LISTSERV mailing list manager LISTSERV 16.0

Help for SF-LIT Archives


SF-LIT Archives

SF-LIT Archives


[email protected]


View:

Message:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

By Topic:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

By Author:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

Font:

Proportional Font

LISTSERV Archives

LISTSERV Archives

SF-LIT Home

SF-LIT Home

SF-LIT  February 2012

SF-LIT February 2012

Subject:

What Does SF Tells Us About Reproductive Rights?

From:

Dennis Fischer <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Science Fiction and Fantasy Listserv <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:58:53 -0800

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (257 lines)

What does science fiction tell us about the future of reproductive rights?
By Annalee Newitz, Feb 22, 2012 3:05 PM
 If everything from technology to politics will be different in the future, then 
so will human reproduction. That's why so much science fiction deals with the 
question of how humans make babies — or don't make them — in alternate worlds 
that are often quite close to our own. It's also why reproduction is a political 
issue. After all, a political campaign represents the promise of a new kind of 
future.
What will happen if the state takes control of human reproduction? The answers 
could be weirder than you think — and might terrify pro-life politicians as much 
as pro-choice advocates. Here are some of the scenarios supplied by science 
fiction. 

Illustration by mondolithic
 State-controlled reproduction is a nightmare
Perhaps the best known work of science fiction about state-controlled 
reproduction is Margaret Atwood's Christian fundamentalist nightmare, The 
Handmaid's Tale. Written in the 1980s (and adapted into a film in the 1990s), 
it's about what would happen if right wing Christian politicians took control of 
North America in the wake of a nuclear disaster that's left most of the 
population sterile. Women who are fertile become "handmaids" in the homes of 
wealthy patriarchs whose wives cannot bear children. Handmaids undergo a 
humiliating ritual where the patriarch tries to get them pregnant while their 
barren wives watch - the idea is that God will approve of this because it 
emulates an Old Testament scenario and the wives are participating "willingly." 
In reality, the system turns women into property and also sets them against each 
other. Atwood imagines state-regulated reproduction as a horrific combination of 
authoritarianism in the public sphere, and spousal abuse and rape in the 
domestic one.
 Other works imagine the state regulating reproduction using the carrot rather 
than the stick. Brave New World, written in the late 1920s during the height 
eugenics craze in the United States, imagines a future where the government 
breeds humans for specialized tasks. Some are designed to be strong but stupid 
low-caste workers, while others (the Alphas) are given perfect minds and 
physiques in order to take their places as societal leaders. Every child is also 
put through years of behavioral conditioning to reinforce their genetic 
predilections. The result is a society where everybody is content with their 
positions and sex is purely recreational. Similarly, the movie GATTACA imagines 
a future where everyone is genetically engineered for various class positions. 
Both stories include "wild type" characters, non-GMO people whose perspectives 
cast doubt on the justice of a system where the state determines who you are 
from conception onward.
You might think that these stories, to the extent that they are about gender, 
would be like The Handmaid's Tale, where patriarchs or a patriarchal state have 
decided to take away women's rights to choose how they'll reproduce. But that's 
simply not the case. In fact, feminist SF writer Sherri Tepper's novel The Gate 
to Women's Country offers an ambivalent portrait of a future matriarchal society 
devoted to the eugenics project of breeding men to be less violent. You can find 
a similar theme even in B-movies like Hell Comes to Frogtown, set in a 
post-apocalyptic world where Rowdy Roddy Piper is captured by a gang of women 
who hook him up to a sperm-extraction machine so they can get some nice genetic 
material. A similar fate meets the main character in 1970s cult classic A Boy 
And His Dog, where a group of subterranean religious nuts capture the virile Don 
Johnson and hook him to their scary groin cage so they can suck out all his jizz 
before killing him. Both movies have elements of parody, but they also reveal 
fairly serious anxieties about men being raped. 

