These bleak misgivings turned out to be prescient. As the writer Virginia Ironside wrote recently of her own youth in the Sixties: Armed with the pill, and with every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly.” And, Bachiochi argues, women consenting to unwanted sex was not the only downside of the pill.
Contraception may have reduced the rate of accidental pregnancy as a total proportion of casual sex, but the existence of contraception so radically changed social norms that much more casual sex took place. And contraception was only mostly effective – so the absolute number of accidental pregnancies went up. This in turn drove feminist demands for legal abortion — a practice Wollstonecraft, and most 19th-century feminists, viewed as abhorrent and indistinguishable from infanticide.
And as feminist campaigns to legalise abortion gathered steam, their arguments turned chiefly on personal autonomy. Betty Friedan argued in 1967 that a woman’s “right to control her reproductive process” was core to the “personhood and dignity of woman”. The feminist jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg went further, saying that the right to terminate a pregnancy was key to affording women “equal citizenship status”.
But this had repercussions for how our societies make sense of motherhood. In effect, Bachiochi argues, making “equal citizenship status” contingent on the power to end a pregnancy entrenched in law a Hobbesian view of the “state of nature”: a vision of “radically autonomous and self-interested male and female individuals”. Indeed, I’ve written on several occasions about the liberal world’s blind spots concerning motherhood, dependency and care. But on abortion, I’ve always been in the “safe, legal and rare” camp. So I found this book challenging, for Bachiochi makes a persuasive case that as long as we uphold women’s right to end a pregnancy, we conclusively favour the Hobbesian vision of selfhood over one that makes room for dependency and care.
As the pro-life feminist Clair de Jong put it in 1978, “Accepting the ‘necessity’ of abortion is accepting that pregnant women and mothers are unable to function as persons in this society”. US President Joe Biden’s recent description of mothers as “locked out of the workforce” by caregiving responsibilities is typical. Mothers are, in effect, illegible to the prevailing conception of personhood — which is based on market participation — except when we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realisation.
An unborn child is absolutely dependent on its mother, and she cannot be replaced. Within an atomised understanding of what humans are, we have no way of weighing competing interests in such a context. And if personhood relies on us having absolute autonomy over our bodies, we must begrudge any claim, however slight, of a dependent baby still contained in that body — lest its rights-bearing nature conflict with ours.
Polls consistently show us to be ambivalent on this question, across both sexes. More women than men believe life begins at conception, while in this 2017 poll, 41% of UK women supported reducing the gestation limit to 12 weeks or lower, compared to 24% of men.
We can only resolve this via positions most people find intuitively repellent, such as the claim that signs of trying to avoid pain aren’t evidence of life. Or even, as the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Peter Singer argues in Practical Ethics, that because “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time,” therefore “they are not persons”. If you’d told me, when I was grieving a pregnancy loss, that I was mourning “little more than cells and electrical activity“ I’d have punched you. And yet we nod along to this idea in other contexts, where doing so supports women’s bodily autonomy.
The atomised vision of personhood is nigh-on unchallenged today. So, many decades into the victory of autonomy over dependence, in the name of feminism, it’s easier to see why even Right-wing young women were unwilling to hear Bachiochi’s arguments. The Right may speak more warmly than the Left about family life, but while we grant personhood and citizenship on the basis of bodily autonomy, what sane woman would seek to deny those goods to her own sex?
Yet abortion rights cut to the heart of yet more contentious issues on the feminist Left. Here, bitter debates rage between those who denounce the marketisation of women’s bodies, for example in surrogacy or the sex industry, and those who defend such practices as potentially empowering and limited only by the need for individual consent. But most feminists on either side of even these fierce disagreements are unanimous on the need to protect a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy.
Bachiochi, though, makes an uncomfortable argument that cuts across both these positions. Nothing, she suggests, could more viscerally epitomise the conflict between the individualistic logic of the market, and a more communitarian one that values and centres dependency and care, than the question of abortion. A women’s movement that “regards abortion rights as equal citizenship rights”, Bachiochi suggests, has already conceded nearly the entire battle on valuing dependency: it has “surrendered, once and for all, to the logic of that market”.
And this means, in effect, that the central political demand of feminism is for women’s rights to enter a “marketplace” of notionally free, unencumbered individuals on the same terms as men. To compete in the workplace without asymmetrical reproductive handicaps; to live without strings. In other words, to be functionally indistinguishable from the most Hobbesian vision of men at their most radically rootless.
And from this vantage-point, even those feminists who resist the claim that “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” find their proposition fatally undermined if they support abortion. For if Bachiochi is right, then they are defending the distinction between the sexes while fiercely committed to the medical intervention most critical to collapsing the distinction between the sexes. Can we really protest the degradation of feminism into a campaign to free us from our biology, while digging our heels in to defend a vision of personhood that rests on exactly that? For 21st-century feminism, the question of choice poses some difficult choices.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeExcellent article Mary Harrington , thank you.
