Abortion & the sexual agenda
Callahan, Sidney
t ,e SIDNEY CALLAHAN I A CASE FOR PRO-LIFE FEMINISM Abortion & the sexual agenda T HE ABORTION DEBATE continues. In the latest and perhaps most crucial development, pro-life feminists are...
...In the long run, the very long run, the abortion debate may be merely the opening round in a series of far-reaching struggles over the role of human sexuality and the ethics of reproduction...
...This process of "humanization" through personal consciousness and "sociality" can only be bestowed by the woman in whose body and psychosocial system a new life must mature...
...In fact, within the security of long-term commitments, women may be more likely to experience sexual pleasure and fulfillment...
...Feminist theorists of the pro-choice position now put forth the demand for unrestricted abortion rights as a moral imperative and insist upon women's right to complete reproductive freedom...
...Significant changes in the culture, both positive and negative in outcome, may begin as local storms of controversy...
...During pregnancy, a woman's whole life and energies will be actively involved in the nine-month process...
...A woman, involuntarily pregnant, has a moral obligation to the now-existing dependent fetus whether she explicitly consented to its existence or not...
...I I IIII which has built the struggle for justice on the bedrock of women's empathy...
...feminists, like myself, argue on good feminist principles that women can never achieve the fulfillment of feminist " goals in a society permissive toward abortion...
...2. The moral necessity of autonomy and choice in personal responsibility...
...A woman was once viewed as incorporated into the "one flesh" of her husband's person...
...Women can only play the erotic game successfully when like the "Cosmopolitan woman," they are young, physically attractive, economically powerful, and fulfilled enough in a career to be willing to sacrifice family life...
...When love, chastity, fidelity, and commitment for better or worse are the ascendant cultural prerequisites for sexual functioning, young girls and women expect protection from rape and seduction, adult women justifiably demand male support in childrearing, and older women are more protected from abandonment as their biological attractions wane...
...If a woman cannot control when and how she will be pregnant or rear children, she is at a distinct disadvantage, especially in our male-dominated world...
...3. The moral claim for the contingent value of fetal life...
...Indeed, all kinds of selection of the fit and the favored for the good of the family and the tribe have always existed...
...The chance biological process of an involuntary pregnancy should not be allowed to override all the other personal commitments and responsibilities a woman has: to others, to family, to work, to education, to her future development, health, or well-being...
...By pro-choice reasoning, a man who does not want to have a child, or whose contraceptive fails, can be exempted from the responsibilities of fatherhood and child support...
...Rightly rebelling against patriarchy, unequal education, restricted work opportunities, and women's downtrodden political status, feminists also rejected the nineteenth-century feminine sexual ethic...
...the involuntary feminine processes of childbirth and nursing have...
...Many pro-choice feminists identify feminist ideals with communitarian, ecologically sensitive approaches to reshaping society...
...One tends to justify morally what one has done...
...Pro-life feminism takes a very different stance to life and nature...
...without this personal conferral there only exists a biological, physiological process...
...The reason is the current permissive attitude embodied in the law, not the "hard cases" which constitute 3 percent of today's abortions...
...Instead of being empowered by their abortion choices, young women having abortions are confronting the debilitating reality of not bringing a baby into the world...
...T HERE ARE FAR BETTER goals for feminists to pursue...
...A distorted idea of morality overemphasizes individual autonomy and active choice...
...The meaning and value of fetal life are constructed by the woman...
...Within these committed "pair bonds" males assume parental obligations...
...Besides the punitive tendencies of a male-dominated healthcare system, especially in response to repeated abortions or welfare pregnancies, there are other economic and social pressures inhibiting reproduction...
...Women rally to feminism a s a new and better way to live...
...Childbirth often appears in pro-choice literature as a painful, traumatic, life-threatening experience...
...The feminist pro-choice position which claims that the value of the fetus is contingent upon the pregnant woman's bestowal -or willed, conscious "construction" -- of humanhood is seriously flawed...
...The human will dominates the body, overcomes the given, breaks out of the material limits of nature...
