FEMINISM AND ABORTION.
FEMINISM AND ABORTION
Pro-choice arguments, the author says, reflect the ambitions,
hypocrisies, and contradictions of contemporary feminism
Sandra Day O'Connor has observed that "Roe v. Wade is on a
collision course with itself." Justice O'Connor was referring to medical
advances since 1973 that make it easier both to destroy potential life and to
preserve it. Her meaning is vividly illustrated by those rare but disturbing
cases in which a second- or third-trimester abortion yields a living infant,
which must then be either killed or rushed to another part of the hospital for
the latest in neonatal care.
But Justice O'Connor could just as well have been referring to the
contradictions at the heart of contemporary feminism. Like the majority of
Americans, I have reservations about both the pro-choice and the pro-life
extremes. But I also feel that there is an imbalance between the degrees of criticism
aimed at the two sides: not enough attention has been paid to the twisted logic
of pro-choice rhetoric. This essay will try to redress that imbalance, by first
sketching the course of recent feminist history and then dissecting some of the
hypocrisies and contradictions used by pro-choice advocates to justify the
absolute right to abortion.
Contemporary
feminism began as a revolt against the traditional female role as it was
experienced by the generation of college-educated women who in the 1950s attempted
to make a full-time occupation of domesticity. To a large extent it was
inspired by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), which began as a
survey of Friedan's former classmates at Smith and grew into a polemic about
the psychological frustrations experienced by women who exchanged the
relatively egalitarian world of the college campus for the "comfortable
concentration camps" of middle-class suburbia. Restless and sometimes
envious of their husbands' careers, Friedan's "trapped housewives"
wanted to pursue the basically liberal goal of freedom and autonomy on an equal
basis with men. Soon a movement arose to break out of the stifling private
sphere inhabited by females and enter the breezy public forum dominated by
males.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Try as they would,
the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s could not extirpate the reality of gender
differences. For the radical fringe, the persistence of such differences was
proof that female oppression was the most deeply ingrained injustice in
history—"metaphysical cannibalism," Ti-Grace Atkinson called it. But
mainstream feminists did not feel drawn to this sisterhood, which was based on
hatred for the essential experiences of womanhood. Beginning in the universities,
many of them sought ways to accept gender differences without sacrificing
equality.
FROM EQUALITY TO SUPERIORITY
These efforts at first had an unassailable logic. Objecting that the
apocalyptic visions of the radicals dehumanized women as passive victims,
scholars in the field of women's studies began upgrading the image of
traditional womanhood in history, literature, and the social sciences. The
political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain describes the process this way:
"Another strain of feminist thought, best called 'difference
feminism,' questioned the move towards full assimilation of female identity
with public male identity and argued that to see women's traditional roles and
activities as wholly oppressive was itself oppressive to women, denying them
historic subjectivity and moral agency."
For some feminists, this upgrading led to a new acceptance of domesticity.
For others, it led to a new and more subtle radicalism, as they persuaded first
themselves and then the university that the differences between the sexes
extended to modes of thinking—not just in women's studies but in every other
subject, from aardvarks to zymology. And lest this new difference be confused
with the old one that relegated women to mental inferiority, a number of
scholars were on hand to suggest that the female mode was superior.
One influential book was the psychologist Carol Gilligan's In a
Different Voice (1982). Gilligan concluded, from a study of moral reasoning in
both sexes, that men reason from public-oriented ideas of individual rights and
fair play, while women reason from private-oriented ideas of responsibility and
caring for others. When the book was published, some of Gilligan's Harvard
colleagues observed that this distinction—between justice and mercy, broadly
construed—is as old as the Western philosophical tradition. At the same time,
other scholars were reminding feminists that an idealized notion of nurturing,
peaceloving womanhood was the keystone of both the nineteenth-century bourgeois
family and the "moral uplift" movement that spawned helping
professions like social work.
But these
comparisons were spurned by those academic feminists who preferred to believe
that social science had proved the existence of a separate, and morally
superior, female mind with a distinctive set of values. Once upon a time
university women had argued that scientific reason had no gender, and that
aesthetic imagination was androgynous. But no longer. It wasn't in their
interest. Instead, they had every incentive, material and otherwise, to join
the feminist guild and subscribe to this new strain of feminist thought—best
called "superiority feminism." Here feminism took an unfortunate
turn, because a sense of superiority is hard to control. It is one thing to
upgrade the image of heroines in Victorian novels, and quite another to adjust
your opinion of unliberated housewives, Bible-quoting ministers, and
conservative Republicans lobbying against the Equal Rights Amendment.