I have’nt read the book but it sounds as if Bachiochi and I hold similar views. Someone on another platform once said that the most subversive choice a woman in our society could make would be to choose motherhood and homemaking and I profoundly agree with that.
Both our neo-liberal Government and the Left (not a lot of difference) prioritise the market, both serve capitalism, and women are required to serve it too. Modern feminism is a con.
That’s only been the case in the last 50 years or so. Motherhood has been the default for millennia. And still mostly is.
It doesn’t have to be. We could focus on demanding that the government pay women for doing the most important job possible: raising and nurturing the next generation. Leaving women at the mercy of individual men is the PRIMARY reason so many women seek abortions. When you have to choose between poverty and an additional mouth to feed (which could harm the children you already have) most women will choose abortion – often by any means necessary.
If we truly value motherhood and unborn life, we will gladly pay for women to have and care for their babies. Otherwise, we need to shut up and sit down.
I do not think we are made to live well as independent individuals.
There is a lovely myth in Plato’s Symposium that at the creation of humans the gods thought them too great, so Zeus divided each human into a male half and a female half, which would need to find a way to work together to achieve wholeness.
It seems to me that social structures which encourage this cooperation (rather than enabling individual men or women to function more or less separately) are for the best.
What rubbish! I have never been dependent on a man in my life, including my own father, and have not lived with one for 35 years. Everything that I have worked for was to enable independent, solitary living. A clump of inconvenient cells would have been got rid of without a qualm.
The nonsense that you talk might benefit men, but it certainly doesn’t benefit women. Women who want to have children would be far better living in communities with other women. Mammals are not designed to live in male/female couples. Female herds are the norm.
It’s really telling, sad, and a little bizarre that your astute, well-written comment is downvoted here.
Maybe because I was an only child until the age of 15, and without brothers, there were no childhood activities, of the male OR female sort, which were denied me by my parents. I played baseball, climbed trees; I loved to mow the lawn, do all manner of yard work, chop wood, and lay cement. I also loved to cook and clean. When the family went fishing they left me on the jetties to build a fire and fry potatoes because I was prone to seasickness. When my sister came along at age 15, I took care of her and of our mother, who was very ill. I never considered the feminist view of a woman’s autonomy to be remotely questionable. And I never considered feminism to be anything BUT that viewpoint. Mary Harrington, describing feminism’s critical inflection point through Erika Bachiochi’s threatened de-platforming, is spot on for me. The feminism that tries to reduce women to clones of men is a sick and soulless world view. It is unnecessary, and it is Wrong with a capital W.
Reproduction is an aspect of humanity, not solely in the woman’s camp. Wollstonecraft is right to include the male member of the species. The message to girls that they must be equals is parental malpractice and socially suicidal. Removing the pregnancy risk from sexual activity is distortion, and as a result we have lots of porn and degraded values. We are in a sorry situation with the state of affairs between men and women. Our families and society suffer because of it.
Feminism is the road to progress, but not the type of feminism that dehumanizes reproduction and commercializes a woman’s role in society.
Apart from your last sentence I agree with everything you say. I think ‘progress’ is a mirage.
But change is a reality.
And constant.
And often confused with ‘progress’ which I agree is a mirage.
My child would have died if a C-section hadn’t been available to me so – no – I do not believe that progress is a mirage. Modern medicine save his life.
I’m thankful that both you and your child survived, and I hope you both recovered well and are healthy. But that is not what I meant by progress. I think scientific and medical discoveries are the best of humanities endeavours, and do not have the value they deserve. My comments where directed at the vapid and the fashionable fads of philosophy which can grip society on occasions, almost to a fanatical degree. The sort that attack medical and scientific advances and deny them to detriment of the whole world, golden rice, nuclear power, vaccinations. All things that will improve and/or save the lives of millions.
To clarify, progress is a loaded term, it implies a goal, but that goal is not stated, and it is not thought by everyone to be the same goal. We are not moving towards anything, we merely change, and often that change is good ( to my mind) when people are healthier, better fed and happier.
That’s interesting point of disagreement. Is progress a ‘mirage’ in spite of, or because of, feminism ?
Re-reading your comment I realise now there is another fundamental difference between us – I am not a feminist.
In my view Feminism is an offshoot of Marxism, both of them arising out of industrialisation + the consequent demands and rewards of capitalism, and both are distorted visions of reality. Industrialisation has resulted in incredible technological progress. But moral progress ? No. Therefore in answer to your question progress is a mirage in spite of feminism (imo).
I think on the basis of studying history and observation that women have always been as autonomous in their own female way as men. And that autonomy is much more dependent on character and force of personality, in either sex, than we give it credit for.