...An individual woman and the unique individual embryonic life within her can only exist because of their participation in the genetic inheritance of the human species as a whole...
...An ironic situation then arose in which many pro-choice feminists preach their own double standard...
...what becomes commonplace and institutionalized seems harmless...
...In a sound moral tradition, human fights arise from human needs, and it is the very nature of a right, or valid claim upon another, that it cannot be denied, conditionally delayed, or rescinded by more powerful others at their behest...
...The handicapped, the retarded, and newborns are legally protected from deliberate harm...
...The similarity may not be accidental...
...Women begin to see themselves as too weak to cope with involuntary pregnancies...
...The fetus must be invested with maternal valuing in order to become human...
...In our male-dominated world, what men don't do, doesn't count...
...These new arguments over abortion take place within liberal political circles...
...3) the moral claim for the contingent value of fetal life...
...Even the moment of birth can hardly differentiate a nine-month fetus from a newborn...
...Since attitudes, the law, and behavior interact, pro-life feminists conclude that unless there is an enforced limitation of abortion, which currently confirms the sexual and social status quo, alternatives will never be developed...
...Yes, one is obligated by explicit contracts freely initiated, but human beings are also obligated by implicit compacts and involuntary relationships in which persons simply find themselves...
...In Western culture, since the nineteenth century at least, most women have espoused a version of sexual functioning in which sex acts are embedded within deep emotional bonds and secure long-term commitments...
...It is difficult to develop concern for women, children, the poor and the dispossessed -- and to care about peace -- and at the same time ignore fetal life...
...As embryology and fetology advance, it becomes clear that human development is a continuum...
...They morally justify the present situation and current abortion practices...
...Only free access to abortion can provide the necessary guarantee...
...unfortunately, many women have fallen for the phallic fallacy...
...Pregnancy is not like the growth of cancer or infestation by a biological parasite...
...Yet the fundamental feminist case for the morality of abortion, encompassing the views of Harrison and Petchesky, can be analyzed in terms of four central moral claims: (1) the moral right to control one's own body...
...Pro-life...
...That espousal of "the eternal feminine" erred by viewing sexuality as so sacred that it cannot be humanly shaped at all...
...Without reproductive freedom, women's personal moral agency and human consciousness are subjected to biology and chance...
...It has helped bring us epidemics of venereal disease, infertility, pornography, sexual abuse, adolescent pregnancy, divorce, displaced older women, and abortion...
...Will these signals of something amiss stimulate" prochoice feminists to rethink what kind of sex ideal really serves women's best interests...
...Sentience, self-consciousness, rational decision-making, social participation...
...More and more frequently, we hear some version of this old rationalization: if she refuses to get rid of it, it's her problem...
...With more abortion there is more abortion...
...While the ideal has never been universally obtained, a culturally dominant demand for monogamy, self-control, and emotionally bonded and committed sex works well for women in every stage of their sexual life cycles...
...I T ALSO seems a travesty of just procedures that a pregnant woman now, in effect, acts as sole judge of her own case, under the most stressful conditions...
...While Margaret Mead stressed the" womb envy" of males in other societies, it has been more Commonweal: 236, mm im d ' i:.tli iiiol, th, O :reSp6hjibilitles o! or less repressed in our own...
...Behavior shapes thought as well as the other way round...
...Morality has often been viewed too exclusively as a matter of human agency and decisive action...
...All of these are involuntary processes of the female body...
...Late abortion should thus be granted without legal restrictions...
...The fetus is an immature, dependent form of human life which only needs time and protection to develop...
...In this article, Sidney Callahan (no relation) offers a critique of feminist arguments for the morality a'nd legality of abortion, addressing from a radically different perspective some of the points raised in the earlier article...
...Many of the most influential women in the nineteenth-century women's movement preached and lived this sexual ethic, often by the side of exemplary feminist men...
...It is a chilling inconsistency to see pro-choice feminists demanding continued access to assembly-line, technological methods of fetal killing -- the vacuum aspirator, prostaglandins, and dilation and evacuation...
