While today’s anti-abortion movement has been empowered by the recent fall of Roe v. Wade, the original ‘right-to-life’ movement dates to the mid-nineteenth century. In the mid-1800s, physicians began to take over the practice of childbirth from midwives and the medical specialty of obstetrics developed. The movement to medicalize women’s reproductive health made use of growing concerns over women’s increasing autonomy and education to proclaim the ‘naturalness’ of reproduction, fetal development, and motherhood. Their concern was about protecting nature and protecting life, even at the expense of the lives of pregnant people. Ideas about protection and nature still underlie much anti-abortion rhetoric. It is therefore worth critically considering the origins of these ideas and the function they play in society. I aim to articulate how the underlying justification for controlling those with the capacity for pregnancy is differentially constructed, especially along racial lines. In particular, abortion access is framed as dangerous in multiple ways that protect oppressive structures. Terminating a pregnancy is seen as either confirming or denying one’s nature, depending on who is seeking the termination and why they are doing so. Both are considered threats to white patriarchal order.
The longstanding construction of women as a source of problems for patriarchal society stems in part from hugely popular texts like the Malleus Maleficarum (1494), which claimed that women were inherently receptive to the Devil (like the biblical Eve) and consciously evil by nature: “when a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” These claims were weaponized during medieval witch hunts to justify violence against women as a way to rid the world of evil. By essentializing women as carnal creatures easily influenced by evil, society constructed women (as a group) as credible targets for scapegoating. This made it easier to shift blame onto individual women when conflicts arose. In the process, ‘evil’ became attached to the concept and identity of ‘woman’ in ways that continue to underlie societal treatment of women today. As Nel Noddings notes, in holding that “more women than men would receive and entertain devils and demons,” it was “imperative to believe that women lacked a fundamental moral sense” (45). This attitude informed the 19th-century medicalization of childbirth, where many physicians saw women as emotionally and morally weak beings who were not capable of making sound decisions about their own reproductive health. It survives today in anti-abortion arguments that women seeking abortions are immoral and/or incapable of making responsible decisions about their own bodies. In Roman literature, witches were described as preventing birth and killing children. Quite literally, witches were constructed as the horror of abortion personified. The connection between women, witches, immorality, and abortion is a strong and long-lasting one.
This construction of women as threatening can be further nuanced by racialized dynamics of womanhood that are constructed in opposition to one another. For example, ‘good’ white women are constructed as faithful Christian wives, mothers, companions, and caretakers. This can be seen in the popular Victorian concept of “the Angel in the House,” an idealized view of a passive, devout, self-sacrificing, and pure woman that was closely tied to Christianity and restrictive norms of white femininity. It can be seen again in the construction of fictional characters like the 1950s housewife archetype (e.g., June Cleaver) whose primary role was to be a homemaker and mother. These attributes have been used to justify the oppressive treatment of white women (while also elevating their status above that of Black women). Any form of disobedience to the roles of wife and mother can be seen as contrary to white women’s nature and justifiably blamed. White women who are not compliant, who express their anger, who choose not to procreate or seek abortions because they do not want to be mothers, etc. are viewed as dangerous because they are not conforming to what a ‘good’ woman’s nature is meant to be. Kate Manne identifies several categories of women who are often viewed as dangerous or threatening within patriarchal structures, including women who assert themselves in masculine-coded domains and women who challenge traditional gender roles. As I have pointed out, the medicalization of reproductive health has historically been a domain controlled by men. Women seeking abortions not only assert themselves over that domain, but challenge (white) gender norms at the same time. Under this logic, women who deviate from their ‘good’ nature deserve to be controlled. Policies that restrict access to safe abortions are connected to the idea that abortion goes against (white) women’s nature as mothers. For example, laws that require providers to give women misinformation about abortion risks and alternatives reflect an underlying belief that abortion hurts women because women’s natural role is motherhood and abortion violates this role. Beyond legislation, studies show that public activism against abortion regularly makes the argument that motherhood is essential to womanhood (“women are mothers whether or not they want to be”); therefore, abortion must be damaging because it destroys women’s ‘natural’ position.
However, this ‘good’ nature is only applied to white women. Racialized women (especially Black women) have been essentialized as dangerous even in terms of qualities—such as being a natural mother—that are considered positive for white women. For example, during slavery in the United States, Black women were constructed as especially suitable for breeding. Patricia Hill Collins argues that this construction of Black women as “breeder” is linked to another harmful construction of Black womanhood as lascivious. This image also originated under slavery, when Black women were portrayed as “sexually aggressive wet nurses,” a stereotype that functioned as a “powerful rationale for the widespread sexual assaults by white men typically reported by Black [enslaved] women” (77). The co-construction of Black women as sexually aggressive and especially fertile set them up to be both producers of valuable units of property and threatening to the familial units of whites. It also functioned to justify the measures used to increase enslaved Black women’s fertility. For example, historian Deborah Gray White has documented techniques by slave masters to encourage adolescent Black girls to have children, including punitive measures used against those who were less fertile. There is also a well-documented history of white men raping Black women as a means of forcing fertility on them and increasing the enslaved population. This history has disturbing and powerful connections to today’s anti-abortion measures that force continued gestation and birth, especially in states with no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape.