Both women and men have had to live at the mercy of those who are more powerful. that is as true today (though less onerous than it used to be) as it ever was.
Nevertheless I think you and I seem to agree in some ways, on the basis of your other comments further down.
Have you read or watched any of James Lindsay’s work regarding the functional marxist framework of the identity politics ideologies? Using this framework, he identifies marxist feminism and then describes it as ‘sex marxism’. A good intro is in this podcast;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNW79czfibw&t=165s
Women have not been “as autonomous,” or else they wouldn’t have been sold off in marriage at 11to men three times their age, thrown on widow pyres in India, had their feet crushed beginning at age 4 in China to satisfy the fetishes and standards of Chinese men, had their clitorises removed in Africa so they couldn’t experience sexual pleasure (a function of male jealousy) and even been infibulated so their husband could open them with their p***s or a knife (and don’t tell me circumcision is the same, because it enhances pleasure after the initial pain), or forced into multiple pregnancies that killed them, or beaten and raped with impunity by their husbands, or publicly dunked and tortured because they complained about it, or torturned and burned at the stake because they indeed TRIED TO BE AUTONOMOUS.
You clearly have a very distorted sense of “history” if you think it’s the record of female autonomy.
deleted.
Great article
“The central political demand of feminism is for women’s rights to enter a “marketplace” of notionally free, unencumbered individuals on the same terms as men.”
Yep been saying it for years. Whole purpose of feminism is to get women out of the home, and servicing the market. Added benefits include reducing family and therefore societal cohesion and weakening structures.
Many women who work now do silly email jobs, but have far too much power. There is a direct correlation between more women in the workplace and silly decisions being made and silly policies being adopted, with no thought or understanding of the long term effects of such policies.
Women in the main are much better suited to taking care of their immediate family. Men are much better suited to taking care of the tribe, ie society. Feminism pretends this isn’t the case – it’s a silly ideology for silly people.
Silly women too stupid to realise that the slogans they chant about “my body my choice” and “get your rosaries off my ovaries” were dreamt up for them by men in boardrooms. The dopamine hits from shouting angrily about the patwiarchy will provide cold comfort for an aging lonely population who has lost he ability to reproduce itself.
Very well put. One of the unfortunate consequences of feminism is the bleak emotional future it promises for both women and men, many of whom will have no family lives to speak of during and after their middle years. Not many of us are prepared for the solitude that we will soon have to face.
I think this is a very important point. When I was a kid I was surrounded by cousins and family at Christmas and throughout the year. Today Christmas is a very small affair and is going to get even smaller.
I welcome solitude. I was furious about lockdowns but woke up every morning thankful that I was on my own in my own house rather than trapped with a man and a ghastly ‘family’. Get it into your heads that some women don’t want any of the ‘marriage and family’ rubbish.
Bleak? I’ve been a radical feminist since 20 and have been pursued by hundreds of men (thousands, if online platforms are included). I’m a proud mother of exceptionally thriving, contributing, high-achieving children and gave up a promising academic career to make them my priority, while also doing fulfilling, public service part-time work until my health precluded it. I’d rather be on my deathbed with children and grandchildren than have 150 more publications on my vitae. How empty.
I agree that contemporary male/female relations are horrible, but I put a lot of that down to misogyny, particularly the extreme woman-hating driving and then furthered by pornography and prostitution. I do think that late 20th century market forces–whether worked out in smoky boardrooms or just a collection of opportunistic decisions–exploited for lower wages, for men and women, the early gains of feminism, which were mostly to get battered women away from their batterers, prevent stranger, date, and marital rape, and protect women from _severe_ sexual harassment in the workplace. And I never thought sexual “liberation” liberated females, except from being pressured to have sex and then having to marry the asshole in high school or college whom you’re now so thankful you never, ever married.
The stereotypes some of you folks have about feminists are ridiculous.
How many men are saying quietly to themselves, ‘if only all women were like Annemarie’?!
Ha, Ha ! Andrew I’m sure many men are saying this. But as a woman I can also agree wholeheartedly! And I consider myself a feminist in every way. But I have a lucky perspective. I was fortunate enough to be able to experience a 15 year stay-at-home motherhood of 4 children and a fulfilling and financially secure career.
It’s also important to realize that what we are pushing here is personal, individual autonomy in the service of authenticity, whether that authenticity is male or female.
A lot more, I’d lay odds, than are saying ‘If only all women were like Caroline Watson.’ If it comes to that, I suspect that very few women would wish to emulate Caroline.
“Many women who work now do silly email jobs, but have far too much power. There is a direct correlation between more women in the workplace and silly decisions being made and silly policies being adopted, with no thought or understanding of the long term effects of such policies.” I read this paragraph out to my husband, as it appears to describe the entire HR department of the company he works for. They are almost exclusively women.