...No pro-life feminist would dispute the forceful observations of pro-choice feminists about the extreme difficulties that bearing an unwanted child in our society can entail...
...A child becomes a product of the individual woman's freely chosen investment, a form of private property resulting from her own cost-benefit calculation...
...and (3) that "'mere" biological, genetic human life has little meaning...
...The disease model of pregnancy and birth has been entrenched...
...Yet abortion is not decreasing...
...If one considers the matter as a case of a powerful versus a powerless, silenced claimant, the pro-choice feminist argument can rightly be inverted: since hers is the body, hers the risk, and hers the greater burden, then how in fairness can a woman be the sole judge of the fetal right to life...
...not being able to count on a committed male partner...
...The feminist vision is expanded and refocused...
...Beyond the claim for individual bodily integrity, the pro-choice feminists claim that to be a full adult morally, a woman must be able to make responsible life commitments: To plan, choose, and exercise personal responsibility, one must have control of reproduction...
...Habituation is a powerful psychological force...
...Yet certain philosophers set the standard of personhood so high that half the human race could not meet the criteria during most of their g aking hours (let alone their sleeping ones...
...Pro-life feminists pursue a vision for their sisters, daughters, and granddaughters...
...They should not be restricted or subordinated because of their sex...
...Women will never climb to equality and social empowerment over mounds of dead fetuses, numbering now in the millions...
...Will their great-granddaughters be grateful...
...We may be at one of those vaguely realized thresholds when we had best come to full attention...
...Just as women, or, blacks, were considered too different, too underdeveloped, too "biological," to have souls or to possess legal rights, so the fetus is now seen as "merely" biological life, subsidiary to a person...
...Thus fetal interests or fetal rights can never outweigh the woman's prior interest and rights...
...Rejecting male aggression and destruction, feminists seek alternative, peaceful, ecologically sensitive means to resolve conflicts while respecting human potentiality...
...Middle-aged pro-choice feminists blamed the "big chill" on the general conservative backlash...
...Pro-life feminists reject the suppositions that would except the unborn from this protection...
...Beverly Harrison argues that in such an envisioning of society everyone would institute abortion rights in order to guarantee that if one turned out to be a woman one would have reproductive freedom...
...2. From the necessity of autonomy and choice in personai responsibility to an expanded sense of responsibility...
...Pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing have been characterized as passive, debilitating, animal-like...
...To be embedded in a family, a neighborhood, a social system, brings moral obligations which were never entered into with informed consent...
...Pro-life feminists and prochoice feminists are totally agreed on the moral fight of women to the full social equality so far denied them...
...She is co-editor, with Daniel Callahan, of Abortion: Understanding Differences (Plenum Press, 1984...
...This erotic model of the sexual life has often worked satisfactorily for men, both heterosexual and gay, and for certain cultural elites...
...But true sexual and reproductive freedom means freedom to procreate as well as to inhibit fertility...
...or "Why not...
...No human can be treated as a means to an end without consent...
...The woman's moral obligation arises both from her status as a human being embedded in the interdependent human community and her unique lifegiving female reproductive power...
...Even the minimal qualifications and limitations on women embedded in Roe v. Wade are unacceptable -- repressive remnants of patriarchal unwillingness to give power to women...
...Most obviously, women also have a far greater sociobiological investment in the act of human reproduction...
...Women and their reproductive power, and the children women have, must be supported in new ways...
...THE EDITORS strands of philosophy and social theory and are often interwoven in pro-choice feminists' own version of a "seamless garment...
...But if one wants to change sexual roles, one has to recognize pre-existing conditions...
...I think women will only flourish when there is a feminization of sexuality, very different from the current cultural trend toward masculinizing female sexuality...
...T HE PRO-LIFE FEMINIST position is not a return to the old feminine mystique...
...Pro-choice feminists are also worried that women's freedom to reproduce will be curtailed through the abuse of sterilization and needless hysterectomies...
