Dune: Part II opens with the image of a fetus. It is a CGI rendition of Lady Jessica Atreides’s unborn daughter in the womb, at an undisclosed gestational age but not yet fully formed. In the book, we don’t see Alia until later, as a young child. Yet we see the fetus repeatedly throughout the movie, which is more and more developed in each visual. In the 1970s, feminist scholar Rosalind Petchesky critiqued the use of fetal visuals, such as the Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for feeding into anti-abortion narratives.[1] In Petchesky’s words, fetal images have “symbolic import” in societies that are hostile towards abortion and reproductive autonomy.[2] The use of fetal imagery in Dune: Part II is particularly problematic following the 2022 decision of the US Supreme Court to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, paving the way for individual states to introduce harsh restrictions on access to abortion.[3] The use of pregnancy-related narratives to subtly reinforce anti-abortion ideas and gendered norms around motherhood is a problem in a lot of mainstream science fiction.

On Fetal Sentience

In the movie, Lady Jessica and her son Paul become increasingly involved with the Fremen, the people inhabiting the desert planet of Arrakis, who believe Paul to be their Messiah. Jessica schemes to cement this belief and becomes the Fremen’s new Reverend Mother. This is where the fetal imagery is ramped up. To be accepted as the Reverend Mother, Jessica must drink a poisonous liquid produced by young sandworms (the ‘water of life’). Jessica survives, and so does the fetus—but it is changed. The fetus is ‘awakened’ by the water, becoming a sentient being with self-awareness. Jessica reveals that she can converse with her unborn daughter, who asks her questions about the outside world. At the end of the movie, the fetal image returns and we, as the audience, actually hear her voice. The fetus is now a person, a character in herself. We even see a flash-forward to Jessica’s daughter, Alia, as an adult, played by Anya Taylor-Joy.

Many US states have anti-abortion and fetal protection laws which are premised upon ideas of fetal personhood, or fetal sentience. Legal personhood is required for a being to have rights and responsibilities under the law—and this categorisation is not strictly reserved for human beings alone. Corporations and rivers have been granted legal personhood, and there are currently debates over whether animals, artificial intelligence, and other new beings such as cerebral organoids (in-vitro brain tissue) could be recognised as persons.[4] In February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos were legally children.[5] This is an outlier, as fetuses have not been granted legal personhood in other jurisdictions, but this does not prevent politicians and lawmakers from viewing the fetus as a moral person. As Heather Parry summarises, “[p]ersonhood has specific meanings in different contexts—in law, personhood bestows both rights and responsibilities … but in a philosophical context, it is generally a moral consideration; personhood means that we see something as a person.”[6]

Sentience—the being’s ability to feel or suffer—is an important concept for moral personhood. The animal rights scholar Peter Singer advocates for animal liberation on the basis of sentience; a being that is self-aware, in his view, is morally more important than one that is not.[7] There is no scientific evidence that fetuses (even at a later gestational stage) are sentient. Yet, the law in some US states treats the fetus as a moral person and forces the pregnant person to recognise it as one. For example, numerous US states have “heartbeat” laws that recognise the life (or personhood) of a fetus once its heartbeat is detectable.[8] Some states also require the pregnant person to undergo an ultrasound, forcing them to view the image along with the fetal heartbeat, before they can have an abortion. In Kentucky, the pregnant person can close their eyes, but the doctor is then legally required to play the audio of the heartbeat.[9] They must see or hear the fetus, just as we see and hear Lady Jessica’s daughter. The fact that the fetus has a heartbeat, and is “like us” (i.e. human), is used to assume sentience, particularly as the fetus develops throughout the pregnancy to more clearly resemble a human infant.

Dune: Part II is far from the only work of science fiction to feature fetal sentience. In the 1980’s cult classic V: The Miniseries and V: The Final Battle, Robin Maxwell becomes pregnant with alien twins and requests an abortion, only it is not possible as the fetuses would actively resist and kill her. We could interpret this as a simple narrative device. However, over 20 years ago, Susan A. George commented that “science fiction films will continue to use their own technology to respond to and comment on the anxieties and concerns that circulate in the United States regarding procreation, creation, and advances in reproductive technology”.[10] So, in the current political context, it is hard to read Dune: Part II’s presentation of a sentient fetus as anything other than reinforcing anti-abortion ideals.

