Spawn: The Fantasy of Women’s Right to Choose

Paula White, televangelist of the “prosperity gospel” and spiritual advisor to President Tr**p delivered a sermon on January 5, 2020, commanding “all Satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.” Despite his anti-choice stance, White prayed for miscarriages in ‘Satanic wombs’, hoping they’d be unable to carry forth plans of destruction or harm. A modern day curse cloaked under right-wing conservatism. The Witcher, Netflix’s most popular debut series, conjures up very real attitudes on motherhood and childbirth. Yennefer, a sorceress from Vengerberg, is unable to conceive; her ascension to become a magical immortal incurred a cost: her womb.

In ‘Spawn: The Fantasy of Women's Right to Choose’ Alyssa Velazquez analyses reproduction justice, eugenics, and population growth through fictional contexts such as The Witcher, George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, Fledging by Octavia Butler, and their cinematic adaptations. Velazquez compares this with research into the history of science’s earliest conceptions of menstruation and pregnancy in relation to birthing bodies and attitudes towards reproduction.

The current national emergency and news coverage on who gets to be pregnant, when, and how, is a universal concern that's been shared by witches, vampires, and demons for centuries. Their reproductive potential is not the exception, but the rule, born from humanity’s historical and contemporaneous gender-biased, race-conscious, and class-based paradoxical repulsion and fascination with female anatomy and birth.

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