...ironically, ready abortion, often advocated as a response to male dereliction, legitimizes male irresponsibility and paves the way for even more male detachment and lack of commitment...
...4. The moral right of women to full social equality from a pro-IRe feminist perspective...
...This moral claim to abortion, according to the pro-choice feminists, is especially valid in an individualistic society in which women cannot count on medical care or social support in pregnancy, childbirth, or childrearing...
...Abortion becomes no longer a choice but a "necessity...
...Erotic sexuality emphasizes pleasure, play, passion, individual selfexpression, and romantic games of courtship and conquest...
...It seems fallacious to hold that in the case of the fetus it is the pregnant woman alone who gives or removes its fight to life and human 25 April 1986:235status solely through her subjective conscious investment or "humanization...
...Followed to its logical conclusion, such a view presumes that reproductive and sexual experience is necessary for human fulfillment...
...Repeat abortions increase, with all their psychological and medical repercussions...
...But female sexuality does need to be deeply respected as a unique potential and trust...
...Biological life should never be discounted...
...When a pregnancy occurs, the first abortion is viewed in some pro-choice circles as a rite de passage, Responsibly choosing ala abortion supposedly ensures that a young woman will take charge of her own life, make her own decisions, and carefully practice contraception...
...With sterilization available to accelerate the inevitable natural ending of fertility and childbearing, a woman confronts only a limited number of years in which she exercises her reproductive trust and may have to respond to an unplanned pregnancy...
...After all, debates similar to those about the fetus were once conducted about feminine personhood...
...Only orgasm, which males share, has been glorified as an involuntary function that is nature's great gift...
...On the whole, women as compared to men possess a sexuality which is more complex, more intense, more extended in time, involving higher investment, risks, and psychosocial involvement...
...First and foremost, women have to insist upon a different, woman-centered approach to sex and reproduction...
...A woman must be able to make yes or no decisions about a specific pregnancy, according to her present situation, resources, prior commitments, and life plan...
...Many pro-choice feminists, deliberately childless, adopt the male perspective when they cite the "basic injustice that women have to bear the babies," instead of seeing the injustice in the fact that men cannot...
...Commonweal: 238...
...Unfortunately, the modern feminist movement made a mistaken move at a critical juncture...
...but it is not a conceptualization adequate for abortion...
...The thrust of present feminist pro-choice arguments can only increase the justifiable indications for "necessary" abortion...
...If a woman does not consent to invest her pregnancy with meaning or value, then the merely biological process can be freely terminated...
...After all, "maternal thinking" receives its name from a mother's unconditional acceptance and nurture of dependent, immature life...
...What kind of people are we going to be...
...In the latest and perhaps most crucial development, pro-life feminists are contesting pro-choice feminist claims that abortion rights are prerequisites for women's full development and social equality...
...While the erotic model cannot encompass commitment, the committed model can -- happily -encompass and encourage romance, passion, and playfulness...
...For those of us committed to achieving sexual equality in the culture, it may be hard to accept the fact that sexual differences make it imperative to talk of distinct male and female models of sexuality...
...But if a woman claims the fight to decide by herself whether the fetus becomes a child or not, what does this do to paternal and communal responsibility...
...To follow the pro-choice feminist ideology of insistent individualistic autonomy and control is to betray a fundamental basis of the moral life...
...3. From the moral claim of the contingent value of fetal life to the moral claim for the intrinsic value of human life...
...Only with such reproductive freedom can a woman have the moral autonomy necessary to make mature commitments, in the area of family, work, or education...
...As our society 25 April 1986:237increasingly endorses this male-oriented, permissive view of sexuality, it is all too ready to give women abortion on demand...
...Within such a continuous growth process, it is hard to defend logically any demarcation point after conception as the point at which an immature form of human life is so different from the day before or the day after, that it can be morally or legally discounted as a non-person...
...Pro-life feminists who defend the fetus empathetically identify with an immature state of growth passed through by themselves, their children, and everyone now alive...
...Abortion is necessary for wom, I en s sexual fulfillment and the growth of uninhibited feminine self-confidEnce and ownership of their sexual powers...
