What Does Science Fiction Tell Us About the Future of Reproductive Rights?

That's the question recently posed by io9.

From the article...

Other works imagine the state regulating reproduction using the carrot rather than the stick. Brave New World, published in the early 1930s during the height of the eugenics craze in the United States, imagines a future where the government breeds humans for specialized tasks. Some are designed to be strong but stupid low-caste workers, while others (the Alphas) are given perfect minds and physiques in order to take their places as societal leaders. Every child is also put through years of behavioral conditioning to reinforce their genetic predilections. The result is a society where everybody is content with their positions and sex is purely recreational. Similarly, the movie GATTACA imagines a future where everyone is genetically engineered for various class positions. Both stories include "wild type" characters, non-GMO people whose perspectives cast doubt on the justice of a system where the state determines who you are from conception onward.

You might think that these stories, to the extent that they are about gender, would be like The Handmaid's Tale, where patriarchs or a patriarchal state have decided to take away women's rights to choose how they'll reproduce. But that's simply not the case. In fact, feminist SF writer Sherri Tepper's novel The Gate to Women's Country offers an ambivalent portrait of a future matriarchal society devoted to the eugenics project of breeding men to be less violent.