In this thesis I perform an analysis of the reframing of abortion as exemplified in a selection of contemporary US novels and short stories. Focusing on the genre of near-future reproductive rights dystopias, I consider how fictional portrayals of abortion provide a space to discuss abortion outside the limiting narratives of pro-life and pro-choice which dominate abortion discourse. I contextualise my readings of fictional texts with an analysis of US abortion laws in combination with the activist framework of reproductive justice, considering how abortion’s shifting legal and cultural status informs fictional representations of societies which limit reproductive rights and access.
American abortion legislation has long been bound to the legal and conceptual construction of the foetus as a person. Drawing on feminist new materialism and Irina Aristarkhova’s concept of the matrixial/maternal, I examine Leni Zumas’s novel Red Clocks (2018); Zumas makes use of a networked understanding of pregnancy and abortion in an effort to establish alternative frameworks for nuanced abortion discussions, without shying away from a foetus’s materiality.
The swiftly developing arena of Assistive Reproductive Technology (ART) also shapes the near-future depictions of abortion. I analyse the representation of commercial surrogacy in Joanne Ramos’s novel The Farm (2019), alongside uterine transplant technology in Ayşe Devrim’s short story ‘No Comment’ (2017), and finally the use of artificial womb technologies in the short story ‘Hysteria’ by Meg Elison (2017). I introduce an understanding of gestation and pregnancy as a source of biocapital, exploring the commodification of the foetus which can result from the relocation and outsourcing of gestation. These authors use abortion storylines to explore the impacts of corporate, institutional or technological control of pregnant people and commissioning parents.
This thesis also considers the impact of surveillance and the legal framing of abortion through privacy, to explore the representation of abortion in tightly surveilled reproductive rights dystopias. Drawing on the long legal and social history of reproductive surveillance, I use Hillary Jordan’s novel When She Woke (2011) and Martina Devlin’s novel About Sisterland (2015) to explore abortion’s contested position as a simultaneously private and public act. Reading these novels alongside Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson, I consider how the legal construction of abortion as a private issue impacts abortion discourse, reinforcing shame as abortion becomes an act which opposes outdated social expectations that women must continue to reproduce the American nation. Abortion restrictions and the surveillance of reproductive bodies reinforce shame as a means of enforcing women’s behavioural conformity.
Telling abortion stories is vital to understanding the way abortion occurs in complex contexts, requiring a nuanced reproductive justice framework which rejects the divisive binary of life versus choice. My reading of abortion fiction, informed by a reproductive justice framework, enables a focus on the complexity of characters’ decisions and access. Abortion fictions can provide a space for a different kind of discussion which does not buy into the antagonism of debate, as it does not need to establish a pro-life or pro-choice outlook, and can include complexity, contradiction and changing opinions. The genre of near-future reproductive rights dystopias is particularly fruitful for this kind of understanding of abortion. Not restricted by a need to faithfully depict abortion according to the present day’s laws or technologies, these near-future dystopias can exaggerate, extrapolate or satirise the current landscape of abortion.