These constructions continue to inform the treatment of Black women as a group. Collins traces the ‘breeder woman’ image to its updated version in the post-World War II welfare state. What was previously commodified as producing units of capital for slaveowners became understood as threatening when Black women’s fertility had the potential to change the political economy by producing more Black people. Collins also draws attention to the contemporary image of the Black woman as the ‘welfare mother.’ Portrayed as “content to sit around and collect welfare, shunning work and passing on her bad values to her offspring,” this racist representation “provides ideological justifications for interlocking systems of race, gender, and class oppression. African Americans can be racially stereotyped as being lazy by blaming Black welfare mothers for failing to pass on the work ethic” (270). Black women are constructed as dangerously fertile and thus naturally threatening to a functioning social order in various ways. They are constructed as a threat to the capitalist work ethic as they are seen to represent the proliferation of laziness, to the economic state of the country as they are seen as representative of unsustainable government spending, to the patriarchal family as Black women are socially presumed to be single mothers, and even to their own offspring by supposedly instilling harmful (i.e., lazy) values in their children. This highlights the multi-layered nature of this racist construction: Black women are constructed as threatening in various intricately connected ways, which makes challenging this construction more difficult. Moreover, dynamic overlapping constructions of the same larger group—‘women’—function to effectively ensure that women are always perceived as threatening.
According to these constructions, abortion involves denying the (loving, nurturing, mothering) nature of white women, and confirming the (dangerously fertile) nature of Black women. For Black women, then, abortion is considered blameworthy because it lends itself to the essentializing racial stereotypes of Black women as breeders. While it may seem that, on this logic, abortion among Black women would be unthreatening because it would mitigate the threat of welfare mothers described above, this is not the case. Abortion represents the epitome of reproductive control: the ability to make decisions about one’s own body and fertility. Not only does seeking an abortion confirm racist stereotypes about Black women as dangerously fertile, justifying the wider structural oppression of Black women, but it is threatening insofar as it involves Black women managing their own reproductive autonomy. For white women, being a breeder is considered a positive and natural attribute, and it is going against this ‘nature’ by having an abortion that is dangerous. The construction of marginalized groups can evolve and differ according to other intersecting constructions, but the threat remains: those with the capacity to control reproduction are dangerous to patriarchal order, whether that danger comes from adherence to or deviation from their ‘nature.’ For white women, this means protecting their ‘nature’ as obedient mothers. For Black women, this means maintaining control over their reproductive choices out of fear that, by their ‘nature,’ they will breed irresponsibly.
Turning to modern-day anti-abortion rhetoric, differential constructions and their toxic consequences continue to plague our political landscape. According to Dorothy Roberts, Director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society, “underlying anti-abortion rhetoric and action is the idea that white women should be having more babies to build up the white nation.” With roots in 20th-century French nationalism, the ‘Great Replacement’ theory is the idea that welcoming non-white immigrants or infants is part of a plot to undermine or ‘replace’ the political power and culture of white people living in the West. This racist theory has many iterations, including rhetoric of migrant ‘invasions,’ voter replacement, and antisemitic conspiracies that Jewish elites are responsible for the replacement plot. Underlying this theory is the idea that white women need to do their ‘duty’ and replenish white civilization. There is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) appeal to their nature as mothers, and the danger that awaits them if they don’t comply—namely, a ‘white genocide.’
The pressure to have children feeds into the racist ‘Great Replacement’ theory, which is then used to justify various forms of institutional and systemic violence, such as anti-immigrant policies that seek to limit or expel the number of non-white immigrants. The theory also inspires acts of white supremacist violence including the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. While white women are urged to replenish the white race by appeals to their nature, Black women are expected to carry pregnancies to term because it confirms their ‘nature’ as fertile breeders and because the alternative—a society in which Black women are free to manage their own reproductive autonomy—could be fatal to the white nationalist project. In both cases, those with the capacity to become pregnant are blameworthy if they seek an abortion.
Ultimately, the modern anti-abortion movement is informed by a longstanding history of misogyny, racism, and scapegoating. Anti-abortion activists and politicians employ rhetoric and dog whistles to evoke various constructions of women as threatening to the natural order of conception, pregnancy, and birth. This is nothing new. So-called witches, racist depictions of ‘welfare queens,’ and countless other covert and overt constructions of women as threatening are utilized to justify reproductive coercion. It is in our best interest as feminists to recognize these origins and question their overlapping or differentially applied constructions. Solidarity between people with the capacity to become pregnant requires fighting many wars at once.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.
Celia Edell
Celia Edell is a Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from McGill University. Edell's research lies at the intersection of feminist theory, social epistemology, and ethics with a special focus on guilt, blame, and group oppression.