Yes I work in HR and it is predominantly female but pushes the idea of ‘diversity’ entirely without irony. Although I don’t object to some professions being more male and female dominated HR has become so powerful it disproportionately favours what’s good for women over men. However it also favours mothers over single women. Mothers receive massively more benefits than non-mothers including almost unlimited time off, job security, financial incentives and just a general expectation of flexibility around school opening times, sickness, school plays etc. Yet they also still expect to get promotions and pay rises like the full timers do.
I can add that more women in the workplace has contributed to a skewered perspective in policies all around. Women have a certain perspective because of their innate function as child bearers and nurturers, however, this perspective might not be the best for running society. What I’m saying is I feel that with women taking on more and more positions of power, I see policies and attitudes that treat people as children who must be protected, sometimes even against their wishes. And the public, having been brought up by women and men who don’t understand male strengths, lap it up, eager and content to be protected. And women have their own pathologies too, their own shadows. So we’ve just moved from a male pathology to a female one by appointing women to all the major and minor positions of power.
I agree on principle but I would never remove the autonomy of women (or men) to choose their own path in life. Motherhood is not for everyone (indeed some should be actively prevented from it) and we ain’t running out of humans anytime soon. Forced motherhood is as bad as missed motherhood.
If you want sex, you want to reproduce. But you won’t admit it because the new world view has us all convinced sex is for pleasure and you should be able to do it as much as you want, consequence free. But that’s not true and never has been. Sex has many consequences, emotional and physical. Sex has a purpose and to deny its purpose is to deny reality and nothing good comes out of denying reality.
What absolute rubbish. I have never wanted an ‘immediate family’ and want nothing to do with people who happen, by an accident of blood, to be ‘relations’. I don’t ‘take care’ of anyone and never intend to. Everything that I have ever worked for has been to enable independent, solitary living, and that began long before I knew the word ‘feminism’. Living with my obsessive mother for 18 years was enough. She would have been far better employed using her considerable brain in a professional career instead of pathologically obsessing about her children.
Wasn’t the premise of Catch-22 that the military is full of “silly” men who like to dress up in uniforms, push paper, and get other men killed?
Wasn’t WWI largely driven by the silly military obsessions of 18th-19th century Germanic culture, where males became obsessed with uniforms and ranks and ribbons and punctilious rules and a large European war on paper that ended up with millions dead and lead to even greater horrors of the Soviet Revolution, fascism, and World War II?
I agree that what I call “Meerkat Manor”–any female dominated profession, including nursing, teaching, HR, AND Colleges of Education–can create all sorts of cultural distortions, just like male-dominated ones can. I think the issues are 1) bureaucracies that become self-propelling and 2) human, not male or female, nature, in which some people enjoy exercising power and even harm over others out of their own sadistic impulses.
Heather Heying, evolutionary biologist, has been writing more recently about this–women have our own power structures, and only ideological feminists (I was one of them for about 10 minutes, until I saw that women in these movements could be just as shitty as men) think that women would exercise power “better.” Ideally, we have a mix of backgrounds–a TRUE diversity of viewpoints and talent that isn’t there through affirmative action but through true merit–where these impulses balance each other.
Ibram Kendi is happy making bank off of CRT, and plenty of women can be ferocious war-mongers.
Don’t know what it’ll take to get a true diversity in leadership who are only uniform in having exceptional competence….I won’t hold my breath.
I don’t disagree with you, but I do find one thing in your argument contradictory, if the “whole purpose of feminism, is to get women out of the home, and servicing the market”, but yet “many women who work now do silly email jobs, but have far too much power”. So why did men try to get women in the workforce if they don’t really need them there? You do say feminism was dreamt up by men in boardrooms, no?
“Bachiochi makes a persuasive case that as long as we uphold women’s right to end a pregnancy, we conclusively favour the Hobbesian vision of selfhood over one that makes room for dependency and care.”
This is the point the question turns on and a mirror image of what Ruth Bader Ginsberg was saying.
In effect women have to choose abortion to have the autonomy needed if they want to live and behave like men. Practically there is no alternative. What feminism of all shades and times has failed to recognise is the cost of making this trade.
The cost is to children and to society. The mother is irrelevant as an autonomous being as her role is purely to sacrifice herself for the good of others. Just as men traditionally sacrificed themselves in war and manual labour to protect those they love. It is a trade off, yes. But perhaps a worthwhile one if we want a functioning society.
Perhaps there is another question. What is the underlying rationale for women wanting to live and behave like men?
I remember reading something Kathleen Stock wrote in which she mentioned the term “subordinate”. I think it was in the sentiment that women were seen as subordinate to men. Is that one reason for wanting to live and behave like men – to eradicate that relationship as they see it?
Thanks, Mary, as always for such insightful dissection of contentious topics. It’s strange how individual bravery has become speaking the obvious truth knowing one will face howls of rage from enforced ideological viewpoints.
