At the annual March for Life in January 2025, a giant billboard spanned across the road up to Capitol Hill as anti-abortion advocates marched. Four panels lined this billboard. One particularly graphic panel showed an AI-generated image of a woman sitting on a toilet with abortifacients in boxes next to her and a bloody clump in her exposed underwear. On the panel next to it, a giant rat sitting in a sewer chews on this fabled “baby” from the woman’s toilet. Flashing emergency lights and a loop of baby cries over a loudspeaker overwhelm those who walk by as the words overhead in bold lettering say, “Don’t feed your Baby to the Sewer Rats.”
Fertilized embryos, especially those that are “left over” from assisted reproductive technologies, as well as remains after medication abortions at home, have become a politicized part of social, cultural, as well as religious life of reproduction in the United States. In her book Conceiving Christian America (2024), anthropologist Risa Cromer argues that embryos are both biological entities and that they are also cultural figures that exist and shift definitions within national and individual contexts. Similarly, anti-choice advocates have advocated for laws that police an individual’s disposal of aborted “remains.” The personhood endowed upon “remains” of any kind move through the discursive rendering of faith and (re)productivity –the opposite of what we would consider waste or wasteful.
What happens when the way we view waste, and specifically “remains,” in a Western, Christian society, like the United States, becomes imbued with discourses of religious veracity, nationalism, and population control? This paper begins to explore the complex relationship between Christianity, Western society, the anti-choice movement, and fetal “remains” of sorts. The understanding of faith versus knowledge through Derrida’s seminal essay argues that any language presents “paradoxes that question the separability (let alone opposition) of reason and religion, of religion and tele-technoscience, and of knowledge and belief” (Kilgore 2005). Science and technology are inherently imbued with belief and faith at its core, as there is no such thing as a lack of “faith” within science as a discursively constructed entity. Therefore, we cannot separate ideas and discourses of faith, morality, and politics from “waste” or “remains.”
These understandings of embryos and “remains” generally are not siloed; they are connected to political realities. In 2018, a teen named Skylar Richardson from Ohio hid the fact that she was pregnant, then, she had a miscarriage in her home and hid the fetal remains in the backyard. Skylar’s doctor told the police, and she was convicted of gross abuse of a corpse and was put on trial for murder. In the United States, someone who miscarried or lost a pregnancy might also find herself facing jail time; for example, a woman who was in a car accident in New York or gave birth to a stillborn in Indiana. In these cases, women have been charged with manslaughter. Although about 15% of pregnancies today end in miscarriage, there is a lack of understanding of what to do with “remains” morally, spiritually, and medically. The surveillance and policing of fetal remains are tied to racial, gender, and class discrimination related to sexuality, pregnancy, parenthood, and reproductive healthcare. The Homeland Maternity state, as coined by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (2018), we live in allows pregnant people to be surveilled and policed. The (re)productive agenda of religious, anti-abortion advocates is a driving force of these laws and practices. There are also calls by feminists to talk about miscarriages and abortion as the same because of the similarity of biological and medical procedures that produce fetal remains, attempting to demystify and decriminalize abortion care. However, these discourses often do the opposite; that is, this leads to the criminalization of miscarriage and disposing of medical remains in this way. Why must we treat all remains and/or waste as imbued with the same meaning? Can individuals have different relationships to “remains” regardless of what category they fall under? In this way, there is also a call by feminist scholars to complicate the language of fetal remains as “waste” especially in relation to women and pregnant people who mourn their lost pregnancies, stillbirths, and miscarriages (Casper 2022).
In other ways, embryos are treated as unproductive if not utilized after fertilization (Waldby and Cooper 2010). For example, the use of embryos for stem cell and other research are discursively labeled as “saving lives” through faith in science and technology; using “remains” to make life better for the sake of the larger population. What happens when people want to use their “remains” in spiritual rather than medical pr “productive” ways in a Western society? Meanwhile, environmental advocates understandably argue that waste of all kinds must be recycled and reduced for the overall good of the planet and the health of its citizens (Foote and Mazzolini 2012).
In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille describes blood and tissue from the vagina (menstrual blood, birth, etc.) as dejected by Western society –we are disgusted by and scared of it, but at the same time we do not know what to do with it. Based on this notion, this project begins to uncover why, in our modern society, the fear of “remains” begins to control the ways we police pregnancy and reproductive capacities, through both religious and moral discourses. Doing so allows us to rethink our assumptions about and how to reorient remains, and to not “feed our babies to the sewer rats.”
Fertilized embryos, especially those that are “left over” from assisted reproductive technologies, as well as remains after medication abortions at home, have become a politicized part of social, cultural, as well as religious life of reproduction in the United States. What happens when the way we view waste, and specifically “remains,” in a Western, Christian society, like the United States, becomes imbued with discourses of religious veracity, nationalism, and population control? In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille describes blood and tissue from the vagina (menstrual blood, birth, etc.) as dejected by Western society –we are disgusted by and scared of it, but at the same time we do not know what to do with it. Based on this notion, this project begins to uncover why, in our modern society, the fear of “remains” begins to control the ways we police pregnancy and reproductive capacities, through both religious and moral discourses.