[Marxism] Rosemary's Baby and Abortion

["Calvin Broadbent" <calvinbroadbent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Most Christians seem to be strongly 'pro-life'. But what if the embryonic
fetus is the antiChrist? A terrifying prospect, and one which must surely
oblige many ardent Christians to adopt a more pragmatic moral code.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_200507/ai_n14849727

Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects

The strategy of antiabortionists to make fetal personhood a self-fulfilling
prophecy by making the fetus a public presence addresses a visually oriented
culture. Meanwhile, finding "positive" images and symbols of abortion hard
to imagine, feminists and other prochoice advocates have all too readily
ceded the visual terrain. (Rosalind Petchesky, "Fetal Images")

Rosemary's Baby, a 1968 horror film adapted by Roman Polanski from Ira
Levin's 1967 best selling novel, invites feminist speculation. It is a story
of violence, deceit, and misappropriation of a woman's body by people she
trusts that makes pregnancy a Gothic spectacle. This discussion reads
Rosemary's Baby in relation to the contestations over abortion that have
inflamed the public sphere in the United States for forty years.1 The film
explicitly situates itself in Manhattan in 1965-66, and it is a product of
and widely distributed participant in the anxieties and conflicts of that
specific moment.2 In the intervening years, the heat of debate has been a
powerful catalyst for reactions among medical, legal, religious, political,
commercial, feminist, and antifeminist agents in reproductive politics, and
the debates have changed shape in response. Nonetheless, what was at stake
in the 1960s and what presently continues to be at stake in the high profile
public debates on abortion is the status of women as legitimate political
and legal subjects. Thus, Rosemary's Baby continues to resonate as a
cautionary tale relevant to the historical present. As the discourse on
generation mutates, so do the meanings that can be read into and out of this
narrative.

Gothic Pregnancy

During the 1960s, a women's movement growing in momentum argued for repeal
of abortion laws on the grounds of a woman's right to self-determination,
while a less radical movement among some medical and legal professionals
called for reform of abortion codes (Baehr 1990, 3; Ginsburgl989, 35-42;
Petcheskyl984,128-29). Both groups objected to abortion laws at odds with
actual practice since women terminated pregnancies despite the law, and both
objected to the dangerous circumstances created by such laws, which made an
otherwise simple medical procedure extremely risky for women seeking
abortions illegally. The American Law Institute proposed a model penal code
(drafted in 1959 and published in 1962) that provided for legal, therapeutic
abortion in cases where pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, or where
continuing a pregnancy would jeopardize the physical or mental health of the
woman or would result in a physically or mentally disabled child. Feminist
activists, on the other hand, sought to seize control of the means of
reproduction from a medical profession they considered to be elitist and
patriarchal. They broke the law, organizing underground referral services to
connect women who needed abortions with physicians who would provide them in
safe, clean conditions, and they established women's health collectives to
deliver woman-centered (as opposed to physician-centered) medical care, with
some collectives eventually offering abortion services themselves (Baehr
1990, 25).

Two events helped to build mainstream public support for abortion reform
during the period that informs Levin's novel and Polanski's film. In 1963-64
a rubella or "German measles" epidemic produced congenital abnormalities in
over 20,000 infants in the United States (Lader 1966, 37). Two years prior
to that, Sherri Finkbine, a local television personality, was prevented from
obtaining a legal abortion in Arizona, and her highly publicized experience
with thalidomide, institutional medicine, and Arizona state law instigated a
national public debate on reforming restrictive abortion laws (Ginsburg
1989,35-36; Lader 1966,10-16). Finkbine was pregnant when she read about the
teratogenic effects of thalidomide, a tranquilizer she had recently taken,
and became alarmed. She approached her physician who recommended and
arranged for an abortion at her local hospital. In order to warn other women
of the dangers of thalidomide, Finkbine told her story to the local press,
and the newspaper carried it on the front page the day her abortion was
scheduled. In response, the hospital cancelled the procedure for fear of
prosecution. What the hospital objected to was not therapeutic or eugenic
abortion, which they were initially willing to provide, but the
publicization of their covert practices. Finkbine's doctor, in turn, sought
a court order for the abortion. However, the court side-stepped the issue by
dismissing the case but recommending that the hospital allow the procedure.
The hospital refused, arguing it needed further legal clarification, and
Finkbine finally went to Sweden where the abortion of a malformed fetus was
performed. In her sociological study of the twentieth-century abortion
debates, Faye Ginsburg remarks that Finkbine was "a persuasive and
compelling figure to the American public" because she was white, middle
class, married, already a mother of several children, and believed abortion
was justified only in extenuating circumstances (1989, 36). In other words,
Finkbine was securely positioned within the institutions of marriage and
motherhood. Unlike feminist arguments for legalized abortion as a
precondition of sexual freedom and self-determination for women, Finkbine's
abortion of a deformed fetus did not contest hegemonic social relations.
Thus, people who felt threatened by abortion as a feminist platform could
nonetheless sympathize with Finkbine.

Rosemary's Baby articulates this charged public debate on abortion with a
literary and cinematic tradition of horror.3 The result is a modern-day tale
of witchcraft and demonic pregnancy, a Faustian story of destructive
ambition, a tribute to Dracula in which the unborn rather than the undead
perniciously feed off the living, and a perversion of the Christian
narrative of the Immaculate Conception in which Satan impregnates a mortal
woman in order to become human and intervene in world history. This feat is
accomplished in Manhattan in 1965 at the Bramford (as in Bram Stoker), a
Gothic apartment house with a history of witchcraft and cannibalistic
Victorian ladies.4 In exchange for a successful acting career, Guy Woodhouse
(John Cassavetes) secretly agrees to cooperate with the evil plot of his
next-door neighbors, the eccentric and overbearing Roman and Minnie Castevet
(Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), who lead a coven of witches. On the night
Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) believes she and her husband Guy are going
to conceive their first child, she is drugged by him and transported through
a false closet connecting their apartment to that of the Castevets. There
the coven performs a ceremony to summon the devil, and Rosemary is raped and
impregnated by Satan. During the malevolent pregnancy that follows, Rosemary
endures excruciating pain, but she does not discover the preternatural
constitution of her offspring until the horrifying last scene. Until this
final revelation, Rosemary's misplaced fears for the well being of her
much-desired first born compel her to piece together the conspiracy against
her, and she suspects the coven is waiting for her infant to be born in
order to steal it for a sacrificial ritual.

The film elicits horror from its audience through Rosemary's violation and
the spectacle of her pregnant body, which harbors a monster. Although it
exploits pregnancy as abject embodiment, I do not understand this as a
misogynist repudiation of the maternal body or "the monstrous feminine,"
which Barbara Creed has identified as characteristic of cinematic horror.3
Rather, Rosemary's Baby turns horror to feminist ends. As Judith Halberstam
explains in her study of the horror genre, Gothic is "a narrative technique,
a generic spin that transforms the lovely and the beautiful into the
abhorrent," and when this transformation of the sentimental into the
grotesque "disrupts dominant culture's representations of family,
heterosexuality, ethnicity and class politics," it can be particularly
amenable to feminist and queer readings (1995, 22-23). I argue that the
gothicization of bourgeois, white pregnancy enacted by Rosemary s Baby
contests the essentialist conflation of women with maternity and the
paternalistic medical and legal restrictions on women's access to abortion
prior to Roe v. Wade (1973), which enforced that conflation in practice.

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