Surely our biological asymmetry is what makes us both self-consciously human yet also makes humanity interesting. Imagine how bland it would be if reproduction was by cloning without human love and challenge: indeed – blood, sweat and tears! But by divorcing sex from love and commitment to the consequences of that love, it becomes a selfish right; and rights are interpreted only for personal benefit.
Ideology only ever seems to dehumanise and when accompanied by powerful semantics from people like Peter Singer also to deceive. Being human also entails privileges: one of which is the power to create another human; and then to love and care for them so they too grow to value their own humanity.
“For 21st-century feminism, the question of choice poses some difficult choices.” Exactly, and most of us know that it is a complex choice – there’s no perfect choice in a life that can never be perfect. For example, we know that if abortion isn’t legal and safe, then it will be illegal and unsafe. We know this because we remember what it was like before it became legal and safe.
“A women’s movement that “regards abortion rights as equal citizenship rights”, Bachiochi suggests, has already conceded nearly the entire battle on valuing dependency”. But that’s simplifying it too much – the decision to abort is often based on the mother knowing that she isn’t in the position to properly care for a dependent child, which, in a way, shows a high value being placed on dependency/responsibility.
The author seems to have some kind of Roussean fantasy about people being naturally communitarian and good but corrupted by modern society.
Whereas I’d say if people acted more communally in the past it was out of mutual self-interest created by insecurity and poverty. Selfishness, greed and manipulation are as much a part of human nature as our socialness – and we tend to limit our communal nature to those we know well in any case – as literature since the beginning of writing shows. We are divided beings, from that comes much of our internal conflicts.
Society has always been an ever evolving compromise and debate between different interests. The old communitarianism had great benefits, which we are lacking today, including a sense of belonging, shared values and neighbourliness but it could also be stultifying, regressive and akin to rule by curtain twitching mob. Swings and roundabouts
“For example, we know that if abortion isn’t legal and safe, then it will be illegal and unsafe. We know this because we remember what it was like before it became legal and safe.”
Do we? In the UK, this was shown to be massively overstated according to a Report to Government (by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, published in the British Medical Journal of April 2, 1966) not long before the ’67 Act was passed (on a private member’s bill backed by Govt. of course, intended to deny the electorate a say via a manifesto promise, as in the case of the Death Penalty, which was overwhelmingly popular (never less than 60% in polls), 2 years earlier).
The upshot of the report was that the prevalence of dangerous emergency health conditions being treated by hospitals which would be expected in the case of a widespread trend of ‘back-street’ abortions carried out by unqualified people in unsafe conditions did not exist.
That would be interesting to read – I wonder how good the data was, since it was an illegal act, which surely meant people wouldn’t have volunteered their accounts of bad experiences.
Not all abortions were unsafe since many of them were done by doctors ‘after hours’. They charged a lot – they had a lot to lose if caught – but did provide safe abortions for those able to afford them. As usual, it was the poor who had no option but the ‘backyard abortion’ and suffered the results, privately. One of my neighbours, when I was growing up, was a backyard abortionist (I can assure you it was a very nice suburb!) and he killed a 17 year old girl, so of course that case became known. But a lot of it wasn’t quite so public.
“But a lot of it wasn’t quite so public.”
Precisely. It was ‘assumed’ as a propaganda tactic by those who were pushing abortion. If it never was ‘public’ how could it be summarised or quantified?
Ask older women about people they knew who had abortions before it was legal.
As I remember, one of the most powerful things that helped swing the debate in favor of decriminalisation (in Australia) was when a lot of very ‘respectable’, well-known older women came forward to the media and said that they had had an abortion, and why. Up ’till then there was kind of a ‘bad girls who got what was coming to them’ attitude about abortion, but they destroyed that attitude by the example of who they were and how they had lived their lives. It was really brave, really admirable for those women to do that, in those times.
Wow! Fantastic article providing insights on women being defined by reproduction/caring that I’d intuitively felt but never tried to put into a logical argument.
Thanks for this.
Agreed 100% and thanks to Mary for calling out that appalling old sham J J Rousseau whose writings disfigured the 18th Century.
The most obvious feminist case against abortion is that a clear majority of the victims are female, due to sex selective abortion…
Sex selective abortion is, I believe, illegal
Thanks to feminism, chauvinists can now have endless indiscriminate sex with female wage slaves, not pull out, and then text them from some new girl’s bed telling them that they are powerful queens as they sit in the Planned Parenthood lobby waiting to have a hoover jammed into their womb. True empowerment.
Harsh but true
This is the BEST description of the modern world I have ever heard. Amen.
And you’ve just described perfectly how men STILL run the world, despite feminism. I honestly think feminists are just women brainwashed by men.
