[lbo-talk] abortion poll

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Fri Mar 9 15:28:02 PST 2007


On 3/9/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> The _only_ reason for a moderately "pro-abortion" (some are o.k.)
> position is the desire to control women.
>
> A fetus is a person or not a person. No third alternative.
>
> If it is a person, then to justify abortion is to justify murder "in
> some cases."
>
> If it is not a person then the only person involved is the woman, and
> control of abortion is control of the woman.

I think the main division that politically matters is among women, not between men and women. The first thing to do is for feminists to convince women -- including women who have had abortion themselves -- who are ambivalent about abortion (e.g., excusing their own abortion but being judgemental about others'). If there is a big, solid, visible block of women who favor expanding the right and access to abortion, men will follow.

The difficulty is that the kind of restrictions which have been increasingly put on abortion affect only women who are very poor, very young, live in very rural areas, come from very conservative families, etc. Those are the very kind of women who have the fewest resources, objective and subjective, to become politically active. The other women who have more resources can "afford" such restrictions, so they are not quite motivated to fight them tooth and nail. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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