It’s 2026, and the regimes load weapons not just for resources, but to harness strength from women’s reproductive capacities, turning bodies into battlegrounds of control.
On Katie Couric’s podcast, Gloria Steinem, feminist luminary and a political activist, was posed the provocative query: “What if men bore the burden of pregnancy?” With a spark of irreverent genius, she invoked the legendary civil rights lawyer Flo Kennedy: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be enshrined as a sacrament.”
Today’s reality continuously reminds us how categorical gendered discrimination is forged through the tools of regime control. A very evident string of this reality is shown in the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022. Imagine residing in a nation where 45% of pregnancies are unintended, only to learn from a conservative Supreme Court that your choice to abort rests at the mercy of your state. University of Colorado reports confirm the fallacy: since the judgment, 14 states have banned abortion outright, 11 more enforce prior illegal gestational limits, and one in three women of childbearing age now lives under such restrictions.
Regimes intensify their choreography of control over women’s bodily autonomy through calculated legislative manoeuvres, as exemplified by Russia’s draft bill—slated for State Duma review in March 2026—proposing a total abortion ban. What renders this story profoundly disturbing is the absolute prohibition, lacking any exceptions, already enshrined in countries like El Salvador, Vatican City, Malta, the Philippines, Madagascar, and numerous African nations, where even miscarriages or rape cases can incur imprisonment. Regimes’ political immaturity assumes restrictive anti-abortion laws erect protective boundaries around life. Instead, they unleash catastrophe: unsafe, unskilled, unregulated back-alley procedures.
Reproductive politics persistently shape regimes’ status quo and the legislation they craft to cling to power. Bodily autonomy directly threatens entrenched power structures, rendering the enforcement of laws on an already marginalised half of the population a convenient pretext for those in authority. The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 remains a deadly reminder of how power corrupts and is prosecuted at a woman who refuses to comply with the theocratic assumptions of how a woman is supposed to be.
Disciplining women’s bodies and choices has long served as a potent tool for suppressing dissent, instilling internalised weakness by surrendering bodily agency to the state. Yet this sparks a profound debate: the fetus’s right to life, precariously suspended between ethical ambiguity and legal contention, making it hard to have a broad-based consensus over it. India navigates this adeptly under Article 21’s right to life and liberty, permitting abortions up to 20 weeks—and 24 weeks in exceptional cases—prioritising the severity of the cases, such as deformity of the foetus; however, this has to be approved by the Medical Board.
Simone Debauvoir poses this existentialist crisis perfectly: “Is my body a site of freedom or a tool of oppression?” Patriarchal structure, time and again reinforce the agenda of collective surveillance over personal freedom. Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’ powerfully embodies the resilience of women of colour, rising against oppression with unapologetic strength.
The conception of power and the body intertwine inextricably, with history revealing women’s reproductive capacities as instruments of domination. From China’s one-child policy enforcing quotas through forced abortions and sterilisations, to Nazi Germany’s Lebensborn program coercing Aryan women into multiple pregnancies for racial expansion, regimes have wielded demographics as weapons. Forced sterilisations—from Peru’s targeting of Indigenous women to India’s emergency-era campaigns—sustain graphs of control, reducing half the population to vessels for sadistic agendas of supremacy and subjugation.
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Kinjal Sharma
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