A few weeks ago, I found myself with a burning desire to watch The Terminator. I love The Terminator for many reasons; it’s a perfect movie. It has easily adaptable lore but is itself very self-contained. It is smart and prescient about the pitfalls of our society’s over-reliance on technology, especially artificial intelligence. It is a beautiful story about the perseverance of humanity in a world that longs to erase it. It features a jaw-dropping series of handmade special effects, combining stop-motion animation, robotics and animatronics, and prosthetic make-up. It is a tight thriller, a moving love story, a meaningful sci-fi epic. It also features one of the greatest cinematic villains of all time. The Terminator. Tell your friends.
It’s also a story about motherhood, but from a perspective we do not often get in films: it’s the story of the last moments in a woman’s life before she becomes pregnant, becomes a mother.
We’ll see in T2 the transformation that our heroine, the normal woman Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), undergoes, after she realizes in T1 that she will give birth to the greatest hero of the 21st century. But in The Terminator we don’t get that, yet. We witness the final moments in Sarah Connor’s life that she lives alone—in her body, in the world.
A few weeks ago, I put together a small list of the coolest pregnant women in crime movies and TV. I didn’t include Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies, because, again, she’s not really pregnant during any of the major events in either T1 and T2.
Bur perhaps the fact that I’m super pregnant now propelled me to watch this movie, anyway. I last saw the movie as a teenager, so I had a very different set of takeaways this time around. In a way, The Terminator is a powerful metaphor for the reproductive lives of women, capturing the moment that a woman realizes that her body is about to become the home and host for someone else, the moment that she realizes her entire life will be about some other person she does not know yet. T2 is about how she rebuilds her own autonomy in the face of that; she’s not simply the hero John Connor’s mother, but a powerful warrior, herself. But T1 is about an ordinary woman realizing her life and body are about to grow and serve someone else.
This is a fascinating intervention, one that we don’t get from movies, often. My own pregnancy journey has been a process of realizing changes to my body and lifestyle that are, for lack of a better word, jarring. More than that I can’t really bike around the city in traffic, as I used to… the pregnancy symptoms I have been experiencing, especially entering the third trimester, have been debilitating. Every single thing I am used to, about my body and how I exist in it, has changed—and it’s all because of someone else, the new person living inside my body. I am in charge of keeping this little someone else safe, and I love this little someone else more than anything, but the experience of pregnancy (or at least my pregnancy) has felt like an offering of everything I have. I don’t feel robbed of my personhood, and yet I can understand how someone might.
It’s a strange sensation—being entirely myself and yet having a bodily addendum that heavily modifies the whole thing, like a secret codicil at the bottom of a contract or will. I prefer to experience my pregnancy not as a robbing of the self, and certainly not as becoming a simple host-body to a new creature, but as a building of myself, like Sarah Connor from T1 to T2. My pregnancy is showing me how strong and tough I am, how I can handle and survive much more than I ever thought I could.
The Terminator is also interesting, from a politically reproductive perspective. The entire film is about an entity (a non-human corporate-designed fascist robot) determined to decide Sarah’s reproductive fate for her. The Terminator is, after all, sent back from the future to kill Sarah before she has a chance to give birth to her son who will one day lead the resistance against the machines and save the world.
The Terminator is obsessed with Sarah’s unborn fetus. It doesn’t matter that he is sent to perform a kind of abortion, while many legislative policies in the US that seek to control women’s reproduction force women to have babies instead of not; the point is that the Terminator (who is, again, a robot), has one mission, which is to control Sarah’s body for here. Actually, it’s to kill Sarah’s body. Indeed, The Terminator does not care that Sarah will die; in fact, it’s the point—and as such, embodies the aggressive history of government and patriarchal regulation of women’s health options without their participation or consent, without caring about their own personhoods, and our current climate of numerous misogynistic women’s health laws that are being passed in our post-Dobbs country.
And, a reminder, the Terminator is a robot. Last week, Dr. Oz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Donald Trump announced in a panel on health in America that many rural counties in Alabama lack OB-GYNS, so “they’re actually having robots do ultrasounds on these pregnant moms.” The turn towards AI in numerous industries, as of late, is alarming, but perhaps none more alarming than this—the continued removal of humanity from medical interventions that need to recognize the equal humanity of women, and advocate for the lives and well-beings of pregnant women, not simply evaluate the development of the fetuses they carry. And, by the way, there are so few OB-GYNs in rural Alabama and other similar states in America because those states have made it illegal to perform life-saving or choice-based medical care for pregnant women.
The Terminator shows us so clearly a world that we do not want to live in, while also reminding us that we do already live in it. But its grain of hope is not only through ensuring that the future resistance leader John Connor will be born; it’s showing us a heroine who cannot be kept down by the aggression of an emerging corporate, patriarchal, anti-human world. After she gives birth, in the space between T1 and T2, Sarah will teach her son how to fight, how to strategize, how to be brave. And he will teach a generation of resistance fighters those same things.
The film presents us with a heroine who models the bravery and the strength of pregnancy and motherhood and how they stand in opposition to the rising tide of anti-women, anti-human sentiment. I’m not a mother quite yet, but Sarah Connor is standing with me, showing me how.
