By Michele Goodwin
Chancellor's Professor and Director, Center for Biotechnology & Global Health Policy, University of California, Irvine School of Law and author of Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood
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With a president who boasts that “unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House” and with newly appointed justices seem deferential to the executive branch, many fear a win for reproductive oppression.
Whether Roe is undone or hollowed out into a bare remnant of its intent, states will have a green light to turn women into instruments for re-population. In many states, they already are.
Michele Goodwin’s monumental book Policing The Womb (available on Amazon) exposes the dystopian nightmare of forced sterilizations, arrests and institutional confinement unleashed by states’ hostile takeover of pregnancy and childbirth. Policing The Womb is a terrifyingly comprehensive examination of governmental powers deployed to enslave, abuse and torture women under the pretext of protecting fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses.
This excerpt from the book reveals the powerlessness of pregnant women in the United States:
This is not a work of fiction, although I wish it were. Some of the cases described here could recall the imagery evoked by Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, who tells a horror story about a young rogue scientist who creates an unsightly monster through clandestine, aberrant experimentation. Although Frankenstein is the name of the monster’s creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, readers would be forgiven for debating who the real monster happens to be. In Policing the Womb, the story of Marlise Muñoz comes to mind – braindead, decomposing in a Texas hospital, forced by state legislation to gestate a barely developing fetus while her body decays and the anomalies in the fetus mount. Eventually, it is reported that the fetus is hydrocephalic, which means severe brain damage in this case and water or fluid developing on its brain. Medical reports also show that the fetus is not developing its lower extremities. The state knows brain death is irreversible.
The hospital forces Marlise’s dead body to shake, placing it on a bed that constantly, violently moves, which makes the dead woman’s eyes flap open and shut. Likely frightening to some hospital staff, they decide to tape Marlise’s eyes shut. Even if Marlise could see anything, which is unlikely, because she is dead, now no one needs to look into her eyes to search for any signs of life. If the state believes, despite well-accepted medical science, that she is alive, it has now taken away her sight and forced her into a state of blindness, while her body is poked and prodded. Marlise’s shaking corpse stays hydrated through tubes that bring fluids into the body. Somehow, the hospital finds a way to pipe away the waste. Everyone – including even the state – agrees that really she is an incubator....until the state is satisfied with Marlise’s gestation and cuts open her body to remove the fetus. It turns out that marriage and the rights of next of kin mean very little when the state takes control of a pregnant woman’s body in order to protect the fetus. The state refers to this as fetal protection. In this case, the state is protecting the fetus from Marlise’s husband and her parents, who say let her rest in peace.
The hospital serves as a surrogate or agent of the state. This is not a role its staff have asked for, but some may fear the consequences if they do not follow the state’s legislation. The medical staff know that she is dead, but they must follow the Texas law, which ignores death, do-not-resuscitate orders, medical directives, and living wills only if the patient is pregnant.
This terrifyingly calloused disregard of a woman's bodily autonomy, humanity and personal dignity likely will be legalized in nearly two dozen states if Roe is gutted and conservative Republican state legislators remain in control.