Victorians Unborn: Revisionist Futures in Turn-of-the-Century Spiritualism

Spiritualism was notable for its insistence that even unbaptized children would go to heaven. But embedded in its theology was an even bolder idea: that the unborn child—the child that died before birth—would be born into, and grow up , in the afterlife. Situating spiritualist theology amid the history of biopolitics, this paper explores how Victorian ideas of futurity have shaped anti-abortion rhetoric. Spiritualism offered counterfactual futures of maternity to childless women, but in doing so it worked to decorporealize the maternal body, ensuring a dangerously long and literal afterlife for the Victorian idealization of motherhood. Instead of revisionist history, the "spirit-born" child gives us revisionist futurity —a politically potent form of the Victorian counterfactual that lives on into the twentieth century and beyond.