HBO’s highly anticipated House of the Dragon aired on the television network in recent weeks. Prompting a return to Westeros and the Seven Kingdoms, we are situated once again in the raging political landscape that occupied the world of Game of Thrones (GoT), only set 172 years prior.
The show focuses on the endangered Targaryen dynasty. King Viserys I is without a male heir, yet remains hopeful that his wife, the pregnant Aemma Targaryen (nee Arryn), will deliver on her duty to provide a son in service of the realm and the crown. Amid its enthralling depictions of gore and bloodshed in war that have become all-too-familiar for GoT viewers, the first season also embarks on an exploration of reproductive politics and the inherent brutality of pregnancy and childbirth.
Aemma Targaryen is besieged with a complicated birth and Viserys must make the decision to “sacrifice one, or to lose them both.” The King chooses duty and what ensues is a truly horrifying and gut-wrenching scene in which Aemma is forcefully pinned to her childbed as her son is removed in a fateful, unanaesthetised caesarean birth. King Viserys is left weeping at her side as his lady wife bleeds to death, at last having delivered on her duty of providing a male heir to secure the Targaryen line of succession.
“This is how we serve the realm as royal women. Childbirth is our battlefield. We must learn to face it with a stiff lip.”
The scene is highly uncomfortable not least in its vivid depictions, but also in what it represents following the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark legal case of Roe v. Wade earlier last year. Aemma suffers a staggering defeat on the “battlefield” as viewers are confronted with the difficult question of why it is that the rights of an unborn child take precedence over a woman’s choice to her own body, an established life.
On 24 June 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade, becoming a crude indictment on women’s bodies and their reproductive rights. Once again, we witnessed a contemporary example of the discipline, regulation and control of women’s bodies.
In 1973, the case of Roe v. Wade decriminalised abortion across the United States. With its recent overruling, we are seeing the return to antiquated notions that a woman’s socio-cultural position remains embedded in her biological and reproductive capabilities.
As the landmark legal decision comes to an end, twenty-six states are expected to institute new restrictive measures and bans on abortion, altering the course for millions of US women and ending their constitutional rights on the functioning of their bodies.
What happened in Roe v Wade?
In 1969, Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe”) was pregnant with her third child. A young single mother, McCorvey had claimed to be a victim of rape and sought to challenge the criminal laws governing abortion in the state of Texas.
Branded as unconstitutional, the state prohibited the termination of a pregnancy that did not endanger the life of the mother. However, the case was dismissed and McCorvey carried her child to full-term.
In 1973, her appeal was heard alongside Sandra Bensing’s case (Georgia) in the US Supreme Court. They had contested that the criminal abortion laws in the state of Texas and Georgia represented an encroachment on women’s right to privacy. The Supreme Court had ruled by a vote of seven to two that state governments were unable to prohibit abortions and that a woman’s right to abortion deserved to be protected under the US Constitution.
The case gave way to the ‘trimester’ system. A termination in the first trimester (initial three months) was deemed an absolute right, while some government regulation was necessitated in the second trimester. The ban on abortion still remained in the third (and final) trimester of pregnancy, with medical certification deemed necessary for a termination in the event that it be required to save a woman’s health.
What does the recent overturn mean?
After nearly 50 years, the historic decision was overruled. Described by President Joe Biden as “a tragic error”, the Supreme Court ruling indeed constitutes a dangerous step back for women’s rights.
“With Roe gone, let’s be very clear: the health and life of women in this nation are now at risk. This is an extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.
[…]
This fall, Roe is on the ballot. Personal freedoms are on the ballot – the right to privacy, liberty, equality. They’re all on the ballot.”
The outcome of the decision has meant that almost 36 million American women will be left without abortion access, paving the way for dire and potentially life-threatening alternatives as the only resort in this incredible infringement to women’s reproductive rights.
The decision comes with the recent challenge on the constitutionality of a Mississippian law banning abortions after 15 weeks. Deemed as unconstitutional by a lower court, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation case saw the Court uphold its abortion ban and, on a larger scale, override the previously constitutional right to abortion.
Thoughts
The debate between pro-life and pro-choice is a heated and widely contested one. There is validity to both arguments, but it often feels like juggling two sides of the same coin. What such a contention has done is miss the point of Roe v. Wade in suggesting that being pro-choice posits one in opposition to life.
The female mind-body has historically been inundated with the rhetoric of inferiority, weakness and lack, perpetually posited as man’s corporeal Other that facilitated hegemonic notions of maleness as epitomised normalcy. Thus, disability has long contended with normalised representations of the body, rooted in social constructionism that posits “social attitudes and institutions [as] determine[ing] far greater than biological fact the […] body’s reality.”
As Aemma so astutely points out in the opening scene, the female body served no greater purpose than its service to the realm, becoming instead a vessel for childbirth. She entreats her daughter, the young Princess Rhaenyra, that she too will one day have to bear this heavy duty, that the ‘discomforts’ of pregnancy and childbirth are simply a woman’s lot.
It is the “royal womb” that deserves attention and care. While Aemma recognises that her reproductive body remains the property of the dynastic line, what makes the later fateful childbirth scene so difficult to watch is her choice, or lack thereof.
“Here you are, surrounded by attendants all focused on the babe. Someone has to attend to you.”
Her lack of agency remains frightful to watch here. She is left at the mercy of a man’s decision, a King’s obsession with a prophecy. While it becomes obvious that Aemma’s concerns lay with her unborn child’s safety, Viserys’ decision to violate her body without consent speaks to the seemingly higher value that is placed on the life of an unborn child.
Aemma’s pregnancy and childbirth is only one of few that feature in House of the Dragon. Later in the series, we see a mirrored childbirth scene, only this time it is Laena Targaryen (nee Velaryon) besieged by the complications of breached birth.
While Prince Daemon, the King’s younger brother and deposed heir, finds himself faced with the same dilemma that had befallen his brother, Laena wrangles the decision from her lord husband and makes a choice. What ensues is a fiery death, “a dragonrider’s death”, as Laena and her unborn child are incinerated by her dragon, Vhagar.
House of the Dragon wrestles with the delicately complicated notions of reproductive politics and the regulatory control of women’s bodies in this shocking display of pregnancy and childbirth in visual culture. A few months on from the show’s premiere and the overturn of Roe v. Wade, we find striking comparisons between our modern world and the one of fantasy that many know so well.
Cover Image by HBO