When it comes to politics, feminists still claim today, as Friedan
claimed in 1963, that the frustration of the few is shared by the many. Yet
even back in 1963 this claim was mistaken, because the peculiarly stifling
circumstances described in The Feminine Mystique simply didn't obtain for most
women. And today, despite a rise in female employment and a decline in family
stability, there are still a great many women who spend their married lives in
the same community where they grew up, who don't aspire to college and career,
and, perhaps most important, who don't envy their husbands' work experience.
The majority of men and women who must earn their living in ways that are not
especially stimulating or enriching still embrace the ideal (if not always the
reality) of women's providing for their families what Christopher Lasch has
called a "haven in a heartless world."
To sum up, in the family and the workplace feminists deny the legitimacy
of gender-based divisions of labor. "We are individuals," they
intone, "and our role in homemaking and breadwinning must be identical to
that of men." In the academy, however, feminists deny the possibility of
gender-free research. "We are women," they intone, "and our
values and thought processes are different from and better than those of men.
" For a long time this inconsistency showed up only when an especially
ornery antifeminist—or perhaps the house-husband of a professor of women's
studies—compared the two separate spheres. But today it shows up in the heat of
political debate, as pro-choice activists switch back and forth between the two
kinds of feminism to defend the absolute right to abortion. Few activists take
time to ponder the contradiction between a feminism that denies gender and one
that institutionalizes it. Like most political actors, they use rhetoric for
its persuasiveness, not its logic. But as I hope to show in my discussion of
pro-choice reasoning, doublethink is not all that persuasive.
WHO OWNS WHOSE FLESH?
The original pro-choice argument is rooted in the classical liberal
affirmation of every man's right to own his own body. Critical of liberalism
for its failure to extend this right equally to women, pro-choicers define
abortion as the essence of every woman's right to own her own body. In Abortion
& The Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker's 1984 study of attitudes on
both sides of the abortion debate, one activist put it this way: "we can
get all the rights in the world...and none of them means a doggone thing if we
don't own the flesh we stand in."
The obvious
objection to this argument is that a fetus is not just part of a woman's body
For a while pro-choicers tried to meet this objection by dehumanizing the
fetus. Some still do. For example, Jane Hodgson, the Minnesota physician who is
currently challenging that state's parental-notification law before the Supreme
Court, told The Washington Post that one way to reassure a patient after a
first-trimester abortion is to show her the pan of "uterine
contents." Dr. Hodgson also refers to the object of such a procedure as
"a few embryonic cells." By using such phrases the
seventy-four-year-old Hodgson is echoing the tones of an earlier era. In the face
of the passionate rhetoric of the pro-life movement, to say nothing of public
opinion, which has never wavered in its support of tighter restrictions on
later abortions (a position that does not deny the fetus humanity so much as
assign it greater weight as it becomes more likely to develop into a child),
pro-choice activists have nothing to gain from using such clinical and
dehumanizing language.
The more up-to-date pro-choice arguments are rooted in
superiority-feminism's elevation of the "private" morality of women
over the "public" morality of men. In this spirit pro-choicers define
abortion as an intensely personal experience that no man can judge. Bella Abzug
anticipated this view in 1980 when she attacked Jimmy Carter's "'personal'
objections to abortion" as "biologically inappropriate." With
this phrase Abzug reveals the bogus logic of declaring the subject of abortion
off limits to men. Since when has biology determined the arenas in which human
beings can make moral judgments?
In a similar vein pro-choicers define abortion as a family matter that
is no business of politicians'. Thus the claim, made before the Supreme Court
by the American Civil Liberties Unions that the Minnesota law requiring
notification of both parents in cases of teenage abortion "tramples on the
integrity of families. " And thus Planned Parenthood's insistence that
cuts in federal funding for abortion counseling are "an outrageous assault
on the American family."
To clarify the doublethink in such rhetoric, consider the language used
by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court last year in
ruling against two pro-life activists who tried to prevent an abortion on a
comatose woman named Nancy Klein. The abortion had been sought by Klein's
husband, in consultation with her parents and her doctor, in the hope that it
would increase her chances of recovery. The court said that "absolute
strangers to the Klein family, whatever their motivation, have no place in this
family tragedy."
Appropriate though this language may be to the unhappy case of Nancy
Klein, it is also misleading, in exactly the same way that the pro-choice
activists' pro-family, anti-government rhetoric is misleading. "Absolute
strangers" are not the only people who "have no place" in
abortion decisions. If Klein had not been in a coma, she would have been
legally entitled to decide between destroying and preserving this unborn life
without consulting either its father or its grandparents. All the pro-family
rhetoric in the world cannot change this blunt fact. After Roe v. Wade abortion
is not a family decision. It is the decision of one class of
individuals—pregnant women—who have been designated, in Orwell's pithy phrase,
"more equal than others."