The point is, the nightmare of state-controlled reproduction is something that 
haunts both the male and female imaginations. It's also bound closely with the 
fear of eugenics breeding programs and designer babies. When contemplating a 
future where the state takes a heavy hand in reproduction, humans worry about 
why, exactly, the government wants to take control. What's the payoff? A class 
of genetically-engineered worker bees? Babies for the chosen few?
 When women control their own reproduction
One way to do an end-run around these questions is to focus on gender, rather 
than the state. What would happen if women had complete control over 
reproduction? This is a fantasy that a lot of feminists have had over the past 
century, partly as a reaction against the fears that Atwood voices in The 
Handmaid's Tale. Indeed, one of the first twentieth century works of science 
fiction, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 novel Herland, is about a lost island 
ruled entirely by women who reproduce by parthenogenesis. They've developed a 
just society, full of women who have no conception of the "real world" in 1915, 
where women would never work as warriors, politicians, or doctors. When a group 
of men accidentally stumbles on the island, Gilman takes the opportunity to 
explore what it would be like for her male peers to fall in love with women who 
treat men as their equals.
While Gilman's Herland is arguably a Utopia, feminists of the later twentieth 
century weren't so sure that a society controlled by women would actually be 
much better than old-fashioned authoritarian patriarchy. In the James Tiptree, 
Jr. story "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", author Alice Sheldon imagines what 
would happen if some astronauts were knocked off course, Planet of the Apes 
style, and found themselves orbiting an Earth of the future. A plague has wiped 
out most of the Earth's population, including all the men, and women are now 
reproducing through cloning. Their culture has remained fairly stagnant, and the 
astronauts dream of taking over the female population through their amazing 
powers of leadership — or just through sexual conquest. Unlike the women in 
Herland, Sheldon's women couldn't care less about the men. They study the men, 
possibly getting ready for the old sperm extraction manoeuvre, and then plan to 
kill them.
Joanna Russ' short story "When It Changed" takes a similarly dim view of what an 
all-female society on a faraway planet would think about the first men they've 
encountered. Male astronauts arrive, treat the women condescendingly, and then 
claim that women on Earth have equal rights. The women have to restrain 
themselves from killing the men because the male point of view seems so 
obviously poisonous. In Nicola Griffith's novel Ammonite, the whole "male 
explorers arrive" problem is solved neatly. A planet full of women who reproduce 
using parthenogenesis are lucky enough to be immune to a planet-wide pathogen 
that kills all men. Any male astronauts will die immediately upon arrival, and 
all the happy lesbians are able to continue on their merry way.
 Other authors, most notably Lois McMaster Bujold, imagine that women will take 
control of reproduction without needing to form female-dominated societies. Many 
of Bujold's science fiction novels include plots that revolve partly or entirely 
around the widespread use of "uterine replicators," or artificial wombs. In the 
novel Barrayar, our hero introduces the uterine replicator to her husband's 
patriarchal planet and proceeds to save the world. Similarly, the hero of Vonda 
McIntyre's Dreamsnake is a doctor who can manufacture personalized medicines 
using her own (modified) body as a chemistry lab. A side-effect of her powers is 
that she has complete control over when and how she becomes pregnant. In both 
novels, it's clear that part of what allows our women to be heroes is that they 
live in worlds where they control reproductive technologies.
Though some pundits claim that feminists want to destroy all men, it's clear 
from this broad range of stories by women that there is hardly a consensus about 
how awesome things would be if we could just have a matriarchy, or a world where 
women controlled reproduction. Even Gilman's female Utopia in Herland welcomes 
men, and the novel eventually becomes a story about how men and women who are 
equals can still love each other. Perhaps the most radical of these stories, 
"When It Changed" and Ammonite, are about women's ambivalence about female 
power. Russ and Griffith's characters prefer to live without men, but they show 
us female societies full of violence, strife, and problems.
The problem with abortion
When I was in seventh grade, I read a post-apocalyptic novel by Walter Tevis 
called Mockingbird that had a profound effect on me. I strongly identified with 
the characters, who were trying to preserve writing in a post-literate society. 
But one thing really confused me. To show how awful this future world was, Tevis 
noted that there were robots on every corner who would give an abortion on 
demand. Wait, what? As a horny teenage girl, a future full of free, anonymous 
robot abortion sounded pretty good. But Tevis was hardly the only science 
fiction writer who thought my idea of Utopia was a nightmare.
In the 1970s, Philip K. Dick made a permanent enemy of Joanna Russ and thousands 
of other pro-choice activists by writing a short story called "The Pre-Persons." 
It was about how Roe v. Wade would lead to a world where kids could be "aborted" 
until their souls entered their bodies — which the US government arbitrarily 
defined as the moment a child could learn algebra. By that logic, suggests 
Dick's main character, any adult who has forgotten algebra should be aborted 
too.
 Dick, who described himself as anti-abortion, hit upon a science fiction trope 
that hasn't changed much since his story was published. Just a few years ago, 
Neal Shusterman's young adult novel Unwind dealt with almost the same scenario 
as "The Pre-Persons" — in it, parents can choose to "unwind" their teenagers, or 
kill them and allow doctors to harvest their organs. Similarly, in the recent 
stories Never Let Me Go, The Island, and House of the Scorpion, people are 
allowed to commission clones of themselves who will be raised to adulthood and 
then harvested for organs. In all of these tales, the soon-to-be-aborted organ 
donors are shown to be fully human, complex people whose lives are being 
tragically cut short by horrifically immoral laws.
These stories work with typical science fiction logic, asking how a current 
political issue (in this case, abortion) might evolve in the future. The fear 
driving these stories is twofold. First, they raise the question of whether it's 
appropriate for humans to set an arbitrary distinction between "alive" and "not 
alive" in the womb, allowing people to abort the latter but not the former. 
Second, these stories ask whether widespread abortion will usher in radically 
immoral social systems where people can legally kill autonomous adults for 
arbitrary reasons like not knowing algebra, or being born a clone.
 Another crop of novels suggests that we're ridiculously human-centric for even 
thinking that these are moral issues. The Color of Distance, The Algebraist, and 
Triad all feature alien societies where adults routinely kill their children. In 
