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Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects
College Literature, Summer 2005 by Valerius, Karyn
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")
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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.
