“You are a Patriot. You are a volunteer for the country.”
In Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, this line is meant to reassure pregnant women who have been detained by the state, whose bodies are no longer entirely their own. The dystopian novel, set in a near-future America experiencing a rapid regressive evolution, follows Cedar Songmaker, a pregnant indigenous woman navigating a world in which pregnancy has come under state control. As the government grows increasingly desperate to preserve the Homo sapiens species, pregnant women become biological resources forcefully detained in facilities: carriers of possible futures.
Erdrich’s novel, much like other reproductive dystopian novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’ s Tale, stands out through the language used to justify enslaving women with reproductive capabilities. “Patriot” and “volunteer” are words that signal moral clarity, speaking to one’s sacrificial choices and honor. To be a volunteer is to step forward willingly; to be a patriot is to act in the interest of something larger than oneself. These are words that assume agency.
In Future Home of the Living God, pregnant women are given the choice to surrender to state custody and receive marginally better conditions or resist and risk being forcibly seized from their families until they give birth in confinement. It is a structure of coercion that preserves the form of consent while eliminating its meaning. The irony lies in the language of consent being used to justify a system wherein consent itself has been stripped away.
The novel’s violence does not just lie in the confinement of female bodies, but in the reframing of society through language. When detention becomes protection, forced compliance becomes patriotism, and a captive woman becomes a volunteer, coercive reproductive policy becomes narratively justified as civic duty.
In Cedar’s world, the state transforms the meaning of pregnancy into one of obligation. To be pregnant is to be conscripted, and hence, the value of a woman is no longer located in her personhood but in her reproductive capacity to secure a future for the greater good of Homo sapiens. In this way, Erdrich’s novel asks readers to confront the ontological shift: from one of person to vessel.
What makes this transformation so effective is its framing as moral clarity. The state does not outwardly claim ownership over women; it claims to protect the future. Consequently, what emerges is a more insidious form of control: one that reassigns meaning to women’s bodies rather than simply regulating them. Such justifications surface, in subtler but recognizable ways, in contemporary reproductive policy debates. When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade (1973) in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the Court declared that the 1973 ruling was made on an implied, non-constitutional right rather than one that is “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Consequently, abortion access has been returned to state control, with thirteen states banning abortion at all stages of pregnancy with no exceptions for conception through sexual assault or incest.
Roe protected the right to abortion through a constitutional right to privacy, not through an explicit right to bodily autonomy. Privacy frames abortion as a decision shielded from state intrusion. Bodily autonomy asks the state to confront whether it can compel bodily harm to an individual to sustain another life. The latter allows far less room to justify overriding reproductive autonomy without fundamentally altering how we understand the tenets of individual rights. Consequently, the overruling of Roe exposed the fragility of the framework that sustains reproductive autonomy. In the infamous case of McFall v. Shimp (1978), the Court refused to force a man to donate bone marrow to save the life of his cousin, even when the cost of refusal was death. The principle of decision-making in that ruling was rooted in bodily autonomy: courts cannot intervene in the moral fallibility to use an individual’s body for sustaining the life of another.
Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson added to this rule in A Defense of Abortion (1971), arguing that regardless of the moral status of the fetus, obligating any individual to harbor life for state interest is not morally permissible, whether in fiction or real policies. Imagine X owns a coat and Y wants to borrow it but X also needs it. We can unanimously agree that X can claim it because, regardless of how urgent Y’s need is, it does not create a right to their property. Thomson uses the same analogy for justifying that if a mother’s body houses the fetus, the woman is the strongest contender for the fate of the fetus and the consequent pregnancy, not because the other life lacks value, but because the fate of her body is not up to requisitioning by the fetus or the state.
Yet contemporary reproductive policy is often treated as an exception to this rule. Pronatalism, the political and cultural valuation of childbearing as a social good, assumes the argument for the potentiality of future life. Such appeals center the fetus as the primary ethical subject, the bearer of the future, and the pregnant person becomes secondary, their role reframed as one of collateral damage for the greater good.
Historically, government-sanctioned pronatalism builds under the language of nationalism and preservation of “family values”, often quietly redistributing the cost onto the bodies and futures of those who can become pregnant. What is presented as patriotic contribution is, in practice, placing the nation’s future goals above the individual’s present life. This becomes especially apparent when placed against the reality that reveals women’s fertility preferences decline with obtainment of higher education, indicating fulfilment in domains other than motherhood. Protonatalism responds to this expansion in aspirations by constraining choice, recasting personal ambition as something deferrable. As Erdrich’s dystopia held, this reshaping is never an overt declaration of control but one that recasts loss of consent as moral duty to the nation.
In Cedar’s world, the question was not who owns the body, but what the body is for. Once pregnancy is redefined as a duty owed to the future of the whole, the autonomy of the smaller individual becomes harder to visualize.
And that is precisely where the danger lies. Once we accept that some bodies exist primarily to sustain others, the principle of autonomy becomes conditional. It applies fully in cases like McFall v. Shimp, yet weakens in the case of pregnancy, where the bodily demand is far greater. One is framed as forced bodily use, the other as responsibility. Erdrich’s novel asks us to recognize this shift before it becomes invisible. The state does not need to say, “Your body is not your own,” but simply, “You are responsible for our future.” Once that claim is accepted, refusal looks less like a right and more like a failure of duty. And that rhetorical drift is exactly where dystopian reproductive fiction starts looking more like contemporary reproductive control.
References
1. Erdrich, L. (2017). Future Home of the Living God. New York: HarperCollins.
2. Dobbs, O. T. M. D. O. H. & Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (2022). Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al. v. Jackson Women’ s Health Organization, Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
3. Forati, R., & Bartz, D. (2025). The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pronatalism: A Disingenous Policy that Harms the Health of People and Society. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 53(3), 435-443. doi:10.1017/jme.2025.10129
4. Guttmacher. (2026). State bans on abortion throughout pregnancy. https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/state-policies-abortion-bans
5. Chen, Q., et al., “Fertility Intentions to Have a Second or Third Child Among the Childbearing-age population in Central China under China’s Three-child Policy: A Cross-Sectional Study,” Journal of Global Health 13, no. 04072 (2023): 1-12, https://doi.org/10.7189/jogh.13.04072
6. Leagle. (1978). “McFALL v. SHIMP | 10 Pa. D. & C. 3d 90 | Ampc3d90189 | Leagle.Com.”https://www.leagle.com/decision/197810010padampc3d90189
7. Thomson, J. J. (1971). A defense of abortion. https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf
Cover image: author’s own.
