It almost certainly would be better to cast the issue of abortion as one of democratic values, and of the long-term significance for the development of democracy for the society to overcome the subjection of women. Mere formal abolition of their legal subjection is only a starting point. As a parallel, it took over a century (really until 1945) for the western European countries to pass from the first formal abolition of feudal privileges in 1789 to a really far-reaching achievement of bourgeois democracy. (See Mayer, Arno: The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War about this.). Just as feudal elites hung onto effective power and influence, after abolition of their established feudal rights over others, so too, male dominance in the United States persists in interpersonal practices, quaint ideological notions about femininity and masculinity, attempts, as in anti-abortionism to enforce sentimentally justified hallowings of the uterus, etc.
By the same token, it is supremely important for democrats to oppose any cultural adherence to pre-democratic gender ideals. The maudlin queasiness about supporting abortion is a rather dishonest example of such an ideal. So too, the allied, though more complicated matter of residual patriarchal monotheism, which persists, in the United States as an example of American exceptionalism. After all, though there is a long history of American progressive movements being organized around Christianity, they have showed a regressive and self-limiting quality in their basis in essentially gendered ideals of sympathy, and compassion. Abolitionism and the civil rights movement are clear examples. Of course, in American circumstances, they were all that was possible.
By contrast, the European socialist movements -- at their occasional best -- did go beyond the psychological confines of male-dominance and gendered ideals of resistance to oppression.
Though second-wave American feminism has not uniformly looked to transcend regressive gender ideals (Essentialist feminism, for example, has b3een a major retreat, even a capitulation.) In the struggle for reproductive choice, we see democratic feminism at its most indispensably progressive.
Doug is right. This is a bedrock issue.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
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