“I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will… Now the flesh arranges itself differently. We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.”
When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she prefaced her writing with the fact that every aspect of Gilead, the fictional totalitarian society in which her tale is set, had been taken from a part of history. Everything that unfolds in the novel has taken place in real life, was suffered by real women, and Offred, her narrator, has become a voice for women around the world who have suffered the loss of bodily autonomy at the unforgiving hands of fascism.
Whilst most societies under fascist rule throughout history have not been so overt in their reduction of women to means of reproduction as in Gilead – where fertile women are forced to take on the role of the handmaid with the sole purpose of conceiving a child – female bodily autonomy is one of the common criteria used to establish a far-right regime that often comes under fire quickly. It becomes a means of control, reproduction and propaganda; to allow women a choice would undermine the foundation of the fascist state.
Although it wasn’t until the 1960s that reproductive rights began to be formally recognised and protected around the western world, access to methods of contraception and abortion services have been crucial indicators of female autonomy for centuries. These rights can be lifesaving for women, providing them with freedom and empowerment in countless aspects of life as well as being a fundamental right to bodily autonomy. So, why are they so often attacked when the far-right is on the rise?
Complete Control, Social Order and Traditional Gender Roles
Fascism revolves around authoritarian control, and thrives off restricting rights and freedoms like free speech, liberty of conscience, religion, and uncensored press. When you add to that its inherently patriarchal structure and outlook, it is hardly surprising that women and their bodies are very near the top of the list of things to control.
Far-right gender ideologies often rest on a traditional, conservative structure where the nuclear family embodies the ideal state and women are reduced to mothers and homemakers. Under Nazi rule, one of the most well-known fascist regimes, inescapable propaganda encouraged, or rather insisted, that German women succumb to the ‘Three Ks’: Kinder, Kuche, and Kirche (‘Children’, ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Church’ in English). An apple from the same tree – Benito Mussolini’s Italian regime was greatly concerned with women’s reproductive autonomy. With the goal of increasing population growth, abortion was outlawed and financial rewards were given to women who birthed six or more children. To centre womanhood around biological capabilities, restrict women to their homes, and allude to Christian depictions of Eve as created both from and for man, is to reduce them to the property of their husbands and fathers, and to transform childbirth from something of beauty to duty, and from dream to nightmare.
Often, these ideals are disguised as matters of nationalist interest and used to compound pre-established hierarchy by securing the population, keeping it racially pure, or transmitting culture through reproduction. In Nazi Germany, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws forbade German Jews from entering marriages or having children with Aryan Germans to ensure the population was strengthened and purified. Under Jorge Rafaela Videla’s fascist dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, pregnant women that the regime deemed ‘politically subversive’ were kidnapped, raped, and murdered, and their children were sent to live with decorated military families who were helping to enforce the regime.
Violence against women is not uncommon under fascist regimes either—a physical manifestation of the legal and social control governments exert over them and an incredibly common torture tactic. To violate a woman’s body provides those in positions of authority with yet another form of power and often does irreversible damage to her, physically and emotionally.
The Resurgence of the Right in the 21st Century West
These examples are all historical, so you might be hoping the world has progressed past policing women’s bodies by now. But you only need to look across the pond to the United States of America – or maybe even just outside your window in the United Kingdom, but we’ll get to that – to see that, unfortunately, that is not the case. The Trump administration has worked, and continues to work, tirelessly to reduce female bodily autonomy, rolling back abortion rights on a national scale. Despite the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the latter of which attempt to remove the codified right to an abortion, and returning autonomy to individual states, the administration continues to impose nationwide initiatives, including the global gag rule. Reinstated in 2025 after the Biden administration had repealed it, this policy restricts US aid to any service that provides or advocates for abortion services. Planned Parenthood funding has been blocked and heavily reduced, medical professionals are now allowed to refuse to provide contraception based on their religious or moral beliefs, and Trump hasn’t shut down the idea of criminalising abortion entirely.
What’s more, restricting access to contraception and abortion services disproportionately affects Black and working-class women. Facing multiple forms of discrimination simultaneously, it is much more difficult for these women to access information about such services, let alone the services themselves. 55% of all Black women in America live in states that have restrictions or complete bans on abortion, and approximately 2.7 million of these women do not have access to the financial means to travel for reproductive care. The marginalisation of Black women and women living in poverty is not accidental, as fascist states are built around rigid social hierarchies based on racial segregation and economic disparities, so it isn’t surprising that when they turn to reproductive rights, these women are hit the hardest.
Fertility, Fascism and the Future
The seeds of fascism are being sown not so far from our front doors too. Anti-abortion sentiment and beliefs in traditional values and gender roles are increasing in the United Kingdom, pioneered by Reform UK, whose candidate for a recent by-election in Gorton and Denton has suggested that people who do not have children should be taxed more heavily than those who do. Sound familiar? This may seem insignificant in comparison to some of the violent and unimaginable examples we have seen throughout this article, but when fascism knocks, it doesn’t announce itself until it’s sitting on your sofa – or in your medical records.
The scars that fascism has inflicted on women, both visible and invisible, remain painful and present. To this day, women in Argentina protest weekly in the Plaza de Mayo and have established a human rights organisation to help bring justice and closure to the female victims of the Videla regime. Women in Europe and the United States fight to retain whatever bodily autonomy they can in response to the not-so-distant echoes of authoritarianism. Women still living under these regimes around the world risk their lives every single day in an attempt to escape the brutal enforcement of fascism and the laws it enacts on their bodies, often to no avail.
It is not pessimistic to say that the world is looking pretty bleak and scary right now, especially for women and other minority groups who are historically first to fall to persecution. But if there is one thing stronger than fear, it is hope; it is our duty to see their struggles, to hear their voices, and to fight for women’s rights. It is our responsibility to ensure that women who currently have these rights retain them, and that those who aren’t so lucky soon regain them, so that these atrocities do not continue to happen across the world or come knocking in our own countries, cities, and hometowns. I urge you not to stay silent, to educate yourself, and to fight for the basic human right of bodily autonomy.