THE MATERFAMILIAS
Granted, there
is nothing new about granting a class of people with life-or-death power over
their families. Such is the original definition of patriarchy. In ancient Rome,
for example, a great many political, economic, and religious powers resided in
the male heads of tribes, clans, and households. Among these was the power to
commit infanticide. If a newborn was deemed healthy and supportable by the
paterfamilias, it was initiated into the family with the proper rites. If not,
it was smothered or drowned.
In Rome infanticide was not considered murder, any more than abortion is
considered murder by the majority of Americans today. But the Romans regarded
infanticide as a very grave act, which is why it could be performed only by the
paterfamilias. In the sense that our present abortion law vests the pregnant woman
with the power to commit a similarly grave act, it's tempting to dub her the
"materfamilias." But of course she is nothing of the kind. The stern
powers of the paterfamilias were fused with stern duties, such as atoning for
crimes committed by the members of his household. In the organic metaphor we've
inherited from the Romans (by way of Christian views of natural law), the
"members" and the "heads" of families and other social
institutions are bound by ties so powerful that they can be severed only by a
kind of amputation.
Since the seventeenth century this organic metaphor has been challenged
by liberalism's depiction of social institutions not as organisms made up of
consanguine parts but as contractual arrangements between consenting
individuals. The feminists' complaint against liberalism is that it has never,
despite its contractual ethos, stopped conceiving of the family as an organic
institution. As the political philosopher Susan Moller Okin has put it,
liberalism still takes a "prescriptive view of woman's nature and proper
mode of life based on her role and functions in a patriarchal family
structure." That is why the chief goal of feminists like Okin is to
restructure the family as a totally contractual arrangement from which anyone,
but especially any woman, may withdraw at will.
But is this goal morally defensible? There's a very good reason why
liberalism has never stopped seeing the family as an organic institution.
Beginning with John Locke, liberalism has understood that not all human ties are
contractual—most notably the tie between a parent and a child. Locke
distinguished between legitimate political power, which may extend to life and
death because it derives from the consent of the governed, and parental power,
which may extend only to preserving the life of the child, because it does not,
and cannot, derive from the consent of the child.
This crucial distinction collapses every time pro-choice arguments
flip-flop between the language of individual rights and that of nurturant
femininity. Pro-choicers begin by asserting equal rights for women—a line of
reasoning that challenges the organic basis of family relationships. But equal
rights are not enough when it comes to abortion, a decision that must balance
women's rights against those of others, such as fetuses and family members. So
pro-choicers define women's rights as more than equal, on the grounds that
female decision-making partakes of a special moral wisdom. But what is the
source of that wisdom? Not women's character or achievement as individuals but
their membership in a class whose nature it is to care for others—a definition
of womanhood that is nothing if not organic.
BRING ON THE BULL
By such
maneuvering, pro-choice advocates can usually avoid admitting that the
relationship between a woman and a fetus is not contractual. But if not
contractual, then it must be organic—an outcome that leaves pro-choicers with
only two options. They can deny the humanity of the fetus, which (as we've
seen) is both unpopular and unproductive. Or they can change the subject.
Because the comparison between maternal and fetal consent favors the
fetus, the logical solution is to shift to a comparison that favors the
woman—that is, between the degrees of consent exercised by men and women having
sex. In its wisdom (which has remained remarkably consistent over the years),
public opinion tolerates legal abortion in cases of coercive sex, such as rape
and incest. But this consensus isn't good enough for those pro-choice activists
who have an overriding rhetorical need to stress female, as opposed to fetal,
helplessness. Their hypocrisy peaks when, after granting women life-and-death
power over the unborn, they depict sexual relations as beyond women's
control—in rhetoric that harks back to the old militant equation of sex and
rape, as expressed by the activist who told Kristin Luker that without
abortion, women would have "about as many rights as the cow in the pasture
that's taken to the bull once a year. "
This is not to suggest that the activists counsel sexual restraint. Like
most "progressive" people, they have a horror of appearing prudish.
Nor do they want to revive the old double standard that gave men more sexual
liberty than women. Yet their dislike of male irresponsibility makes it tricky
to advocate similar behavior in women. Perforce, they resolve the conflict by
taking the "me first" ethic of the sexual revolution and cloaking it
in the "caring" verbiage of superiority feminism. Here is Luker's
summary of the pro-choice view of sex:
"Because mobilizing such delicate social and emotional resources as
trust, caring, and intimacy requires practice, pro-choice people do not
denigrate sexual experiences that fall short of achieving transcendence. They
judge individual cases of premarital sex, contraception, and infidelity
according to the ways in which they enhance or detract from conditions of trust
and caring. In their value scheme, something that gives people opportunities
for intimacy simply cannot be seen as wrong."