...To say this affirms the view that men and women differ in the domain of sexual functioning, although they are more alike than different in other personality characteristics and competencies...
...Repeatedly assured that in the name of reproductive freedom, women have a right to specify which pregnancies and which children they will accept, women justify sex selection, and abort unwanted females...
...But this morally required equality cannot be realized without abortion's certain control of reproduction...
...Morality is not confined to contracted agreements of isolated individuals...
...While neonatology pushes the definition of viability ever earlier, ultrasound and fetology expand the concept of the patient in utero...
...Surely, immaturity and dependence are not crimes...
...Pro-life feminists champion a more 25 April ?086:233encompassing moral ideal...
...The abortion dilemma is cruised by the fact that 266 days following a conception in one body, another body will emerge...
...Pro-choice feminist exponents like Harrison and Petchesky claim that the value of fetal life is contingent upon the woman's free consent and subjective acceptance...
...Thus it is all the more important that pro-life feminists articulate their different feminist perspective...
...One's own body no longer exists as a single unit but is engendering another organism's life...
...Either our idea of person must be expanded or another criterion, such as human life itself, be employed to protect the weak in a just society...
...But morality also consists of the good and worthy acceptance of the unexpected events that life presents...
...Thus no woman should be Commonweal: 232subjected to "compulsory pregnancy...
...the fetus possesses rights arising from its extreme need and'the interdependency and unity of humankind...
...But as the early feminists insisted, no woman has to marry or engage in sexual intercourse to be fulfilled, nor does a woman have to give birth and raise children to be complete, nor must she stay home and function as an earth mother...
...This feminist mistake also turned off many potential recruits among women who could not deny the positive dimensions of their own traditional feminine roles, nor their allegiance to the older feminine sexual ethic of love and fidelity...
...been seen as I~ondage to biology...
...4. The moral right of women to full social equality...
...Yes, one can acknowledge that the pregnant woman will be subject to the potential burdens arising from a pregnancy, but it has never been thought right to have an interested party, especially the more powerful party, decide his or her own case when there may be a conflict of interest...
...Consciousness becomes important to the abortion debate because it is used as a criterion for the "personhood" so often seen as the prerequisite for legal protection...
...Membership in the species, or collective human family, is the basis for human solidarity, equality, and natural human rights...
...Would it be just that an embryonic life -- in half the cases, of course, a female life -- be sacrificed to the right of a woman's control over her own body...
...C ONSIDERING THE differences in sexual functioning, it is not surprising that men and women in the same culture have often constructed different sexual ideals...
...This round of intense intra-feminist conflict has spiraled beyond earlier right-versus-left abortion debates, which focused on "tragic choices," medical judgments, and legal compromises...
...They recognize the claims of fetal life and offer a different perspective on what is good for women...
...Just as astronomers are studying the first three minutes in the genesis of the universe, so the first moments, days, and weeks at the beginning of human life are the subject of increasing scientific attention...
...Perhaps the most highly developed feminist arguments for the morality and legality of abortion can be found in Beverly Wildung Harrison's Our Right to Choose (Beacon Press, 1983) and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky's Abortion and Woman's Choice (Longman, 1984...
...We do not sanction killing the innocent if it can be done painlessly or without the victim's awareness...
...Amative, erotic, permissive sexuality (along with abortion rights) hecame symbolically identified with other struggles for social equality in education, work, and politics...
...With abortion as an acceptable alternative, contraception is not as responsibly used...
...Why should men share responsibility for child support or childrearing if they cannot share in what is asserted to be the woman's sole decision...
...And it should be noted that in pregnancy much more than a passive biological process is at stake...
...Parent-child relationships are one instance of implicit moral obligations arising by virtue of our being part of the interdependent human community...
...This dynamic passage from conception to birth is genetically ordered and universally found in the human species...
...The inadequacies of this position flow from the erroneous premises (1) that human value and rights can be granted by individual will...
