An international movement of nationalist fetusism

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Abortion is increasingly an issue of virulent nationalism.  In Nicaragua, former leader of the Sandinista revolution, Daniel Ortega, has reinvented himself as a nationalist leader through the use of anti-abortion laws and rhetoric.  Abortion is now sold as a “foreign” threat to “real” Nicaraguans– despite the fact that real Nicaraguan women are losing their lives to protect the fetus.

Here in the US, an anti-abortion campaign sells abortion as part of a racist agenda to eliminate Black children.  In Atlanta, billboards featuring a chubby-cheeked Black child and the words “Endangered Species.”

In Poland, a recent anti-abortion campaign uses images of Adolf Hitler and bloody pieces of aborted fetuses with the slogan “Abortion for Poles: introduced by Hitler, March 9, 1943.”  According to the group behind this campaign, Fundacja Pro,

It was Hitler who first introduced abortion to Poland, and in several days it will be the anniversary of that event.”

These anti-abortion campaigns indicate that there is now an international movement to impose a nationalist fetus program on all of us.

How did the fetus became a nationalist figure?  What will the consequences of nationalist fetusism be?

It’s not that the fetus was ever innocent.  Prior to modernity, Christianity saw the fetus as bathed in sin.  Any fetus or child who died before Baptism and the erasure of original sin was condemned to Hell.  Medieval theologians, feeling kinda bad about all those babies burning in eternal damnation,  invented “Limbo” so that they could go to an “in-between” place where they wouldn’t suffer.  These theologians also decided to put the good Jews here too since it seemed wrong for Moses to suffer the agony of Hell.

A few hundred years after  the child and fetus were removed from Hell, a variety of forces in Western society also removed the child from the world of adults.  The Victorians made sure children were not working in factories with child-labor laws.  They removed children from the sexual economy with age-of-consent laws.   The Victorians also imagined children as “innocent angels” free of all sin (well, some children were angels – white, blond, big blue-eyed).

By the time the 2oth century rolled around, children were “sacred.”  Again, not all children deserve our protection.   Many children work in sweat shops producing our cheap clothes, die of starvation due, or in America’s endless wars.  Here in the US, 1 in 5 children live below the poverty line and 41% live in low-income families.

But none of this matters in the march toward nationlaist fetusism.  What matters is how fetuses can be deployed to incite fear of racial collapse.

In Poland, the reference to Hitler is an interesting one.  After all, it is mostly the Jews who died under Hitler.  Of course, Poles fought the Nazi invasion (after having made a pact with Hitler) and many Polish citizens died (according to some estimates, about 200,000).  But nearly all of the more than 3 Million Polish Jews died during WWII.  But nationalist fetusism, like nationalist socialism, is interested in racial purity, not historical accuracy.  And it’s interested in deploying the fetus to that end.

Which brings us to the beginning.  Abortion and the birth control movement began as part of an international ideology of eugenics.  Hitler’s “Final Solution” was an extreme version of it, but eugenics was extremely popular in the US and Europe.  Eugenicists believed that there was something “sick” about modernity, a sickness that produced weak and imbecilic offspring and that the best way to strengthen the nation was to control who was born.

In the US, anti-immigration laws, anti-miscegenation laws, and forced sterilization campaigns were enacted to “save the American race.”  And yes, the birth control movement was embedded in this sort of eugenicist rhetoric, as were beauty pageants and freak shows and beautiful baby contests.

But birth control became less central to the eugenicist project (even as genetic testing and abortions continue to be used to make sure “mutants” are never born).  Instead, birth control became part of a feminist ideology that reframed it as the liberation of women from reproductive enslavement.

Now the paradigm of reproductive freedom is being challenged, primarily by nationalism, but also by the Catholic Church and a variety of international Evangelical Christian movements.  Reproductive freedom is rewritten as racial suicide. And the movement of nationalist fetusism saves the unborn even while it eliminates women.