Dystopian fiction allows us to examine the worst-case scenarios for issues we face today. A common and understandable aspect of this genre is the loss of autonomy. While there is no end to the ways in which these stories strip away their characters’ humanity, there is one common loss among much of dystopian fiction — the loss of reproductive rights.
The most well-known example of this is The Handmaid’s Tale. Published in 1985 and written by Margaret Atwood, this novel was adapted into a TV series that can best be described as harrowing. In the story, religious extremists transform the United States into a dictatorship. Women are stripped of a vast majority of their rights. They are not allowed to read or write or own property, and the few remaining fertile women are forced to birth children for the ruling class.
The Handmaid’s Tale shares similarities with John Wyndham’s 1956 novella Consider Her Ways. Both borrow inspiration from the Bible. The Handmaid’s Tale repurposes the story of Rachel, who has Jacob impregnate her maid after they learn she is unable to conceive. Consider Her Ways draws its title from the Book of Proverbs: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.”
In the story, a doctor awakes in a strange future populated only by women. A mysterious plague wiped out all men, and the near extinction-level event threw the world into chaos. Society rebuilds and is now structured in a hierarchy similar to that of ants. An educated class governs, while the servitor and worker classes labor. The doctor realizes she belongs to a fourth class: mothers.
Bloated and bedridden, the mothers are forced to breed for their entire adult lives. They are not taught to read or write. Their value is only in the quality of child they can produce.
The doctor manages to return to the present-day life she knew before traveling to this horrific future. She dedicates herself to stopping the creation of the disease that will eventually wipe out men and set society on such a terrible path.
Consider Her Ways was adapted into an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1964, and stands out from most other episodes of the show due to its strong science fiction subject matter. The story’s plague that only affects men bears a strong resemblance to the comic series Y: The Last Man, which was also adapted into a TV series in 2021, but was canceled after one season.
One earlier and formative entry in the dystopian genre was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. First published in 1924, the novel has all the hallmarks that would come to define this style of satirical dystopian fiction: an advanced and omniscient police state strips citizens of all individuality. Their lives are governed by a cold logic. All sexual encounters are governed by the state, as are births.
Ayn Rand’s 1938 novella Anthem continues We’s themes of state-arranged breeding programs that pair people together for the sole purpose of reproduction. Within this story, citizens are required to participate in the annual Time of Mating to produce children. According to a 2000 article by Gregory R. Johnson and David Rasmussen in the The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Rand was a passionate defender of a person’s access to abortion, even though this doesn’t completely align with her larger philosophy.
They write that Rand was firm in her belief that forced birth and the raising of an unwanted child was “an ‘impossible responsibility,’ which condemns ‘ambitious and struggling’ young people ‘to give up their future’ for ‘a life of hopeless drudgery, of slavery to a child’s physical and financial needs.’”
We is argued to have also heavily inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was released eight years later, although Huxley denied such claims. In the novel, children are engineered in artificial wombs. Characters experience intense shame and societal shunning for reproducing naturally.
Similar themes are found in Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel The Wanting Seed. In the book, overpopulation has led to the promotion of sterilization and discrimination against couples capable of procreating. The state places legal restrictions on births, opens abortion centers, and places gay men in positions of extreme power.
According to the L.A. Review of Books, elements of Burgess’ satire stemmed from his homophobic and xenophobic belief that England was being overrun in more ways than one. As he stated in a 1981 interview on The Wanting Seed, “Also I was interested in what was already apparently happening in England. Homosexuals were rising to the top… There’s no doubt that there is a homosexual mafia, not only in England, but also in California.”
It’s clear that dystopian fiction can arise from an author’s worst fears, as well as their prejudices. Despite the vast separation among all the authors mentioned here related to political and social beliefs, sex, generational standing, and whether or not they are a huge piece of shit, a common thread running through all these stories is the loss of authority over one’s reproductive rights. In these books, female characters are treated by society as either a means to or threat of reproduction. For that reason, what they can and cannot control about their own bodies is severely affected.
And this unwanted regulation of women’s bodies isn’t just a minor aspect of these works. It’s a key component. Remove it, and there’s no story. Really the loss of reproductive autonomy is the culmination of these nightmare scenarios. Not just a side effect.
And there’s a reason that the stripping away of reproductive freedoms is so common in dystopian fiction. Because we can conceive of a world much like our own that has fallen apart. And we see the makings of it bit by bit every day.
