By Mira Sundar
To cage a woman, the state first had to colonize her womb.
Image from The Womb by Rebecca Louis Law
Reproduction is often argued as the foremost cause for misogyny, as it is a physical marking of woman’s “otherness” to men. The literal biological classification of the female sex across dictionaries is often defined as one who gestates or can bear offspring. On the other hand, women’s ability to reproduce and the necessity of it often have been state-level incentives to protect women’s health, safety, and bodily autonomy.
Yet, we stand on the precipice of a destabilizing technological advancement. The emergence of artificial gestation, ectogenesis, presents a world where women’s reproductive labor is no longer necessary for the survival of the species.
Without the necessity for women’s reproduction, would women be labelled insignificant, or would they finally be seen equal to men?
In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Shulamith Firestone famously diagnosed biological reproduction as the ultimate reason for women’s oppression. Firestone argued that because women bear the grueling physical burden of pregnancy, they become Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the “Other”. Reproduction, women’s uncontrollable bodily function, can be used to trap them and as an area of control to benefit their family, the market, and the state. To Firestone, women would never be truly free with the “tyranny of biology.”
However, artificial gestation would likely not lead to women’s ultimate liberation.
Marxist feminists have long recognized that reproduction is a form of uncompensated social labor, but if women are exploited by this labor, they also hold the power to skillfully withhold it, and have done so, successfully influencing state-wide change in events such as the 1913 German “Birth Strike” and The Nigerian Women’s War in 1929.
Various existing legal protections for women existed keeping in mind women’s roles as reproductive and maternal. Women’s perceived weakness and need for protection often comes from the need to protect women’s reproduction for humanity’s advancement, thus women have been granted labor laws more easily, such as within the trial of Muller v. Oregon, and rights of maternity leave post WW1. If a state no longer requires the female body to continue itself, the incentives to protect that body disappear. Women and their rights risk being viewed as unnecessary.
Furthermore, reproductive rights have been repeatedly weaponized based on women’s race and class. While white, middle-class feminist movements fought for the right not to reproduce, Black and indigenous women have historically faced forced sterilizations. In a society with widely-used automated gestation, the state gains total governance over who can reproduce and which genetic lineages continue.
The definition of a woman would radically transform if they are no longer the only way for the reproductive process to occur, and although freeing them from being bound to the sexist roles that connote this definition, the removal of it cannot eradicate women’s oppression; it merely changes its shape.
Sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7217043
https://www.rebeccalouiselaw.com/womb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dialectic_of_Sex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproductive_labor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_War
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