The Irresistible Lure of the Fetus, or Why Abortion Has Everything to Do with the Colonizing Temporalities of Anti-Blackness, “Human” Exceptionalism, and the Climate Crisis

ABSTRACT As the climate crisis escalates, the political discourse of the United States has doubled down to focus not on the environment at large, but on that of the uterus. This paper argues that the fetal body is operating as a magical fetish object upon which to displace growing annihilation anxieties while attempting to colonize the future. As the fetus embodies projected climate vulnerability, policing the fantasized purity of the uterus becomes a displaced antidote to the horrors of environmental destruction. Integrating psychoanalysis with concepts from anti-Blackness and Indigenous theories, I contend that this fetal fetish functions as a colonizing temporal system of affect regulation used to buttress an anxious and violently defensive white, cisgender, able-bodied, heteromasculinity. Cloaked in the pretext of fetal protectionism, racially and economically stratified reproductive violence is a literal scorched Earth policy fortifying white, heteropatriarchal “human” exceptionalism.