...But they should look rather to their own elitist acceptance of male models of sex and to the sad picture they present of women's lives...
...Since hers is the body, hers the risk, hers the burden, it is only just that she alone should be free to decide on pregnancy or abortion...
...Responsible use of contraception can lower the probabilities even more...
...Pitting women against their own offspring is not only morally offensive, it is psychologically and politically destructive...
...As long as most women choose to bear children, they stand to gain from the same constellation of attitudes and institutions that will also protect the fetus in the woman's womb -- and they stand to lose from the cultural assumptions that support permissive abortion...
...Surely no infant, or child under two, could qualify...
...Prochoice feminism argues that a woman choosing an abortion is exercising a basic right of bodily integrity granted in our common law tradition...
...1. From the moral right to control one's own body to a more inclusive ideal of justice...
...Human ambivalence, a bias toward self-interest, and emoCommonweal: 234tion~l stress have always been recognized as endangering judgment...
...Unfortunately, the pervasive cultural conviction that adolescents, or their elders, cannot exercise sexual self-control, undermines the responsible use of contraception...
...Women's rights and liberation are pragmatically linked to fetal rights because to obtain true equality, women need (1) more social support and changes in the structure of society, and (2) increased self-confidence, self-expectations, and self-esteem...
...Finally, through the potency of social pressure and the force of inertia, it becomes more and more difficult, in fact almost unthinkable, not to use abortion to solve problem pregnancies...
...women take risks, often at the urging of male sexual partners...
...I These opposing arguments can best be seen when presented in turn...
...As the most recent immigrants from non-personhood, feminists have traditionally fought for justice for themselves and the world...
...not accounting oneself strong enough, or the master of enough resources, to avoid killing the fetus...
...every unwanted fetal handicap becomes more and more unacceptable...
...This time, instead of humbly buying entrte by conforming to male lifestyles, women will demand that society accommodate to them...
...Prolife feminists seek to expand and deepen the more communitarian, maternal elements of feminism -- and move society from its male-dominated course...
...Female infanticide, after all, is probably as old a custom as the human species possesses...
...In all patriarchal unjust systems, lesser orders of human life are granted rights only when wanted, chosen, or invested with value by the powerful...
...Women's biologically unique capacity and privilege has been denied, despised, and suppressed under male domination...
...2) the moral necessity of autonomy and choice in personal responsibility...
...The obstetrician Niles Newton, herself a mother, has written of the extended threefold sexuality of women, who can experience orgasm, birth, and nursing as passionate pleasure-giving experiences...
...A fundamental humanist assumption is at stake here...
...A woman may be pregnant without consent and experience a great many penalties, but a fetus killed without consent pays the ultimate penalty...
...In the April Ii issue of Commonweal, Joan C. Callahan argued that "there are insurmountable difficulties in finding a compelling argument fi)r the recognition of fetuses as persons that could justify imposing on a woman the particularly intimate burden of bearing an unwanted child...
...But the stronger force of the fetal claim presses a woman to accept these burdens...
...Since most contraceptives and sterilization procedures really do involve only the woman's body rather than destroying new life, they can be an acceptable and responsible moral option...
...The moral right to control one's own body does apply to cases of organ transplants, mastectomies, contraception, and sterilization...
...1. The moral right to conI I I trol one's own body...
...No one can be forced to donate an organ or submit to other invasive physical procedures for however good a cause...
...Society in general, and men in particular, have to provide women more support in rearing the next generation, or our devastating feminization of poverty will continue...
...Woman's whole nature was supposed to be opposite to man's, necessitating complementary and radically different social roles...
...A great deal of evidence is accumulating which points to biological pressures for different male and female sexual functioning...
...Prior to her own free...
...When faced with a new life, or an involuntary pregnancy, there is a world of difference in whether one first asks, "Why continue...
...Pragmatic failures of a pro-choice feminist position combined with a lack of moral vision are, in fact, causing disaffection among young women...
...Willing, planning, choosing one's moral commitments through the contracting of one's individual resources becomes the premier model of moral responsibility...
