Reflections on 'Pro-Choice' (was Re: Butler, Nussbaum, Paglia)

Liza Featherstone lfeather32 at erols.com
Sat Feb 27 13:21:39 PST 1999


Yoshie wrote:


>Why noone seems to speak of abortion as a matter of women's
>_desire_ (desire for freedom, free time, pleasure, autonomy,
>self-determination, etc.), not just need? Is it because desire is still
>considered a shameful feeling that self-sacrificing women are not to
>possess?
>

This is definitely the reason and exactly what the euphemistic "choice" obscures. i hate chickenshit political language that hides what it's about. as if abortion is so shameful we can't speak of it directly but must instead use this meaningless word that so comfortingly evokes markets and individual rights. In her foreword to Alice Echols' wonderful history of 1967-75 radical feminism, Daring to Be Bad, which I just re-read, Ellen Willis attributes the use of this lame word to the death of the radical wing of the women's movement -- the folks whose first major public campaign was a militant drive for abortion law repeal. here's Willis on why it won't do:

"With the eclipse of radical feminism the debate shifted again, its focus no longer the pregnant woman but the fetus...the charge of baby-killing was potent code for male-suprmacist culture's worst nightmares: women cut loose from their anatomical destiny; women putting their needs and desires before their age-old obligation to create and nurture new life; women having sex on their own terms and without fear...On the deepest level the right-to-life movement spoke to primal fears that if women stop subordinating themselves to their role as caretakers of men and children civilization and morality as we know them will give way to destruction and chaos. To which a women's movement deprived of a radical language could only respond, with ludicrous weakness, that it was for "choice".

she then goes on to convincingly argue that it was not the more recent "choice" rhetoric that has been responsible for all the gains on this issue over the past thirty years, and the sense of entitlement most women now quite rightly feel...but the more radical legacy of the early feminists who made the issue a matter of women's own desires and moral authority, and, like today's right wing, understood that it was about whether or not women should control their own destinies.

anyway, I'd highly recommend the book

Liza



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