Reminds me of how Wollstonecraft’s religious convictions are routinely sidelined and offer an alternative to equality in the marketplace of, as she insisted, equality before God.
The tenor of this interesting article is, however, about people on all sides telling other people what they should do with their own bodies is it not?
Terence, you missed an important detail: it takes 2 people to make a baby. Maybe you’d like to see paperwork executed prior to the sex act ? To wit: a release signed by the man that the woman has the legal authority and capacity to abort the baby if the sex act results in pregnancy ?
But a couple still shouldn’t be told by others what to do with their own lives. Personally my wife and I devotedly brought up our kids ( and still are emotionally though both are in their thirties and hugely successful etc) in a devoted marriage. I personally disapprove of absent fathers, blended families and the rest. Bringing up kids means slog and love. That’s it. That said, I’m not about to get on a bandwagon about others’ private lives. The word is ‘private’.
When will feminists see babies as human beings?
I thought the same thing and I’m more the pro choice side of the argument. When I was young abortion rights were fought for as a limited but necessary evil. Modern feminists seem to believe that rights are to be celebrated and maximised no matter what.
Here’s the real issue: women have always either had abortions or killed unwanted babies shortly after birth.
Abortion and infanticide have always been with us, and is far more common in countries where abortion is illegal.
You can rail against abortion all you want, but you won’t stop women from aborting their pregnancies.
In Texas, women have been crossing the border into Mexico for years to buy the ulcer drug Misoprostol, which induces abortion. The 6 week anti-abortion bill will make no difference to them.
Here are the real choices: make it easier for women to care for the children they have, or deal with a large number of safe legal abortions, or an even higher number of unsafe illegal abortions.
It’s ridiculous to talk about ending abortion by making it illegal. Women figure out how to abort unwanted pregnancies one way or another.
We can reduce and even eliminate abortion by making sure women have all the social support they need to care for themselves and whatever children they have. Otherwise, our only choice is to make abortion more dangerous and deadly. That is neither pro-life nor feminist.
If it’s illegal, it’s harder to obtain. If it’s harder to obtain, it makes people spend more time thinking. Maybe some will change their minds and not regret a knee jerk reaction.
Is this a typo ? “Mothers are, in effect, illegible ( INELIGIBLE ?) to the prevailing conception of personhood ” It’s central to the ideas so might want to correct.
Another brilliant article by Mary Harrington!
Good article. The Singer quote is poisonous. So he believes babies are not aware. The same was said of women and non white races a few hundred years ago. These views are the origins of evil.
Babies are aware, week old blastocysts are not.
I suspect that the real problem is not one of feminism or abortion but a political disconnect between the Real World and the Conventional World.
The Conventional World is something we (societies, families, individuals) broadly agree on. The Conventional World does not have to agree with the larger Real World – we can believe in all sorts of things, some sacred, some profane, some lunatic, but occasionally we agree on things which don’t mesh together and spend hours and hours trying to square the circle.
So when we try to square certain versions of feminism with certain versions of abortion it cannot be done. A hint that some deeply held beliefs are opinions rather than factual perhaps?
AC, it is a fact that some versions of the Real World are objectively unhealthy and amoral. If you are suggesting that we tailor our Conventional World values to accommodate the Real World we live in, then I would have to disagree. Before the internet, it was easy to say “live and let live.” We could make a decision not to have TV in our homes and raise our children as children, and not as future crass-creature-commodities. I was able to raise my children in a more Conventional World, but where will my grandchildren be raised ? In the distasteful Real World where boys are allowed to be girls at the age of 12 ? Where going to public school is basically an indoctrination into the Socialist Apparatchik? Sorry, I’ll have none of that.
You are reading too much into my comment. I’m not saying that we should not have Conventional World morals – they are generally a good thing for societies. I’m saying that our moral elaborations are not guaranteed to mesh together because they are human constructs and subject to change or fashion.
In the Real World, yes, it is true that some folks try to pass off opinions as fact. That doesn’t prevent or preclude society at large from adopting a mutually agreeable code of behavior. Abortion has been around for millennium but it’s criminalization or regulation is relatively new in modern history because of technology.
I guess you could say that it’s the Real World which spawned the Roe V Wade decision and the Conventional World that is trying to minimize the harm done by the so-called ‘Right to Abortion’. And in order to do this, we recognize that what has changed are the Facts on the Ground.
Society should set higher expectations to aspire to, not dwell with the bottom feeders and the bigotry of low expectations
Thank you Mary for an excellent thought provoking article. I worry that as a male my views are instantly dismissed and yet what disturbs me is the value assigned to the unborn to women who want a baby and those who do not. On the one hand it is a person on the other it is just cells. It feels as if the market economy has an inbuilt evil within it where personhood is denied.