...Women can never have the self-confidence and self-esteem they need to achieve feminist goals in society until a more holistic, feminine model of sexuality becomes the dominant cultural ethos...
...Traditionally, many men have been laggards in assuming parental responsibility and support for their children...
...2) that the individual woman's consciousness can exist and operate in an a priori isolated fashion...
...In the world of work and career, women are urged to grow up, to display mature self-discipline and self-control...
...Maternal thinking is loosely defined as a responsible commitment to the loving nurture of specific human beings as they actually exist in socially embedded interpersonal contexts...
...Permissive abortion laws do not bring women reproductive freedom, social equality, sexual fulfillment, or full personal development...
...In the idealized Victorian version of the Christian sexual ethic, culturally endorsed and maintained by women, the double standard was not countenanced...
...ultimately, women's rights and fetal rights are linked...
...Moreover, in cases of voluntary pregnancy, a woman can withdraw consent if fetal genetic defects or some other problem emerges at any time before birth...
...Genuine reproductive freedom implies that day care, medical care, and financial support would be provided mothers, while fathers would take their full share in the burdens and delights of raising children...
...This female disease or impairment, with its attendant "female troubles," naturally handicaps women in the "real" world of hunting, war, and the corporate fast track...
...After childbirth a woman will either be a mother who must undertake a twenty-year responsibility for childrearing, or face giving up her child for adoption or institutionalization...
...Just because it is her body which is involved, a woman should have the right to terminate any pregnancy, which at this point in medical history is tantamount to terminating fetal life...
...Either we are going to value embodied human life and humanity as a good thing, or take some variant of the nihilist position that assumes human life is just one more random occurrence in the universe such that each instance of human life must explicitly be justified to prove itself worthy to continue...
...In pro-choice feminism, a permissive, erotic view of sexuality is assumed to be the only option...
...In the case of a woman's involuntary pregnancy, a complex, long-term solution requiring effort and energy has to compete with the immediate solution offered by a morning's visit to an abortion clinic...
...If she does not choose to be physically involved in the demands of a pregnancy and birth, she should not be compelled to be so against her will...
...Abortion helps a woman's body be more like a man's...
...Abortion is also required...
...Fully accepting our bodies as ourselves, what should women want...
...This thought experiment helps ensure justice for all...
...I SIDNEY CALLAHAN i$ associate professor of psychology at Mercy College, Do~bs Ferry, New York, and the author of many books, including The Illusion of Eve and Parenting...
...Psychological equality and well-being is also at stake...
...Women mu~t enjoy the basic right of a person to the free exercise of heterosexual intercourse and full sexual expression, separa!ed from procreation...
...The concept of "compulsory pregnancy" is as distorted as labeling life "compulsory aging...
...It has been observed that Roe v. Wade removed the last defense women possessed against male sexual demands...
...The male-oriented sexual orientation has been harmful to women and children...
...Freud declared that love and hate are so entwined that if instant thoughts could kill, we would all be dead in the bosom of our families...
...choice and conscious investment, a woman cannot be described as a "mother" nor can a "child" be said to exist...
...No less than males, women should be able to be sexually active without the constantly inhibiting f~ar of pregnancy...
...Sexual intercourse with a variety of partners is seen as "inevitable" from a young age and as a positive growth experience to be managed by access to contraception and abortion...
...From one perspective, the fetus is, as Petchesky says, a "biological parasite" taking resources from the woman's body...
...It is a moral perspective very different from the abstract, competitive, isolated, and principled rigidity so characteristic of patriarchy...
...It is a betrayal of feminism, The ~onoopt of ~ nan9 ~ is as distorted as labeling UIo "9 aging...
...Women have a moral fight to full social equality...
...Obviously it is difficult to do justice to these complex arguments, which draw on diverse T HIS IS TIlE second of two contrasting articles on the subject of abortion...
...But for the average woman, it is quite destructive...
...But the social dynamics of a permissive, erotic model of sexuality, coupled with permissive laws, work toward repeat abortions...
