According to the rhetoric used by Donald Trump during the presidential debates, girls can rip babies out of their wombs minutes before birth. This imagery runs counter to current laws, which in most states permit abortions merely before a fetus has reached 24 to 26 weeks. Some states outlaw abortion as few as 12 weeks after a womans most recent menstrual interval; North Dakotas cutoff is six weeks.
The chairmen language on the issue produced pro-life proponents to fear an overturn of Roe v. Wade, a law that younger women may take for awarded as a basic right. But stories like Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale, a speculative fiction volume from the 1980 s thats get accommodated this year for Hulu, work to remind us that few rights are truly inalienable, and a perfect cyclone of circumstances could undo the freedoms of millions.
While dystopian stories like Atwoods help readers contextualize the here and now, theres also a stable of science fiction writers using the genre to explore possible solutions to current problems. So, we asked writers to imagine how reproductive rights could be protected, and improved, in the future. Their answers, below, include birth control injections distributed to both men and women, and socializing kids to take ownership of their own bodies.
Kameron Hurley, Hugo Award winner and author of The Geek Feminist Revolution
Womens health is often used as a euphemism for issues related to contraception and abortion. Certainly, there are many other health issues faced by cis and trans girls alike, but its fertility that is often the most heavily legislative and taboo. How does engineering solve a problem that is, at its core, a social difficulty?
Sure, the creation of artificial wombs sounds nice, but it does not remove the reproductive function of those who do have wombs, and it doesnt erase the social stigma that many girls suffer. Im often asked why I write all-women space operas like The Stars are Legion, or imagine fantastic cultures with eight different genders and wild social taboos. I do this because many of our fundamental problems as human being wont be solved by creating a widget. There have been all sorts of useful widgets that failed because we could not make them socially palatable( Google Glass, anyone ?). But what we need to change first is the stories of ourselves, and what it possible.
As weve watched over the last few months, who controls the narrative over a narrative has a huge impact on who creates the future. The future of womens health does not require an artificial womb or a 100 percentage effective contraceptive( though both would be nice ). Instead, procuring a future where cis and trans female torsoes are afforded equal respect and research dollars requires a harnessing of the histories of who matters. Create the story of who matters, and who is human, and the investment in the right widgets will follow.
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Meg Elison, Philip K. Dick Award winner andauthor of The Book of Etta
The erosion of womens rights to bodily freedom begins early in life and must be approached at the root induce. We must uncouple the relationships between the body, sexuality, disgrace, and morality through compulsory education that rightly treats gender, sexuality, and sexuality as separate and independent themes. We must spurn all the idea of the body as unclean or nudity as inherently sexual, passion as uncontrollable and unilateral or coercion as normal in intimate settings.
This starts with awarding children their own bodily autonomy; making them the right to say no, to refuse kiss or cuddles, and never forcing them to show any kind of physical affection to anyone. This starts with lavatory training kids without disgrace and using remedy anatomical words for their bodies. This starts with refraining from color-coding babes and projecting their entire futures and personalities based on their genitals. This starts with prohibiting all circumcision, regardless of biological sex.
None of this is unique to women or girls because womens rights are human rights. We begin to lose them before were born, and the rest are given away or stolen later in life because weve been conditioned to believe they were never really ours in the beginning. Stop that conditioning. Save girls and save the world.
Elizabeth Bonesteel, author of the Central Corps series
Throughout history, womens health has been contentious for reasons altogether culture. Humanity seems to have a deep, persistent discomfort with sexuality, and female sexuality including with regard to. While this is easing slowly, and non-linearly I expect were looking at more centuries than I like to think before we all grow up.
As much as it seems reductive to say it, the issue revolves around womens role in the human reproductive cycle. In ordering to depoliticize basic health issues, it is also necessary get to a level where women have control over when( or if) they become pregnant, and how often. The simplest way to do this is through effective, easily-administered birth control. Despite the much-derided results of the trials of male substance birth control, theres no doubt were moving in a direction where there will be more options for everyone. As these methods are also available, use will widen, and eventually they will have an effect similar to a inoculation, establishing a herd exemption against unplanned maternity. Eventually, accidental maternity will be seen as a medical failure, rather than some kind of cautionary narrative and at that point, perhaps the question of bodily autonomy wont be considered so controversial.
Nalo Hopkinson, Hugo Award nominee and author of Falling in Love With Hominids
[ Hopkinson offered to provide an absurdist fictional scenario .]
Science advances swiftly to the point where transitioning from one gender to another is a complete change which happens at the chromosomal degree. 45* comes out as girl, becoming the U.S.s first lady chairwoman. Health laws abruptly become more favorable towards women.
* I wont call that human the president, so Im using the word thats becoming the accepted one for people who feeling as I do.
Amy S. Foster, author of The Rift trilogy
What could the future hold for reproductive rights? Theyve already tried( and failed) to bring a birth control injection for men to market. Too many side effect though they were nominal and possibly caused by other medicine interactions. I have to imagine that in the future we might determine an improvement on bioidentical hormones, in general, so that women of all ages could not only control when they get pregnant but menopause could be experienced with no symptoms at all. Perhaps physicians could even find a way to keep eggs viable for longer so that girls could have children at a much older age though in this scenario, aging itself might have to be dealt with!
I think for me, as a mother of teenage daughters, I would love to see a birth control injection that lasted for years and was mandatory throughout the world. It sounds completely totalitarian, I know, but I believe that no child, anywhere, should have to deal with the fear of parenthood, the emotional upheaval of abortion, or the trauma involved in adoption. I believe permitting daughters to grow up before becoming moms would genuinely change the culture, emotional and economic landscape of the entire planet for the better.