But that’s the point. A woman who wants a baby will always see it as a baby. To a woman who doesn’t want one it isn’t a baby YET. Time is of the essence while that baby is actually only a blastocyst. Women don’t routinely enjoy abortions, it’s not done on a whim or like cutting a toenail. Early is best. I agree that morally it is becoming too routine and too many young women are lax with contraception as well as poor partner choice in the quest to be ‘equal’ with men by trying to become like men. But it’s ultimately their responsibility whether they like it or not. One of the many problems with the abortion debate is emotive use of the word ‘baby’. A blastocyst is not a baby and neither is a 6 week old foetus. Many pregnancies spontaneously end early on and are barely noticed. Nature has designed it that way. There is no absolute on this question. Abortion is not always ok no matter what and no abortion at all is not ok either. The compromise position we have in the UK I think is fairly well balanced, unlike much of the debate surrounding this topic which is all emotion.
We should not be in a situation where women choose abortion for purely economic reasons but, mostly, we’re not. Single, underclass women, with no regular partner and no job don’t have abortions; they have children who are brought up dependent on the taxpayer with no aspirations to do anything different and no ability to try. Those women don’t even abort children with severe disabilities because they have been brainwashed by sentimental rubbish in the tabloids about ‘disabled kiddies’ and a disabled child means more money from the taxpayer and a get out of work free card for the rest of their miserable lives.
Women who have abortions are the responsible ones. The ones who know that a particular man would not be a good father and that they could not love his child. The ones who do not want to bring up children in state-dependent poverty and their own misery. The ones who are intelligent enough to know what the pressures and resources required to bring up a seriously disabled child would do to their marriage and their other children. The ones who know that they don’t have the energy to bring up a menopause baby.
In most cases, abortion is not a form of contraception for irresponsible and promiscuous young single women. They have babies. That is the problem that needs to be addressed.
You just contradicted yourself though. To you being responsible means getting a good job and a career, so you can’t have a baby, it gets in the way of good job and a career, aka money, so it is about economics.
Also responsible women don’t have sex with losers who would make bad fathers. Responsible women don’t need abortions. So your idea of responsible is messed up. If you want to focus on your career, then don’t go sleeping around. That can come after you are set up with a good job.
Should society provide access to medical procedures for those who refuse or neglect to take protection…? I’d be yes in both cases…
Yes, irresponsible people should not perhaps be parents
Thank you Mary. I have thought some of these things but distrust myself and don’t dare
I am not sure how the right to kill an innocent human being can ever be used to support the humanity of the decision maker. At a minimum we should pray that the decision never have to be made and, if the decision is made, that the decision maker(s) ultimately find peace in eternity.
I’ve been trying to say this, badly, for 20 years. Began a thread about it on the old GenderCritical subreddit and was pounced on immediately by a crowd of radical feminists whom I thought understood that the Enlightenment notion of “self” is based on a man’s bodily experience and that we have been grossly limiting ourselves thereby.
Sounds like an amazing book. She raises amazing points. I don’t think we can get there overnight–not with the untrammeled sexual rage at women exacerbated by international sex trafficking and widely available violent pornography–but I think it’s a vision that should be slowly nurtured over the next 30 years.
Thank you so much for your work, as usual, Mary.
The flaw in this argument, of course, is that the pro-life position is itself predicated on the idea of the fetus as an atomized individual, an entity with rights of its own that stand apart from the rights of its mother. Both sides of the abortion debate are infused with a deeply Hobbesian view of humanity, primarily because liberalism is itself a close analogue of Christianity. It’s an attempt to uphold Christian values without the actual God – the most salient value being that we are all independent actors, all of us endowed with free will and all of us created equal in the eyes of the lord. That pregnant women, uniquely, should be excluded from this idea of personhood (even as their fetuses are granted it) has little to do with a rejection of individualism and far more to do with the increasingly ruthless battle for power between the sexes.
The flaw in this argument, of course, is that the pro-life position is itself predicated on the idea of the fetus as an atomized individual, an entity with rights of its own that stand apart from the rights of its mother. Both sides of the abortion debate are infused with a deeply Hobbesian view of humanity, primarily because liberalism is itself a close analogue of Christianity. It’s an attempt to uphold Christian values without the actual God – the most salient value being that we are all independent actors, all of us endowed with free will and all of us created equal in the eyes of the lord. That pregnant women, uniquely, should be excluded from this idea of personhood (even as their fetuses are granted it) has little to do with a rejection of individualism and far more to do with the increasingly ruthless battle for power between the sexes.
I’m not sure why Hobbes is being used as a strawman here. His vision of human nature and society without the threat of ultimate violence holds up a great deal more than insipid calls to inherent human goodness or communitariamism.
Yes, we do favour our extended family circle and Hobbes wouldn’t deny that. His vision of h o m o homini lupus is between men if different tribes. He noted the collapse of Leviathan with the end of the Roman empire and the struggles that emerged. Go outside our small circle of close contacts and see how people treat each other. Look at any premodern tribe and see how they act, or indeed modern states within the anarchy of international relations.
