While it is true that the Religious Right have theocratic ambitions, most premodern Christians (to say nothing of most premodern "pagans") did not have the sort of fundamentalist anti-abortion view that we observe today.
***** In practice...Gratian's rulings [in 1150 A.D.], which remained intact until the nineteenth century, meant that even Catholic moral theology and canon law...did not treat what we would now call first trimester abortions as murder....
At the opening of the nineteenth century, no statute laws governed abortion in America. What minimal legal regulation existed was inherited from English common law tradition that abortion undertaken before quickening was at worst a misdemeanor. _Quickening_...was the period in pregnancy when a woman felt fetal movement;...it generally occurs between the fourth and the sixth month of pregnancy. Consequently, in nineteenth-century America, as in medieval Europe, first trimester abortions, and a goodly number of second trimester abortions as well, faced little legal regulation. Practically speaking, the difficulty of determining when conception had occurred, combined with the fact that the only person who could reliably tell when the pregnancy had "quickened" was the pregnant woman herself, meant that even this minimal regulation was probably infrequent. In 1809, when the Massachusetts State Supreme Court dismissed an indictment for abortion because the prosecution had not reliably proved that the woman was "quick with child," it was simply reiterating traditional common law standards.
(Kristin Luker, _Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood_, Berkeley: U of California P, 1984, pp. 13-15) *****
The kind of anti-abortion view with which we are familiar today, according to Luker and other scholars of the history of abortion, is a late modern phenomenon; it was originally a view promoted, from the mid-19th-century on, not by churchmen but by male medical doctors who sought to professionalize their practice, in the process displacing women who had dominated the field of gynecological health care. Therefore, at its inception, the fundamentalist anti-abortion view did not "well up from below." Today, however, it is embraced by many segments of the working class, sometimes the very segments who would be most punished by the limitation of the right and access to abortion.
At 9:04 AM -0800 2/1/03, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>``The conflict is not at bottom between the state and individuals,
>though. It exists between classes, culturally mediated by gender
>and sexuality...'' Yoshie
>
>I don't want to put too fine a point on it, because we're agreed.
>But there is a basic difficulty here. While marxist, generally
>leftist, and socio-economic analysis wants to define conflict
>between groups, the legal and existantial experience is with
>individuals, in their physical isolation as bodies. The dicotomy
>between a particular body versus its group identifications is part
>of the game of power that the state exercises as a means to divide
>various groups, say working class divided by gender or race versus
>economic class. So to a certain extent, failing to note this,
>obscures some of the understanding of how power is exercised as well
>as resisted.
What we need -- I'm sure you agree -- is not abandonment but refinement of the class struggle perspective. Struggles for reproductive rights and freedoms are part of struggles for working-class power, though the divide-and-conquer strategy has so far succeeded in obscuring this fact. How we may counter the divide-and-conquer strategy is a question worth extended discussion here. As a preliminary remark, I say that the defensive struggle solely focused on the defense of women's right to choose is likely to play in the hands of the very enemy who practice the divide-and-conquer strategy against "pro-choice" women. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>