Reduction to Appearance: Baby Bumps and the Aesthetic Enjoyment of Other People's Uteruses

Reduction to Appearance is one of the 10 ways of treating human beings as mere things.

Aug 03, 2026

Charcoal drawing of various object - by S.P. Rogers (author)

The objectification of pregnant people permeates the ideology, rhetoric, propaganda, and policies of the movement against sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR).1

Objectification is “the seeing and/or treating of someone as an object” — especially women.2

The objectified person is seen in ways that are fundamentally inaccurate, as a person is not a thing. Having been made into a thing, the objectified person is treated in ways one would treat things, but not persons. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum explained, “In all cases of objectification what is at issue is a question of treating one thing as another: One is treating as an object what is really not an object, what is, in fact, a human being.”3

Scholars have identified ten ways of treating persons as mere things. THIS SERIES discusses each.

Reduction to Appearance

The objectifier treats the object primarily in terms of how it looks, or how it appears to the senses.

In 2023, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals attempted to restrict access to mifepristone nationwide at the behest of anti-reproductive health denists and doctors. One of the judges on the court, James Ho, issued a separate opinion in which he claimed that forced-birth doctors suffer an “aesthetic injury” when pregnant people end their pregnancies with medication. If people are allowed to access medication abortion, Ho reasoned, then forced-birth doctors won't get the opportunity to stick a sonogram probe into women’s vaginas and peep at 7-week embryos in their natural “habitat.”

“It’s well established that, if a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal,” Judge Ho wrote. “Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” and therefore, according to Ho, doctors “experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

To back up his bizarre (and downright creepy) assertion of “aesthetic injury,” Ho cited “multiple cases involving attempts to protect either wildlife or natural landscapes from harms that would diminish the viewing pleasure of nature lovers.”4 For example, Ho cited Sierra Club vs. Morton, a 1972 Supreme Court case “in which the environmental group sought to block construction of a ski resort in California’s Sequoia National Forest on the grounds that the resort would harm the ‘area’s aesthetics and ecology.’”5

[Judge Ho's opinion lead to a Strict Scrutiny podcast episode entitled “The Aesthetic Enjoyment of Other People's Uteruses.”]

“Objectification entails making into a thing...something that is really not a thing.”—Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, 1999, p. 218.

Give a Little Bit of Your Love

Judge James Ho's opinion objectifies both human embryos and the human persons who are pregnant with those embryos.

Ho refers to human embryos and early fetuses as “unborn children,” a term conveying the standard anti-choice idea that an embryo is equivalent to a freckle-faced kindergartener. — And yet, Ho reduced these children to things that exist to be viewed and be protected for the sake of the viewer's sensory enjoyment—like a Monet painting.

Precious, yes. But a precious object is still an object nonetheless.

And as for the living, breathing, thinking, and feeling human persons who are pregnant? Judge Ho likewise reduced them to viewable things. As one commentator observed:

Women are public parks in other words. Or pretty little birds. Or flowers that are lovely to look at when pregnant and in full bloom. And it would make certain people sad to not have that. You will be harming them if you deprive them of pregnancies to behold. A bountiful crop of full bellies stretching as far as the eye can see. Nature as it was meant to be.6

Making frequent use of words like view, image, and sight, Ho conjured up a legal argument wherein abortions cause aesthetic deprivation, abortion patients are akin to damaged natural landscapes or wildlife habitats, and anti-choice doctors who want to invasively gaze upon the interior crevasses of a woman’s body and “see women give birth against their will [are placed] on the same footing as conservationists who want to see gopher frogs before they disappear” from extinction.7

This is objectification by Reduction to Appearance. It occurs when the objectifier treats the object (the objectified human being) primarily in terms of how it looks, or how it appears to the senses, rather than as a full human person with thoughts, feelings, and inner life who is deserving of moral treatment by others.

Rhonda Garelick, a distinguished professor of English and journalism at Southern Methodist University, astutely observed that Judge James Ho's opinion “reveals a larger truth about the antiabortion movement. To construe abortion as a crime against the privilege of looking inside women is to construe them as objects offered up for the visual consumption, pleasure and, of course, control of others.”8 At the LA Times, she wrote:

Scopophilia objectifies women, turning them into visual surfaces to be looked at, embellished, augmented or reduced, perfected and consumed — in a word, commodified.
Ho’s opinion takes scopophilia to new depths, extending it below the surface of the skin into women’s bodily interiors, which he treats here as yet another category of viewable commodity, more subject to the controlling, pleasure-seeking gaze of medical providers than to the volition of the women themselves.
It’s no accident that this opinion pertains specifically to nonsurgical abortion. By virtue of being a pill, mifepristone can make abortion invisible, often obviating the need for medical imaging or pelvic exams and thereby eliminating visual access to the procedure. Mifepristone can also reduce or even eliminate visual access to patients themselves: In many cases, a woman can get a prescription without an office visit and take the pill in the privacy of her home.
Mifepristone in this way offers women a powerful mode of resistance to the kind of compulsory bodily visibility that Ho advocates. Perhaps that’s why the judge chose the seemingly bizarre grounds of “aesthetic injury” to argue against access to the drug. It allows him to reposition abortion in the very realm from which mifepristone effectively frees it: that of prurient visual surveillance.9

Research has repeatedly shown that when observers focus on a woman’s appearance, particularly her body, “they tend to perceive her as less characteristic of what it means to be human.”10

In studies, researchers found that drawing people's attention to a woman’s appearance—specifically, to her body rather than her face—“reduced the degree that she was perceived as having characteristics typifying human nature (i.e., that which separates humans from objects)”; hence, “objectified women are perceived as less than fully human.”11

Unfortunately, as scholars have observed, “anti-abortion propaganda often weaponizes images of highly feminine, visibly pregnant people.”12 This “romanticizes motherhood and foregrounds its importance as a tactic to subsequently dissuade people from seeking and having abortions, despite most abortions occurring in the first trimester before ‘baby bumps’ typically appear.”13

As such, scholars note, “anti-abortion propaganda exploits the appearance of pregnant bodies to reify idealistic notions of pregnancy that undercut the humanity of the pregnant person. Feminized baby bump iconography simultaneously perpetuates misconceptions about who has abortions and when they have them, all in favor of a pronatalist agenda.”14

These visuals are frequently “paired with infant and fetal images visually depicting pregnant people as vessels for fetuses,” rather than as full human persons with thoughts, feelings, and inner life who are deserving of moral treatment by others.15

Precious, romanticized objects, yes. But a precious object is still an object nonetheless.

Leave a Tip! 💰

This hyper-focus on the pregnant body results in the objectification of living, breathing, thinking, and feeling human beings by Reduction to Appearance, stripping them of the human qualities that differentiate people from objects.

Making persons into things may or may not be a conscious goal of those who agitate against reproductive health and human rights, but the perception of pregnant people as objects permeates their subconscious.

The result is still the same: policies treating humans as things.

As Sarah Jones at New York Magazine observed, “Abortion bans weren’t written for human beings. As written, they strip women of their humanity and reimagine them as vessels. A vessel is not a person. A vessel has no rights. A vessel is only useful as long as it is functional. When it is no longer fit for purpose, it is cast aside; there are plenty more where it came from.”16

HOMEWORK:

Review the 10 ways of treating persons as objects. Besides Reduction to Appearance, what other ways are people being treated as things in the Judge Ho's opinion and in the anti-choice visual propaganda discussed above? This activity will help train your brain to recognize objectification. Leave a comment below to help others recognize it, too.

rePro-Truth

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?