The Color of Distance, by Amy Thomson, a human scientist is appalled when she 
realizes the squid-like aliens she's been living with are regularly eating their 
own tadpoles. Any tadpole lucky enough to escape being eaten is allowed to 
mature into a teenager, but only a tiny handful of those teenagers — the 
smartest and most agile — will be allowed to become adults. The rest are killed. 
Thomson is careful to point out that the aliens think the human scientist is 
complete crazy for wanting to preserve every child. It would be completely 
unsustainable, and destroy their planet.
In The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks introduces us to the Dwellers, gas giant 
creatures who cheerfully watch their children being killed in the midst of a 
particularly dangerous airship manoeuvre. Like Thomson's aliens, the Dwellers 
simply don't fetishize the idea of preserving children's lives at all costs. 
Once a person has proven to be a competent adult, they have worth. But 
protecting a child just for the sake of "life" seems, to these aliens, simply 
wasteful and potentially destructive.
 The real issue is child-rearing
All the stories I've discussed up to this point focus on reproductive rights as 
an issue that centers basically on conception. Mostly, they ask: Who controls 
how we have babies, and who says what kinds of babies we can have?
But I would argue that the real issue lurking beneath the surface of those 
questions is a single, stark query: Who is responsible for raising children?
This certainly goes a long way to explaining why concerns about aborting fetuses 
can so easily morph into concerns about raising teenagers, as they do in tales 
like Unwind. It also explains why the stories I discussed earlier, about the 
state controlling reproduction, are often implicitly or explicitly about 
eugenics. The goal of a eugenics breeding program isn't to control reproduction; 
it's to control the population. And that takes us into the realms of 
child-rearing, education, and ultimately the state control of adults.
One of the often-neglected aspects of the reproductive rights debate is that 
when women ask to control their reproductive systems, they aren't just saying 
they want to have sex without fear of pregnancy. Of course pregnancy sucks, and 
certainly the Alien movies demonstrate in fantastical detail why childbirth is 
completely gross. Controlling reproduction is more fundamentally about 
controlling the fates of children, and the adults who care for them.
Children, after all, represent years and years of work. Parenting may be a joy, 
but it's also undeniably a form of labor that can last a lifetime. So science 
fiction about reproductive issues often winds up focusing a lot on parenting — 
the good, the bad, and the ugly of being in charge of a child.
 There was a creepy subplot on Battlestar Galactica where Starbuck is captured 
by the Cylons, threatened with forced impregnation, and is later imprisoned as 
the "wife" of the Cylon Leoben. She murders Leoben every time he comes into her 
prison cell (which she can do because there are a zillion copies of every 
Cylon), until he brings her a child he claims is hers. Suddenly, Starbuck is 
emotionally compromised. She wants to protect the child, though part of her 
wants to kill it, and as a result she can no longer focus on fighting Leoben. 
The arrival of this child is in many ways more traumatic than Starbuck's forced 
reproduction because it divides her loyalties and is an emotional distraction.
The idea that child-rearing divides our attention, making us less fit for 
heroism, is a theme in the Terminator series too. Though Sarah Connor is an 
incredible hero, she is often portrayed a bad mother, or at least a troubled 
one. John Connor has been raised in foster homes, as we learn in Terminator 2. 
In the Sarah Connor Chronicles series, Sarah struggles with devoting time to 
child-rearing when she has so many other responsibilities. Child-rearing, for 
women, provokes anxiety because it's so much work — and like Sarah Connor, they 
often have to do it mostly alone. The eponymous hero of Max Barry's corporate 
dystopia novel Jennifer Government is, like Sarah Connor, a single mother 
fighting impossibly brutal enemies. Jennifer's child is never far from her mind, 
and she's constantly having to take time off from her crime-fighting for mother 
duties in a way that Batman never would.
 Men do struggle with single fatherhood in tales from Enemy Mine and The Road, 
to Deep Space Nine and Real Steel, and they are often just as torn apart by it 
as Sarah Connor is. Generally they have to carve out new emotional space for 
their children, as Hugh Jackman's character does in Real Steel. This can also 
mean acknowledging that they are unprepared for the rigors of juggling daily 
work life with daily child-rearing responsibilities. Captain Sisko on Deep Space 
Nine is probably the least troubled of the bunch in these stories, partly 
because he's lucky enough to have a self-sufficient, smart kid in Jake, and 
partly because it seems like the entire space station is willing to help him 
take care of his son.
 Of course sometimes child-rearing is so awful that parents secretly wish they 
had aborted their kids. Certainly we can see this dark side of parenting in 
creepy-child movies like The Omen or even The Brood. In the world of A.I.: 
Artificial Intelligence, the mother leaves her emotionally distraught 
child-mecha David by the side of the road when he becomes too needy. And in 
classic short story "It's a GOOD Life," which became a famous Twilight Zone 
episode, a child with psychic powers controls everyone in his small town, 
threatening to send them "to the cornfield" if they show even a hint of 
displeasure at his bratty behavior. The message in these narratives is clear: 
The only thing worse than not controlling how you have children is not being 
able to control your children once they arrive.
It might be useful, as we contemplate the futures offered by science fiction and 
politics, to consider that the struggle over reproductive rights is really a 
struggle over parenting. It's not about when the child becomes "alive;" it's who 
will take care of the child when he's running around the holodeck. And it's not 
about the state forcing certain people to remain pregnant; it's about the state 
forcing certain people to spend two decades of their lives devoting an enormous 
amount of labor to child-rearing.
 In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley asked what kind of society would be produced 
by a government that grew and reared children in laboratories. Today's science 
fiction urges us to ask similar questions about governments that force women and 
men to rear children that they don't want, cannot afford, and who require work 
that the adults around them simply cannot perform. What kind of world are we 
creating when humans cannot prevent unwanted children from beng born? More to 
the point, we have to ask what those children will think of us when they realize 
how much more political effort has been put into regulating reproduction than 
into child-rearing, schools, and activities for young people.
Right now, we live in a world that ignores the importance, expense, and labor of 
child-rearing. The more we neglect these issues, the more likely it is that our 
children won't mature into the kinds of autonomous adults who can prevent the 
equally horrific futures of The Handmaid's Tale and "The Pre-Persons."