This is precisely why (as Machiavelli noted) men have had to be skilled in vice and well as virtue and women were relegated to the kind of situation the author complains about in her analysis of women in Rousseau’s work. These ideas to ‘improve men’ just seem proposals for a more suffocating and authoritarian form of feminisation that surely cannot be socially stable.
‘Even within a marriage, this group declared, men should remain sexually continent except where a woman was willing to become pregnant.’ This in particular seems to me laughably naive, a ridiculous idealism that ignores that which historically women need to exchange to men for their protection in a harsh world: an preposterous proposal which only rebarbative middle class harridans disconnected from the harsh realities of human existence could dream.
You’ve kinda summed up a male view of the world there. Maybe try and see a different perspective through the fog of patriarchy?
Perhaps, but he’s dead on the money here.
Why?
Mary certainly made no attempt to put a male view. In fact her viewpoint was exclusively and unapologetically feminine. Why shouldn’t Ferrusian put an equally one-sided male view?
In fact he doesn’t put a one-sided male view. He takes the Marys’ (both Harrrington and Wollstonecraft) assertions and critiques them by showing they are ridiculous in a society which contains men and women partnering together.
The reality, of course, is that men and women do live together in social groups and have to live together. Mary’s view is unrealisitic as Ferrusian says. Women’s sexual situation, drives and purposes, like men’s, always exist in relation to the other sex’s situation, drives and purposes.
Ferrusian Gambit elaborates here on his reply to Mr. Hamilton. I disagree with FG that the choice is binary: between insipid calls for communitarianism and the absolute fending off of vice and violence through the emasculation of the male of the species. When the choices are framed as this binary, people stop processing the gray areas. We absolutely NEED to process the gray areas of the question, which is where healthy feminism stops and unhealthy social dysfunction begins. We can legitimize both objectives – the autonomy of women in the context of allowing men to be male. As a mother of 3 sons and 1 daughter, I wouldn’t want such consequences as FG envisions.
I can allow that if we take Wollstonecraft at the extreme, requiring male sexual abstinence totally at the behest of his mate, would be unfair, and yes, even laughable. So if we are to be supportive of the social good of marriage, the gray areas MUST be processed within a marriage and across the generations. I don’t know the particulars of my grown children’s pacts with their partners, and these are private anyway. But I do think they learned something from the mistakes of my generation. My 3 straight sons, all well within marrying age, are, so far, skipping their first marriages.
Agree these either/or propositions are infantile
I am a woman and agree with your statement on :‘Even within a marriage, this group declared, men should remain sexually continent except where a woman was willing to become pregnant.’ This in particular seems to me laughably naive, a ridiculous idealism
So she is forced to keep the baby from the fling with the druggie trumpet player and never have those 3 beautiful children with her wonderful husband.
She had sex with the druggy Trumpet player. This is a wake up call for women to be more chosy.
I have been saying this all along. The world still loves men more than women. We once thought men should go to work and women should stay home and raise babies. And since men were making the money, we saw that gender as the successful one and the women as oppressed and immediately women wanted to become just like men. Being pregnant, something only a woman can do became a burden. Children in general are seen as a burden. They get in the way of wealth. Money is the root of all evil. Always will be. Men make the money and have been put on a pedestal. Creating more life and more humans and strong family bonds IS ACTUALLY more important, but here we are in America.
I have been saying this all along. The world still loves men more than women. We once thought men should go to work and women should stay home and raise babies. And since men were making the money, we saw that gender as the successful one and the women as oppressed and immediately women wanted to become just like men. Being pregnant, something only a woman can do became a burden. Children in general are seen as a burden. They get in the way of wealth. Money is the root of all evil. Always will be. Men make the money and have been put on a pedestal. Creating more life and more humans and strong family bonds IS ACTUALLY more important, but here we are in America.
On the crucial question of when, if ever, the fetus becomes a person, the feminist position is that no one has standing to decide that question, for purposes of the law, except the woman carrying it. Who else should have a say? You? Me? A crowd of people carrying signs and yelling? Sure, if the woman wants to take into account the opinions of her partner, her family, the Pope, or whoever, she’s free to do that; but the final decision is hers. So those women who hold that personhood begins at conception are not wrong, regarding their own pregnancies. However, they can’t speak for all women.
Even to use the phrase “unborn child” is to take a position on a question that has not been decided and on which you have no say, unless it’s your pregnancy. The author should be more careful.
In the future, the artificial womb in combination with advanced AI sex dolls will disassociate male from female to a large degree for a significant percentage of the population.
Technology will eventually provide women with what they want and these debates will become historical noise.
and nostalgia…..
Sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me