You Call It Pro-Life: I Call It Necropolitics on Mosher Mag

Imagine this.

You’re dead. Not metaphorically. Not spiritually.

Not “in a bad place” or “feeling numb.”

Clinically. Medically. Irreversibly dead.

Your brain is gone. Your self is gone. Your story, interrupted.

But the state? It doesn’t care.

Because your uterus is still technically “viable.”

Because there’s a flutter on a scan.

Because someone wrote a law, in Georgia, or Texas, or Ohio, or any of these handmaid dystopias, that says a heartbeat matters more than a whole life.

So now, you are not dead. You are property.

A shell. A vessel. A womb on life support, plugged in and repurposed like an incubator from a horror film.

You’re no longer a person. You’re a machine that doesn’t get to power off.

This isn’t a metaphor. This isn’t poetic rage. This isn’t speculative fiction.

This is already happening.

In 2019, the state of Georgia passed a “heartbeat” law banning abortions once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, as early as six weeks. Most people don’t even know they’re pregnant then.

It offers no exceptions for rape, incest, or, in some interpretations, even when the pregnant person is brain dead.

That’s right.

You could be in a hospital bed, brain gone, soul flown, and still, they’d keep the machines on.

Not for you. For the foetus inside you. For their ideological obsession with control.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, over a dozen US states enacted near-total bans on abortion.

But the nightmare didn't start then.

It was always growing.

In 2013, Marlise Muñoz, a paramedic and mother, was declared brain-dead after a pulmonary embolism. Her family requested her removal from life support, her own wishes, documented and clear. But Marlise was 14 weeks pregnant.

And Texas law prohibited the withdrawal of life support from pregnant patients, even brain-dead ones.

Her corpse was legally mandated to continue gestating.

She was dead. But the state refused to let her go.

Her husband had to fight in court to bury her.

In 2021, Brittney Poolaw, a 20-year-old Native American woman, had a miscarriage at home at 17 weeks. She went to the hospital. She was honest about using marijuana.

She was charged with first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison.

For having a miscarriage. While poor. While honest.

They didn’t prove the miscarriage was drug-related. They didn’t need to.

She had a uterus and bad luck. That was enough.

Even now, in 2025, Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse from Atlanta, was approximately nine weeks pregnant when she suffered a medical emergency due to blood clots in her brain. She was declared brain-dead, a legal determination of death. Yet, she has been kept on life support to allow the foetus to develop to a viable stage for delivery.

Adriana's family has expressed profound distress over the situation, describing it as "torture." They have highlighted the emotional and financial strain on the family, as well as concerns about the foetus's health, which include potential disabilities due to detected fluid on the brain.

The hospital refuses to remove her from life support.

People say: “At least it’s not America.” “Abortion is legal in the UK.”

But guess what? Abortion is still technically illegal in the UK.

Yes, even now. Yes, even in 2025. Yes, even in England, Wales, and Scotland.

Under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, abortion is a criminal offence punishable by up to life in prison. The 1967 Abortion Act just made exceptions, only if two doctors agree that continuing the pregnancy is a risk to your physical or mental health.

You don’t have a right to abortion. You have a system that grants you conditional mercy.

And if you live in Northern Ireland? Until 2019, even rape survivours had no legal route to abortion. Some had to travel hundreds of miles to England, in secret, bleeding and shamed.

Even now, services are patchy. Local trusts delay or deny. Stormont politicks and people suffer.

Here’s how it works:

• You find out you’re pregnant.

• You panic.

• You go to your GP. They refer you to a clinic.

• The clinic asks: Are you sure? Have you thought about adoption? Is the father involved?

• Two doctors sign you off, not because you say yes, but because they agree it won’t damage your health.

  
  

You are not the final authority on your own womb. You are a risk assessment.

And if they don’t believe your distress?

If your postcode sucks? If you’re too late for the 24-week cutoff? Too bad.

Even miscarriages and stillbirths are being policed now.

There are women being investigated for taking pills.

Some arrested. Some jailed. Others doxxed, demonised, and driven to silence.

We like to think we’re above American-style horror stories.

But do you remember Savita Halappanavar?

She died in Ireland in 2012, denied a life-saving abortion during a miscarriage because there was still “fetal cardiac activity.” Her pain dismissed. Her death preventable.

Or Carla Foster, in England in 2023, who was sentenced to 28 months in prison for ending her pregnancy during lockdown using abortion pills obtained through the legal "pills by post" scheme. She was 22–34 weeks pregnant and desperate.

They called her a murderer.

They dragged her into court.

They made an example of her.

The system doesn’t protect life. It protects control.

Let’s say it happens. A car crash. An aneurysm. A sudden collapse.

You’re gone. Brain function: none. Legally dead. No longer a person.

But you’re pregnant. Maybe a few weeks along.

And in this country, that’s enough to justify keeping you hooked up.

Machines humming. Electricity burning. Corpse gestating.

This isn’t just theoretical.

In the UK, there is no clear legal framework around brain-dead pregnant patients. If your hospital trust is cautious, or cowardly, they might keep you on life support to give the foetus a chance.

In the US, this is already law in multiple states, you die, they don’t care.

They don’t bury women anymore. They farm them.

Your body is no longer yours. Your death is paused.

You are government property, womb-first.

This isn’t a story of one woman.

It’s a global pattern of power using biology to bind people to misery.

It’s the woman jailed for miscarriage. The teen raped and made to carry. The asylum seeker denied care. The disabled person disbelieved. The mother investigated while bleeding out.

This is not about life. It’s about punishment.

About making sure no one with a womb feels free.

So, call it spite. Call it vengeance. Call it matriarchal rage.

The state thinks it's creating life.

But it's feeding rage through the umbilical cord.

The truth is, some would have loved to raise their children. To give them a name. A home. A laugh.

But the state robbed them of that. It ripped them from a tomb and turned them into a headline.

Now their children will grow up knowing the state killed their mother for a principle.

For an outdated law. For a heartbeat on a scan. For a false god with a white wig.

They will not mourn their mothers. They will avenge them.

Don’t get it twisted.

This isn’t about “life.”

If it were, you’d fund prenatal care, childcare, schools, food assistance, housing, healthcare.

But you don’t. You fund police. You fund prisons. You fund border walls.

You love the foetus. You hate the child. You loathe the mother. And you absolutely despise autonomy.

Because this isn’t about babies. It’s about punishment. Control. Power over the flesh.

You don’t want women to be mothers. You want them to be compliant.

You want them bleeding and obedient.

Dead, if necessary — as long as the womb stays warm.

You’ve closed clinics. You’ve threatened doctors. You’ve overturned Roe. You’ve sent women to jail for miscarriages. You’ve wrapped “morality” around misogyny and called it virtue.

But you haven’t won.

Because some of us were born spiteful. Some of us were raised in the fire. Some of us are not interested in survival, only revenge.

Every person you force to carry a pregnancy they didn’t choose is a ticking bomb. Every stillbirth you legislate is a curse on your name.

Every child born from rape, from medical negligence, from coercion is another crack in your holy empire.

You made a theology of cruelty. But your temples are rotting.

You turned the womb into a battleground.

And now you’re surprised that we come with knives in our mouths?

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com