Abortion in Science Fiction

In a previous issue of Strange Horizons, Suzanne F. Boswell explored the lack of representations of abortions in science fiction.[11] While there are metaphors for unwanted pregnancy, abortion, and forced reproduction in novels and on screen, Boswell highlights that there are almost no actual abortions depicted in these works—and especially, no positive depictions.[12] Dystopian abortion bans feature most famously in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and more recently in Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline, and Laura Lam’s Goldilocks. In Lam’s novel, there are almost abortions: firstly, when protagonist Naomi is faced with an unwanted pregnancy and seeks an illegal abortion, and secondly when Naomi is on a spaceship, far away from the grasp of US law, and discovers that she is unexpectedly pregnant. Yet, there is no actual abortion. In the first case, Naomi has a miscarriage prior to the abortion, and in the second case, she chooses to continue her pregnancy and give birth. This is ultimately the character’s choice, which cannot be critiqued as non-feminist, but it is interesting that actual abortions tend not to feature in feminist works of science fiction.

Abortions (or abortion-adjacent events) do sometimes feature in mainstream science fiction, but they are usually horrific or non-consensual. Alien: Prometheus shows the closest thing to an on-screen abortion in science fiction cinema, when protagonist Elizabeth Shaw performs abdominal surgery on herself to remove an alien embryo. Boswell notes that while this is a positive portrayal, it is only positive because the embryo is literally an alien threat—and it is complete with problematic body horror.[13] This portrayal is one that suggests that abortion is dangerous, bloody, and traumatising, which again feeds into anti-abortion narratives.[14] Lady Jessica’s drinking of poison, which corrupts her fetus (referred to in the subsequent Dune books as an ‘Abomination’), could also be viewed as a horrific failed abortion. Pregnant people in the US have been prosecuted for harming their fetuses in similar ways, including one case where a woman ingested rat poison in a suicide attempt.[15]

Non-consensual abortions feature in Battlestar Galactica and Farscape. In Battlestar Galactica, despite President Laura Roslin’s decision to criminalise abortion, Roslin orders that a woman’s pregnancy is terminated against her will due to fetal abnormalities. The order is only stopped when it is discovered that the fetus’s blood can cure Roslin’s cancer. In Farscape, Aeryn Sun is kidnapped and tortured for information, and her pregnancy is forcibly ended when her captors believe they can obtain the knowledge they seek from the fetus’s DNA. Back to our world: forced abortions and forced sterilisations have and continue to be practiced within eugenicist population policies. They have generally targeted certain demographics: poor people, people of colour (and especially colonised and enslaved Black and Indigenous people), and disabled people. This systemic aspect of non-consensual reproductive practices is missed in these individualised portrayals, which instead reinforce the idea of abortion as something inherently harmful. Within this idea is the “implication that abortion is something that the pregnant person would (or should) never choose for themselves.”[16]

There are portrayals of abortions—positive, interesting, complex portrayals of abortions—in other genres.[17] The lack of similar portrayals in science fiction is surprising, given that the genre is about “human futures, technological advancements, and societal evolution” and should be well placed to explore these issues.[18] Most science fiction representations of technological advancements around pregnancy relate to ectogenesis—the external gestation of a fetus in an artificial womb. In Star Trek: Enterprise, the technology to transfer a fetus from one body to another exists (though it is only used in an episode where a human man becomes involuntarily pregnant with an alien embryo), but in Star Trek: The Next Generation, we see 20th-century ultrasound technology still being used. In Prometheus, the machine that Shaw uses to remove the alien embryo was programmed to perform surgery only on male bodies. There are two recent short stories that do explore reproductive technology, but in context of a dystopian future where abortion is banned in the US. Samantha Mills’s Rabbit Test portrays a future where a tracking app can automatically administer a pregnancy test upon a late period.[19] MKRNYILGLD’s The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World looks at genome editing as a futuristic method of terminating a pregnancy —but one which permanently prevents the body from becoming pregnant again.[20] The utopian advancement of abortion- and pregnancy-related technology to support reproductive autonomy is simply not seen in science fiction.

In fact, much mainstream science fiction can be seen as socially conservative in its approach to reproductive autonomy, with “warnings” as to the dangers of advancements in reproductive technology just as George argues.[21] Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was cited frequently in debates around the development of in-vitro fertilisation, saw artificial wombs as the gateway to genetic engineering, the indoctrination of children, and the destruction of the concept of the family.[22] Sara Hosey highlights the increasing prominence of narratives where women’s reproductive autonomy was undermined on-screen in the 1980s, at a time when feminist movements had made gains on reproductive rights issues such as the legalisation of abortion.[23] Palmer Rampell has explored the anti-abortion themes that emerged in Phillip K. Dick’s work following the US Supreme Court’s recognition of a constitutional right to abortion in 1973.[24] Science fiction responds to conservative anxieties around reproduction, and falling within this theme is the broader reinforcement of gendered norms around pregnancy and motherhood, beyond explicitly anti-abortion tropes.

