Fetal Fetish

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, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2023). As I’ve noted, it seems our relationship to the fetus enacts Henri Bergson’s (1913/2001) 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 (fet