Embodiment, Abstraction, and Hidden Reproductive History

Figure 1.

Promotional still, The 8th documentary film, 2021, directed and produced by Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy, Maeve O'Boyle, and Alan Maher.

Crowds dominate the publicity stills used to promote the 2020 documentary The 8th about the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution (1983), which had essentially outlawed all abortions in Ireland.¹ One vivid image from the celebration after the vote features a woman—Lysette Golden—elevated above the rest of those gathered; she sits on a man's shoulders, smiling and holding a banner from the "Together for Yes" movement. Golden wears a snug white crop top that has two rainbow-hued alien heads at roughly the level of her breasts, the iconic inverted-egg shape of the head repeated in the blank eyes. Although there is no evidence to suspect that this activist chose her shirt to link aliens to reproductive politics, the imagery is nevertheless fortuitous, educing a familiar trope of baby-as-alien-invader. In her essay collection Making Babies Anne Enright links pregnancy and abuse by priests with alien abduction to discuss reproductive rights in Ireland. Her elliptical chapter "Breeding" registers how clerical sexual abuse has often been dismissed as imagined—a fanciful idea on par with impregnation by a spaceman—as though aliens and priests were both races of "higher beings" who "gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will" (15). Remarking that pregnancy is often an unwanted surprise ("We do not choose, sometimes, to be occupied by this other creature"), Enright juxtaposes this sense of invasive violation with the recovered memories of alien abductees: "What they remember, eventually, is a hidden reproductive history," a concept that she in turn links to the suppressed or ignored narratives of sexual abuse at the hands of priests (21, 18). She also gestures toward the lack of access to contraceptives, an aspect of how the institution of the Catholic church forces Irish women to have babies. We might ask why Enright bothers with the aliens at all, given that the Irish sexual histories that she discusses already conjoin neatly, with priests and babies both imposing themselves, secretive and unasked. The answer would seem to lie in the ways that the figure of the alien activates the uncanny, something at once like us and unlike us, part of us and utterly different.

Enright's analogy juxtaposes popular conceptions of aliens with photographs of a gestating fetus, with both rendered floating in space with nonreflective eyes:

It drifts free, like an astronaut on his umbilical cable; glowing; weightless; with pads for fingers, and plum-like, radioactive eyes. The foetus sees nothing, knows everything. … It is a different life form. The foetus has no capacity for wonder. There is something blank and mean-spirited about it, perhaps. It lurks. It is all potential.

(21)

This description corresponds to Julie Roberts's observation that technologies for creating images of a fetus in utero frequently generate depictions that exclude the maternal body.² Both Roberts and Enright recognize the power of the image of the fetus as isolated, different, and indifferent. In Enright's description we can see echoes of Donna Haraway's "god trick" as well as Yeats's rough beast, "its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" (line 15).³ More than mere animal, however, this creature is otherworldly, outside of human systems of knowing and of marking time. The collapse of time via Enright's reference to "potential" in the above passage is central to long-standing efforts to control female reproductive rights by patriarchal and religious authorities. These efforts transform a woman from a person with agency into a vehicle for a larger will, an imperative from God, nature, or even the state to bring to fulfillment a new life. A pregnant woman becomes important primarily for her body's futurity.⁴

Judy Rohrer references this sort of potentiality in a U.S. context when she traces a history of concerns about "reproductive futurity—the way the iconic fetus or...