On Maternal Destiny

As the fetus Lady Jessica is carrying can now speak to her, they develop an intimate relationship. This is quite different from Petchesky’s critique of fetal imagery for portraying the pregnant woman as a mere vessel, or an “empty space” where the focus is entirely on the fetus.[25] Jessica is an important character in the movie for her influence on the religion and politics of the Fremen, in support of her existing son. She is a member of the matriarchal Bene Gesserit, a group of women who gain supernatural powers including the ability to control other people using “the Voice”. While Jessica is the Duke Leto Atreides’s concubine, she is also a woman of significant skill and influence. It is common for science fiction and fantasy film to attach maternal instinct or maternal desire to strong, powerful women. Strong, powerful, successful women can be mothers, and having maternal feelings by no means undermines this. However, the narratives of powerful women within science fiction and fantasy tends to revolve around their status (or lack of) as mothers—consider Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, and her stillbirth and infertility caused by blood magic, a pain which stays with her throughout her reign of the Seven Kingdoms. In The Witcher, Yennefer sacrifices her reproductive organs for her magical transformation, a choice which she desperately regrets and seeks to undo. And in Dune, Lady Jessica uses her power to advance her children in the political order.

These maternal narratives play firmly into the Adrienne Rich’s definition of motherhood as an institution, rather than mothering as an empowering relationship.[26] The institution of motherhood is one which relies on patriarchal assumptions of maternal instinct; that women will and do desire pregnancy and childrearing, under a “biology-is-destiny” approach. Good mothers sacrifice their own wants and needs for that of their children, whether fetus, infant, or adult. We see this repeatedly in science fiction which adopts the involuntary alien pregnancy trope. In one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deanna Troi becomes pregnant during her sleep by an alien entity. The commanding officers are concerned that the entity could pose a threat, and one character suggests that Deanna has an abortion. Despite the intrusion into her body, Deanna insists that she wishes to continue the pregnancy to term. She is a “good” mother figure, sacrificing her bodily autonomy for the wellbeing of the fetus, but she also develops maternal feelings for the entity. Likewise in Extant, Molly Woods becomes pregnant by an alien entity during a solo space mission—but when the fetus is removed and taken away from her without her consent, she is desperate to get the alien child back.

Even the most hardened women in science fiction can be redeemed by motherhood. In Stargate SG-1, Vala Mal Doran, a thief and con artist, becomes pregnant with a child of the Ori, dangerous alien beings who wish to be worshipped like gods. While aware of the threat that the child may pose, Vala continues the pregnancy to term. She reflects on this in a later episode, stating that “I could have done something about it but I didn’t (…) Maternal instinct kicked in, I suppose.”[27] Maternal instinct is also explicitly referred to in Star Trek: Voyager. Seven of Nine, a former Borg drone who was assimilated and removed of her human individuality, rediscovers her humanity on the Voyager. While she struggles forming relationships with the other members of the crew, she develops close bonds with several children and upon caring for a Borg clone infant, is told that she had awakened her maternal instincts. These women are softened by their proximity to motherhood, even without the experience of childrearing.

The idea that maternal instinct is something innate to women has been dispelled as a myth. It has also been critiqued by feminists for reinforcing heteropatriarchal norms around women’s domestic roles—the norms that say that women (assumed to be in heterosexual monogamous partnerships) should be primarily responsible for their children’s upbringing.[28] Pregnancy is not always met with joy and a desire to continue it to term, but the assumption that it is marks people who either have abortions, or experience regret or postpartum depression after giving birth, as deviant in some way. Yet the idea of maternal instinct is one which has not gone away. In an essay for The New York Times, Chelsea Conaboy discusses the influence of this faux science in modern pro-nuclear family and anti-abortion discourse.[29] This comes back to Rich’s institution of motherhood, seeking to entrench “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution—which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.”[30]

Joanna Russ famously commented that much science fiction looks like an “intergalactic suburbia” in its representation of the American middle-class.[31] In the Star Trek franchise, at least in everything prior to Discovery, the non-biological and non-romantic familial bonds formed between members of the crew are repeatedly viewed as secondary to romantic and reproductive ties. Queer theorists have looked at the concept of kinship beyond these ties, with friendship and “chosen families” as a liberatory collective structure.[32] These kinds of collectives can be seen in some utopian feminist science fiction, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Yet, on screen, the heterosexual monogamous nuclear family is seemingly found in the furthest reaches of the universe, entrenching the idea that this version of family formation and its associated gender relations is inherently natural. This is somewhat less prevalent in Dune: Part II, as the Great House Atreides to which Lady Jessica and Paul belong appears to be more about political influence than nuclear family relations—especially as Jessica is a concubine, rather than bound by marriage into the family. However, for Paul, his greatest attachment to the Fremen—who do live in a collective structure—is a romantic one, to Chani. The movie omits the fact that Chani bore Paul’s first son, who died during an attack on the Fremen community. In the movie, Paul soon sets his relationship to Chani aside in order to step into the role of patriarch of House Atreides, a move supported by his mother. Jessica’s role is to support her children’s rise to power. In the book, Chani is relegated to Jessica’s former status—as Paul’s concubine, leaving him free to choose a political marriage.