Top of Message | Previous Page | Permalink

Advanced Options


Options

Log In

Log In

Get Password

Get Password


Search Archives

Search Archives


Subscribe or Unsubscribe

Subscribe or Unsubscribe


Archives

November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
July 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
August 2015
July 2015
June 2015
May 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
July 2014
June 2014
May 2014
April 2014
March 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
September 2013
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
April 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002
July 2002
June 2002
May 2002
April 2002
March 2002
February 2002
January 2002
December 2001
November 2001
October 2001
September 2001
August 2001
July 2001
June 2001
May 2001
April 2001
March 2001
February 2001
January 2001
December 2000
November 2000
October 2000
September 2000
August 2000
July 2000
June 2000
May 2000
April 2000
March 2000
February 2000
January 2000
December 1999
November 1999
October 1999
September 1999
August 1999
July 1999
June 1999
May 1999
April 1999
March 1999
February 1999
January 1999
December 1998
November 1998
October 1998
September 1998
August 1998
July 1998
June 1998
May 1998
April 1998
March 1998
February 1998
January 1998
December 1997
November 1997
October 1997
September 1997
August 1997
July 1997
June 1997
May 1997
April 1997
March 1997
February 1997
January 1997
December 1996
November 1996
October 1996
September 1996
August 1996
July 1996
June 1996
May 1996
April 1996
March 1996
February 1996
January 1996
December 1995
November 1995
October 1995
September 1995
August 1995
July 1995
June 1995
May 1995
April 1995
March 1995
February 1995
June 1996
May 1996
April 1996
March 1996
February 1996
January 1996
December 1995
November 1995
October 1995
September 1995
August 1995
July 1995
June 1995
May 1995
April 1995
March 1995
February 1995

ATOM RSS1 RSS2



LISTSERV.LOC.GOV

CataList Email List Search Powered by the LISTSERV Email List Manager