Russia's pro-life campaign: babies for cannon fodder

A billboard combined with increased anti-abortion rhetoric offers proof of how fascist ideology is guiding Russia's approach to women's bodies

On Thursday, Julia Davis – an expert in analysing Russian disinformation – tweeted that “the link between Putin’s current and potential wars and looming restrictions on abortion is far from subtle”. The tweet was accompanied by a photo of a billboard of a foetus next to a child in army uniform.

The juxtaposition is disturbing. But the poster tells us something fundamental about the workings of fascist ideology, and women’s position within fascism – a dynamic I explore in the first chapter of my book Bodies Under Siege. It also, therefore, tells us something interesting about Russia’s fascistic turn as it wages its so-called ‘de-Nazification’ war against Ukraine. (Yet it’s Russia which has resurrected the Nazi slogan Kinder Kirche Kuche – what’s next, posters shouting Blood and Soil? The Nazi excuse is not only vile and untrue, it’s increasingly hypocritical)

There are three key pillars of fascist ideology: one is the natural order, two is the mythic past, and three is the constant state of war. Russia is aggressively pursuing all three.

Let’s start with the natural order. According to the fascist thought architecture, the world is governed by a natural order, one where men are superior, women are inferior, white people are superior, black and global majority people are inferior, and LGBTQ+ people don’t exist. In nature, fascism argues, all is brutal hierarchy. There is no such thing as society, no such thing as human rights, no potential for humanity to change and transform and improve.

Within this natural order, women are subordinate to the patriarchal authority of the husband/father, and the male leader of the state (Duce/Fuhrer), and their natural state is one of *passive* reproduction. The natural order positions women as the womb of the nation, and women must fulfil their natural duty by having as many babies as possible for the family/nation/race. A woman who refuses to fulfil her natural obligation, whether that’s through having an abortion, using contraception, choosing if and when to have children, and choosing how many children, is unnatural, even devilish. In fascism, women are reproductive vessels. That is their natural state.

We can see how the natural order is playing out in Russia, not least with its assaults on the LGBTQ+ community, which began in 2014 with the gay propaganda laws, and which has accelerated since the start of the full-scale invasion. Putin’s rhetoric against the decadent West, for example, and mocking of LGBTQ+ rights, is a way of establishing Russia as following the natural order, and the West of subverting it. Now we are seeing a redoubling of the regime’s attack on the LGBTQ+ community, as Russia seeks to label the LGBTQ+ movement as “extremist”. Of course, it is not clear what it means by “movement” and who would be considered “extremist”.

Russia’s fascistic concept of the natural order is further illustrated by its ongoing war against abortion rights and women’s freedoms, including the de-facto decriminalisation of domestic abuse (women’s natural state is subordinate to male authority, even if that authority manifests in violence).

The second pillar is the mythic past – the idea that history and progress need to be rolled back to restore the natural order. Often with Putin, people think his mythic past is the Soviet Union, but when you look at the writings and ramblings of his philosopher-cum-fascist-ideologue in chief Aleksandr Dugin, what you in fact see is an imperative to return to a feudal existence of Tsarist empire. Again, in the mythic past, when men were men and women knew their place, women are pinned to the reproductive role (there’s much more to say about the mythic past and ideas of empire and colonialism but for now I am focusing on the fascist relationship to the abortion poster). The mythic past believes that once upon a time, women’s role was solely and wholly reproductive – and ‘every man was guaranteed a wife’. Rolling back progress means re-pinning women to the reproductive role and abolishing women’s human rights.

The third pillar is the constant state of war, and this is where that poster really matters.

Fascism demands a never-ending war, as the historian and academic Mark Neocleous explains in his defining short book Fascism. He writes how ‘War sustains the dynamic of nature and contributes to the power of the nation … [war] shapes man’s spiritual character and is the defining characteristic of nature’.

In the fascistic war, men are destined for the battlefield and women are again pinned to reproduction – women’s bodies become a means of (re)production, a resource to be plundered in order to generate the next generation of soldiers, and the next. In fascism, writes Neocleous, ‘biology is destiny. Where men are destined for war, women are destined for motherhood’.

Never before have I seen this ideology so clearly and graphically visualised as in the Russian anti-abortion poster shared by Davis. Here, we see a direct link between reproductive control and the imperative to breed soldiers for war. Through it, Putin and his acolytes are demanding that every woman and every child become a tool of state aggression, while those who refuse are unnatural. They are devilish. They are traitors.

Women’s wombs, the poster shows, are not our own. We are denied authority over our own bodies. Instead, women’s wombs are a public good that must be put to work for the state, producing babies to become soldiers who will wage Russia’s wars on its neighbours. The mother is a tool, as is her child.

What this poster, and the ideology is represents, tells us, is that any woman who opts for abortion is a traitor to her nation. And when fascism dictates that nation is race, she is therefore a traitor to her race, too. Reproductive control is explicitly placed here as a way to achieve fascism’s aims, which, for Putin and his campaign of aggression against Ukraine (and beyond?), are also Russia’s aims.

Obligatory book plug

Is this whole newsletter not, in itself, an obligatory book plug? Buy the book to get the full story on fascist thought architecture and abortion!

I’ll be in London on Friday talking at the Institute of Contemporary Arts about abortion rights as part of the launch of After Sex, a fantastic anthology of writing on abortion and reproductive justice. Edited by Alice Spawls and Edna Bonhomme, it’s published by Silver Press.

Book your tickets here

What I’m loving

Realised I forgot to do the what I’m loving in my newsletter last week. I’ve been out of the habit haven’t I? But getting back into my SubStack ways now.

This week I want to plug the fantastic ongoing investigation into Hamish Ogston and allegations of sex trafficking, which was first published on 30 September by Gabriel Pogrund and Katie Tarrant, and continues today with new revelations. This is fearless investigative journalism at its finest.

What I’m writing

Two things for you this week, both for the i paper.

The first is the response from Rwanda’s LGBTQ+ community to the UK Supreme Court ruling that Rwanda is not a safe country and therefore the plan to send people who arrive into the UK via irregular means there is unlawful. That Rwanda is not safe is no surprise to LGBTQ+ people, as my interviewee explained.

The second is one I am really proud of, a data-led investigation into how the numbers of Ukrainian nationals identified as potential victims of modern slavery in the UK trebled in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion (2022). While Ukrainians make up a small (0.2%) of all referrals, the number increased by 278% compared to previous years, while overall modern slavery referrals increased by a third between 2021/22.

What I’m reading

Still on a Slough House/Mick Herron tip - but also read The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm which I found *fascinating*, and I am now reading A Death In Malta by Paul Caruana Galizia which is fantastic and moving and insightful, and I can’t imagine how painful it must have been to write.

A.S Byatt died and it’s made me realise I really really really want to re-read Possession which was one of the books that went missing in the BIG BOOK DISAPPEARANCE OF 2016 (aka, when a box of books vanished as I moved house). So I am going to dig out a copy and then read some of her other novels. Because I did really love Possession.

What I’m watching

Last night I watched By the Grace of God by Francois Ozon, a film about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (and they say I don’t know how to relax!). I thought it was really good and powerful, especially in how it shows that nothing is ever really resolved. Nice touch to put a film poster for Spotlight on the set design.

And I’ve been watching The Good Wife as enjoyable glossy telly.

That’s it for this week! Ciao ciao!