The film has no business being put in service of abortion advocacy.
At the Bulwark, Zandy Hartig makes the case for the renewed relevance of Rosemary’s Baby (focusing on Roman Polanski’s 1968 film, not the 1967 Ira Levin novel on which it is based). I have also made the case for the timelessness of the work. But Hartig’s argument is strange, and misguided. Her interpretation turns the story, which is about how a New York City woman unwittingly becomes the mother to Satan’s baby, into a rote allegory for a post-Dobbs America. “Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow)’s fate — like many pregnant women then, before, and presently — is at the mercy of those who see her womb solely as a vessel for their own ambitions,” she writes. “And as much as she fights for her bodily autonomy, she is ultimately powerless against the dark forces that want to control her and the baby inside her.”
To make this case, Hartig distorts three aspects of the film. The first is the nature of the arrangement that leads to Rosemary’s plight. She does correctly note that Guy, her husband, subjects her to his own desire to make it big as an actor. When the Woodhouses move into the same apartment building occupied by a demonic cult, Guy rushes at the opportunity to make a deal to secure his own fame at Rosemary’s expense. When the true nature of the evil he agreed to is revealed, Guy defends it on extremely worldly grounds, saying “We’re getting so much in return.” Up to that point, in fact, what had prevented them from having children was Guy, who “wasn’t ready yet.” In a time of collapsing birthrates and people choosing other goods over children, this same spirit of worldliness manifests more obviously nowadays in the act of abortion.
Hartig also neglects something present in the film, but made more obvious in the book: Rosemary’s own discomfort with the world in which she lives with Guy, so alien to her upbringing. Rosemary’s chafing at the religious insults flung at her by the Castavets, her deceptively inviting fellow apartment tenants, points to Rosemary’s prior life. From a large Catholic family in Nebraska, she nonetheless always felt she was “black sheep,” and desired to escape. Yet in New York City, she is lost in urban anomie, and haunted by the vestiges of her faith. Without its trappings and its community, she is easy prey for the false comity offered by the coven in her apartment. This desperate, lonely Rosemary, with fake friends and a vain husband, could have used some of the social connectedness offered by the life she left behind.
But Hartig’s most egregious interpretation of Rosemary’s Baby is also her strangest. In her understanding, the demon spawn Rosemary is forced to carry is not alien, but rather representative. Though Hartig notes that she has given birth twice and was “overjoyed” both times, she argues that the experience was profoundly “weird” in that it meant she no longer controlled her body. And now, post-Dobbs, all women are Rosemary. “The overturning of Roe v. Wade has grabbed one of the most important decisions out of the hands of women and put it into the hands of politicians, usually male.”
Forget that many of the male politicians in these states have codified or even expanded Roe. To Hartig, “Rosemary’s baby is a graphic, symbolic depiction of what women again face regarding their unwanted or dangerous pregnancies: Her baby is the product of rape, supernatural though it may be, and she is reduced to a symbol, a dark and twisted Madonna.” But this analogy breaks down the moment one considers the fundamental issue in debates about abortion: the fact that successful conception creates a new, distinct human life.
What gives Rosemary’s ordeal its horror is its inversion of how pregnancy ought to be. Hartig almost has the idea when she notes that Rosemary is a “twisted Madonna.” Unlike Mary, whose “fiat” allowed Jesus to incarnate, Satan impregnates Rosemary through rape. Joseph’s kind, silent support blows Guy’s selfish ambition out of the water. And the coterie of demonic elites who welcome Rosemary’s baby into the world are the polar opposite of the shepherds and assorted manger-residents who welcome Christ. This is no stand-in for all pregnancies; it is a travesty thereof, especially of the Nativity. And it thus drives home that point that children, far from being demons, are, and ought to be, a blessing. It’s patently absurd to argue that a demonic cult trying to bring Satan’s son into the world has anything in common with people who want to reduce the number of abortions. (Also, the “rape-pregnancy-as-demon” trope is both hideously unsubtle and offensive to the innocent children conceived in rape.)
By all means, let us work toward a world that supports mothers more, where no child is unwanted, and where women are treated with the respect they deserve. But that is a world where abortion and its dehumanizing logic are less prominent, not more. Rosemary’s Baby has no business being put in service of abortion advocacy.