This is a term I had never heard before, perhaps because I spend most of my time around sane people. But apparently, it is a thing: the “fetal fetish.”

No, it is not referring to some way-out-there sexual fetish, but to people who think that protecting human life in the womb should be a priority. The use of the term fetish refers, I assume, to the second definition of “fetish” in the Oxford Dictionary: “an inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.” Although the phrasing indicates the first definition, which is indeed sexual and is clearly intended to be insulting in that manner.

I ran across the term in an–wait for it!–academic paper written by a Professor of Criminology at the prestigious John Jay College of Criminal Justice named Katie Gentile. Gentile describes her work:

My research aims to integrate queer, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous theories of  temporalities with those of psychoanalysis to examine and explore impacts of trauma and ongoing patterns of traumatic repetitions and violences. I have published numerous articles and book chapters on eating disorders, sexual and racial/cultural violence, intimate partner violence, participatory action research, and the cultural and psychic production of temporalities around trauma, annihilations anxieties, reproductive technologies, and fetal personhood. My current work integrates queer and psychoanalytic temporalities with anti-Blackness theories, Indigenous Studies, Animal Studies, and posthumanism to deconstruct human exceptionalism and to reinvigorate the more-than-human in theory and practice, especially around issues of fetal personhood, animals and environmental justice, and institutional betrayal around sexual misconduct in psychoanalytic training settings and the academy and the uses of restorative justice and bystander intervention practices. I contribute to the Public Seminar blog from the New School for Social Research on gender and sexuality and most recently, #MeToo in a series of articles and posts titled “Give a woman an inch, she’ll take a penis.” I have been cited by Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker, for my theoretical work on fetal personhood.

In other words, she is woke as hell and on the faculty of a school dedicated to teaching criminal justice.

What drew me to her work was its title. Published in the journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, it sticks out like a sore thumb–at least to non-academics who live on Planet Earth.

I dare anyone not steeped in critical theory to make heads or tails of the abstract; then I defy anyone steeped in critical theory to defend the argument to anybody who still is part of the human race:

This essay integrates queer, anti-Blackness, Indigenous, and psychoanalytic theories of temporality to explore fetal personhood. It is argued that fetal personhood reflects a form of temporally-based affect regulation in which the fetus represents the promise and vulnerability of a tenuous future, rendering the uterus the only environment lawmakers seem to protect. In the face of the climate crisis, displacing promise and annihilation anxieties onto fetuses is a dangerous temporal system of affect regulation targeting BIPOC bodies with uteruses; a literal scorched-earth strategy designed to defend and buttress white, heteropatriarchal human exceptionalism, through a violent deployment of time.

“A violent deployment of time.” That is a concept sure to keep academic researchers in grant funds for decades.

I parsed my way through the article because I am profoundly stupid and self-hating, and this is what I made of the thesis:

• Human beings are destroying the earth. At least White people, who are anti-Black and proponents of heteropatriarchy are.
• There is no set timescale regarding when exactly the earth’s ecosystems will collapse, creating temporal anxiety
• Heteronormative White people address their anxiety about the collapse of the world by redefining and displacing their anxiety
• The create a fetish object–a sort of magical being–of the fetus. Particularly non-White fetuses, trying to save it
• They fetishize fetuses because there is a defined temporality–9 months of gestation
• They fetish Black fetuses because they are racist
• By fetishizing the Black fetus they empower themselves to protect it by controlling the wombs of Black women

That is compressed, but it boils down to this: White people are scared of Climate Change so they displace their anxiety and control Black women to feel in control of their lives.

Wow. That is quite a set of leaps. Maybe people are pro-life and want to protect babies because they are human beings created in the image of God. That could be it too.

Given that opposition to abortion extends to a “temporal reality” that precedes worries about ecological destruction it seems to me that this theory is pretty obviously BS.

But being true or false is hardly the point, is it? Psychologizing and demeaning other’s deeply held moral beliefs obviously is. And doing so while getting paid a nice salary, great benefits, lauded by one’s peers, and a publication credit is the pinnacle of grifting.

In a sane world we should laugh out loud and in the face of anybody who publishes anything this absurd. Instead we give them cushy jobs and research grants.

And send our kids to learn this trash from them.