Obstetric Violence vs. The Insubordination of Eve’s Daughters: Embers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine

Frankenstein can be understood as Mary Shelley’s accusation of the usurpation of women’s reproductive capacity by a scientific father and has become a myth nurturing a ‘hideous progeny’ of multifarious literary expressions. Through the lens of Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, this essay explores Frankenstein’s inspiration for Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine to unravel the intergenerational rage of Eve’s daughters against patriarchal science, and the timelessness of Shelley’s rewriting of the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost, transfused from the nineteenth century to contemporary times of obstetric technology and violence against women. In sisterly unison, Shelley and Baines reveal how, yesterday and today, overreachers ravage pregnant/birthing patients and a Gothic son not ‘of woman born’, all of them converted into malleable matter in male hands. However, this essay examines how women reach power to avenge the law of the Mother, violated by unethical scientists.