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."
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