The Fetal Fetish, Part 5: Criminalizing the Uterine Environment to Disavow “Human” Violence and Climate Destruction

Cloaking sexual and genocidal violence as “protecting women” is an age-old strategy of the White settler heteropatriarchy. This paper is expanded from a presentation at the 2025 APsA conference, and builds further on work I have done that situates fetal personhood and the increasingly draconian restrictions on abortion, as behaviors stemming from using the fetus, embryo, and even fertilized egg as fetish objects. This fetish serves a complicated process of disavowal, where annihilation anxiety from escalating environmental destruction and “human” violence results in a rabid legislation of the uterus, the only environment the Unite States is willing to “protect.” Building on Freud’s ideas of a fetish and Zupančič’s exploration of disavowal, this paper analyzes the ongoing cavalcade of abortion restrictions being rolled out since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The fetus can function in the public imaginary to play on conscious and unconscious yearnings for safety in the face of mounting uncertainties, and by embodying displaced vulnerability and risk, it provides perpetual opportunities for rescuing, manufacturing agency in the face of helplessness while providing outlets for the rage of narcissistic wounds stemming in part from unmet expectations of exceptionalism (human, gender, national, White, etc.). These defenses emerge within and are played out through shifting configurations of temporality with devastating impacts on women and people who have uteruses.