Does this mean that when Hank Williams sang "Your Cheatin'
Heart," he was really singing about a practice mobilization of delicate
trusting and caring resources by a person given an opportunity for intimacy?
More likely, Hank meant that the human objects of trust, caring, and intimacy
shouldn't be batted around for practice, like so many interchangeable tennis
balls. Since the main purpose of such verbiage is to rationalize
self-indulgence, it's no wonder that such verbiage also dominates feminist
discussions of the higher morality of abortion.
FAMILY PICTURES
Take Carol
Gilligan's "concepts of self and morality" in a group of women
considering abortion. There's nothing objectionable about her claim that women
faced with unwanted pregnancies tend to weigh "selfishness" against
"responsibility." But there's plenty objectionable about her tortured
efforts to interpret abortion as always a responsible decision. According to
her discussion, the women who were Catholic concluded that the "honesty
and truth" of their own desires was worth more than the Catholic
"conventions that equate goodness with self-sacrifice." The single women,
mired in dead-end affairs with exploitative Don Juans, decided that destroying
their lovers' potential offspring was a way of affirming their self-esteem. And
one twenty-nine-year-old married woman reasoned that it was selfish to bear her
child and adult to abort it.
In Gilligan's view, a woman is not permitted to put the needs of other
people first, because "self-sacrifice" is the linchpin of female
oppression. Instead, she is expected to ascend to a higher level of enlightened
self-regard, where the act of putting her own needs first is tantamount to
striking a blow for women's freedom. But what if the other people involved are
also women? Consider the scenario of the pregnant teenager who decides, against
the wishes of her mother, to abort a female fetus. In the one instance, she is
depriving an older female of a grandchild. In the other, she is depriving a
younger female of life. Compared with such deprivations, the idea of striking a
blow for women's freedom seems pretty absract, impersonal, and public—rather
like Gilligan's stereotype of male moral reasoning.
The above scenario may not be typical, but neither is it as lurid as the
picture of the American family currently being drawn by pro-choice activists
opposing the various state laws that are trying, in the wake of the Supreme
Court's Webster decision, to restore the attenuated interests of other family
members in the life of the unborn. Again, the goal of pro-choice rhetoric is to
emphasize female helplessness. But because the battleground is now the family
itself, the rhetoric of abuse and violation gets applied to the parents of
minors seeking abortions. In a full-page ad in The New York Times, Planned
Parenthood explains "What's Wrong With Parental Consent" as follows:
"Indeed, after hearing evidence of family conflict and brutal violence, an
appeals judge wrote 'compelling parental notice...is almost always
disastrous.'"
Never mind the deliberate confusion of "parental consent" with
"parental notice." Just look at the model of family life offered by
pro-choice activists and their allies as the basis for law. On the one hand,
minors should have complete sexual license, because younger people need to
practice those all-important skills of trust, caring, and intimacy. On the
other hand, parents should be kept in the dark, because older people cannot be
trusted to refrain from brutal violence. A favorite variation on this theme is
the tale of the molesting father who murders his daughter after learning that
she is pregnant with his child. The activists don't want the law to make
provisions for these grim exceptions; they want it to enshrine them as the
rule.
FEWER FEMALES?
We now arrive
at the real legacy of feminist doublethink, with its contempt for the values of
the unliberated majority and its misplaced faith in the superiority of female
moral reasoning. Substitute "feminist superiority" for "female
superiority," and the actual tendency of the movement becomes clear. Not
only does feminist doublethink accord women the exclusive power to terminate
potential life while absolving them of any responsibility for having conceived
life in the first place; this doublethink also extends its influence, by way of
the helping professionals and judges under its sway, over the poor, the
confused, and the underaged, who are urged to heed the feminist message over
the advice of their own families.
Nor is this power being exercised in the name of a clearly defined
kinship group, as was the power of the Roman paterfamilias. Rather it is being
wielded in the name of all women, a category that includes not only the
majority of people who disagree with the pro-choice position on abortion but
also half the potential lives being aborted. It's a measure of feminist
fanaticism that only recently have pro-choice activists announced their unwillingness
to defend abortion as a method of sex selection. Perhaps it occurred to them
that sex-preferential practices have historically favored the male, and that by
sanctioning such abortions, they are quite likely causing fewer females to be
born. If this was their reasoning, then it's time to stand back and watch
feminism collide with itself.
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