Towards A Feminist Politics of Reproduction in Science Fiction

Boswell ends her essay by stating that if we want alternatives to dystopian reproductive futures, we have to write them.[33] There is space in the genre for better representations of gender, reproduction, and motherhood. These representations matter, not just for culture but for politics too. Melzer views feminist science fiction as “part of a feminist criticism of existing power relations” and as capable of producing feminist theory.[34] Feminist science fiction can do much more in exploring the future of reproduction and motherhood, especially around abortion.

However, when it comes to non-feminist work, writers have been critiquing science fiction for its problematic gender portrayals for decades. It is not even as easy as translating feminist writing on screen—the television show version of The Handmaid’s Tale has been critiqued for the way it “idealizes, rather than critiques, the institutions of marriage, family, and motherhood”.[35] We need a much bigger shift towards a feminist politics of reproduction in our science fiction. That probably requires more diversity in television and film production, but that is a discussion for another day.

[1]Petchesky, Rosalind. “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 263–292.

[2]Petchesky, “Fetal Images,” 268-270.

[3]Liptak, Adam. “In 6-to-3 Ruling, Supreme Court Ends Nearly 50 Years of Abortion Rights,” The New York Times, 24 June 2022.

[4]Fobar, Rachel. “A person or a thing? Inside the fight for animal personhood,”National Geographic, 4 August 2021; Jowitt, Joshua. “Assessing contemporary legislative proposals for their compatibility with a natural law case for AI legal personhood,” AI & Society 36 (2021): 499-50; Jowitt, Joshua. “On the legal status of human cerebral organoids: lessons from animal law,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 32, no. 4 (2023): 572-581.

[5]Hoffman, Jan. “Alabama Says Embryos in a Lab are Children. What are the Implications?”The New York Times, 21 February 2024.

[6]Parry, Heather. Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism (404 Ink, 2024), 41.

[7]Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation (London: Thorsons, 1991).

[8]Carr Smith, Julie. “Abortion landscape under state ‘heartbeat’ laws,”Associated Press, 29 June 2022.

[9]Dyer, Owen. “US Supreme Court allows Kentucky’s abortion ultrasound law to stand,” BMJ 367 (2019).

[10]George, Susan A. “Not Exactly “of Woman Born”: Procreation and Creation in Recent Science Fiction Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28, no. 4 (2001): 183.

[11]Boswell, Susan F. “The Curious Case of Abortion in Science Fiction,”Strange Horizons, 31 July 2023.

[12]Boswell, “Abortion in Science Fiction.”

[13]Boswell, “Abortion in Science Fiction.”

[14]Tongue, Zoe L. “Reproductive Justice: The Final (Feminist) Frontier,” Law, Technology, and Humans4, no. 2 (2022): 100.

[15]Goodwin, Michele. Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 32.

[16]Tongue, “Reproductive Justice,” 100.

[17]See Abortion & Other Stories, “Abortion Book Club” for a list of books featuring abortions.

[18]Tongue, “Reproductive Justice,” 95.

[19]Mills, Samantha. “Rabbit Test,”Uncanny Magazine 49 (2022).

[20]MKRNYILGLD. “The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World,”Lightspeed 148 (2022).

[21]George, “Not Exactly,” 183.

[22]Tongue, “Reproductive Justice,” 96.

[23]Hosey, Sara. ““Keeping Women in the Dark”: Science Fiction, Fictional Science, and the Legacy of Maternal Misrepresentations,” Science Fiction Studies 48, no. 3 (2021): 464.

[24]Rampell, Palmer. “The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade,” English Literary History 85, no. 2 (2018): 221-252.

[25]Petchesky, “Fetal Images,” 270.

[26]Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).

[27]Stargate SG-1, “Counterstrike,” Syfy, 25 August 2006.

[28]Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Motherhood: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

[29]Conaboy, Chelsea. “Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created,”The New York Times, 26 August 2022.

[30]Rich, “Of Woman Born,” 13.

[31]Russ, Joanna. “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” reprinted in Science Fiction Criticism, edited byRob Latham (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 203.

[32]Bradway, Tyler and Freedman, Elizabeth. Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).

[33]Boswell, “Abortion in Science Fiction.”

[34]Melzer, Patricia. Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2006), 4-10.

[35]Boyle, Amy. ““Domestic Feminism”: The Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale,” Television and New Media 25, no. 2 (2024): 136.