnancy through a childbirth and induction with a chance of uterine rupture, a third C-section.”

A doctor convicted of performing an illegal abortion in Texas can face a prison sentence of up to 99 years and fines of at least $100,000.

Make No Mistake: This is Political

This is not a struggle between those who value “life” and those who want to give women “choice.” “Choice” became our brand defensively, as we insisted, against those who would portray us as casually scraping embryos out of our bodies, that we were not “pro-abortion.” But those who want to deny us reproductive freedom are in favor of choice, too. The difference is that they insist on men like Paxton making the choice, rather than the girls and women most affected. And with that insistence they deprive us, not only of “choice” over our reproductive lives and all that entails for our ability to care for ourselves, our families, and future generations, but of our full equality under the law. 

And now it’s become clear—if it wasn’t already—that concern for fetal “life” has no morality or empathy or care behind it, either. The fetus is nothing but a stand-in for those who pretend to worship it, but whose real concern is the retention of power. The words “fetal life” were nothing but magical incantations, as empty as the “Make America Great Again” slogan—and as deceptive.

For the politicians leading this effort, it has nothing to do with respect for life but is part of a broad agenda intent on dismantling all the gains in equality and social justice made since the sixties and seventies. Those were the decades when Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, and (what was then known as) Gay Rights began to insist that the country, its laws, and its culture were not owned by those who felt it was rightfully theirs by God’s decree. Since then, these movements have expanded, redefined themselves, become more inclusive—and more vocal. But so too, have those who felt betrayed and angry. They watched, and strategized, and made affiliation with religion, with talk radio and Fox News, and with a political party that saw demographics might soon make them obsolete.

The years 2012-2016 are instructive.

In 2012, the mainstream media had been on high alert to threats to reproductive freedom. They hailed Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke as a heroine when she testified in congress in favor of a federal mandate requiring religiously affiliated institutions (such as universities and hospitals) to offer cover for contraceptives to employees. When Rush Limbaugh called her a “slut” and a “prostitute” who is “having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception,” his remarks set off a firestorm of support for Fluke, and he was eventually forced to apologize for his “insulting word choices.”  

In August, Representative Tod Aikin, senate nominee from Missouri, arguing against exceptions for rape victims, said that in instances of “legitimate rape,” women rarely get pregnant: “The female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” He is berated in the press and defeated in the election.  

In October, Senate candidate from Indiana Richard Mourdock says during a debate that “Life is a gift from God. And, I think, even in the situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” He, too, is eviscerated by the press, and defeated in the election.

But no one seemed to be paying attention any more in 2016.

Vice-Presidential candidate Mike Pence’s career militating against Planned Parenthood and federal funding for pregnant victims of rape barely rated a mention in the papers or political news shows. Nor did his 2014 bill, requiring that all women seeking an abortion have an ultrasound 18 hours before the procedure.

When MSNBC host Chris Matthews pressured then-candidate Trump to give a yes or no answer to the question of whether women who have abortions should  be punished, he waffles for a bit, then replies “yes.” When, after the election, “Sixty Minutes”’ Leslie Stahl questioned him about the consequences of a repeal of Roe v. Wade, he waved aside the issue of the effects on women living in states that would outlaw legal abortions: “They’ll have to go to another state” he shrugs.

In 2012, the notion that women who get abortions should be punished or Pence’s proposal for fetal funerals would have ranked, along with Aikin’s and Mourdock’s remarks, as monumentally misogynist mistakes, politically speaking. In 2016, they slid off the candidates into a growing heap of “gaffes” which the press largely ignored, preferring to raise alarms about Hillary Clinton’s emails.²

Her opponent—a demonic idiot/genius—knew the magic words:

“You don’t have to take this anymore”

And you made him president. And he appointed judges to do your bidding.

And he’s running again.

I hope that Democrats—particularly those who (for some inexplicable reason) “don’t approve” of Biden (who has done more to improve our lives, safeguard our rights, and restore our status in the world than any POTUS in my living history) or who are angry over his support of Israel—won’t make the same kind of mistake we made in 2016. Vote like smart people, not magical thinkers.

1. Some of the material above is taken from a longer piece of mine:

2. Some democrats are responsible, too, for our failure to protect reproductive rights. When Bernie Sanders described Planned Parenthood and NARAL as “establishment” and abortion as a “social issue” (as though loss of control over ones reproductive life had no impact on ones economic survival), the mainstream media sounded no alarms. Sanders regarded “our” issues as peripheral disturbances to getting out the “real” message of economic inequality. In an interview with Rachel Maddow, he described the fight for reproductive rights as a distraction from “serious issues.”