...It does not matter (The Silent Scream notwithstanding) whether the fetus being killed is fully conscious or feels pain...
...With legal abortion freely available, a clear cultural message is given: conception and pregnancy are no longer serious moral matters...
...she too was a form of bodily property...
...The disagreement between them concerns the definition of the desired goal and the best means to get there...
...Males always and everywhere have been more physically aggressive and more likely to fuse sexuality with aggression and dominance...
...It is assumed that a variety of partners and sexual experiences are necessary to stimulate romantic passion...
...A more male-oriented model of erotic or amative sexuality endorses sexual permissiveness without long-term commitment or reproductive focus...
...But surely in the original position and behind the "veil of ignorance," you would have to contemplate the possibility of being the particular fetus to be aborted...
...tual plane, with imagination and thinking curtailed, the speed, ease, and privacy of abortion, combined with the small size of the embryo, tend to make early abortions seem less morally serious -- even though speed, size, technical ease, and the private nature of an act have no moral standing...
...Strained philosophical analogies fail to apply: having a baby is not like rescuing a drowning person, being hooked up to a famous violinist's artificial life-support system, donating organs for transplant -- or anything else...
...Contraception provides a measure of personal control, but contraceptive failure or other chance events can too easily result in involuntary pregnancy...
...Where is the burden of proof going to rest...
...Yet giving birth is accurately seen as an arduous but normal exercise of lifegiving power, a violent and ecstatic peak experience, which men can never know...
...Selective extinction is no new program...
...Despite temporary conflicts of interest, feminine and fetal liberation are ultimately one and the same cause...
...The same legal tradition which in our society guarantees the right to control one's own body firmly recognizes the wrongfulness of harming other bodies, however immature, dependent, different looking, or powerless...
...Thus if one does not choose to be pregnant or cannot rear a child, who must be given up for adoption, then better to abort the pregnancy...
...Gestation and childbirth involve physical and psychological risks...
...The outcome of this debate may be decisive for the culture as a whole...
...But "necessity," beyond the organic failure and death of the body, is a dynamic social construction open to interpretation...
...Of course, these feminine sexual ideals always coexisted in competition with another view...
...Permissive abortion, granted in the name of women's privacy and reproductive freedom, ratifies the view that pregnancies and children are a woman's private individual responsibility...
...A moral abortion decision is never made in a social vacuum, but in the real life society which exists here and now...
...Responsiveness and response-ability to things unchosen are also instances of the highest human moral capacity...
...Human life from the beginning to the end of development has intrinsic value, which does not depend on meeting the selective criteria or tests set up by powerful others...
...On the simple, percep...
...Ironically, some pro-choice men and women think and talk of pregnancy and childbirth with the same repugnance that ancient ascetics displayed toward orgasms and sexual intercourse...
...Pro-life feminists grant the good intentions of their prochoice counterparts but protest that the pro-choice position is flawed, morally inadequate, and inconsistent with feminism's basic demands for justice...
...For women to get what they need in order to combine childbearing, education, and careers, society has to recognize that female bodies come with wombs...
...they are told to persevere in long-term commitments, to cope with unexpected obstacles by learning to tough out the inevitable sufferings and setbacks entailed in life and work...
...Sidney Callahan further argues that opposition to abortion is in keeping with an expanded and refocused feminist vision...
...Females may be more variable in their sexuality, but since Masters and Johnson, we know that women have a greater capacity than men for repeated orgasm and a more tenuous path to arousal and orgasmic release...
...Young women are hardly going to develop the selfesteem, self-discipline, and self-confidence necessary to confront a male-dominated society through abortion...
...Following theorists like Sara Ruddick and Carol Gilligan, they link abortion rights with the growth of "maternal thinking" in our heretofore patriarchal society...
...Men and women did not need to marry to be whole persons, but if they did engage in sexual functioning, they were to be equally chaste, faithful, responsible, loving, and parentally concerned...
...But this mature ethic of commitment and self-discipline, recommended as the only way to progress in the world of work and personal achievement, is discounted in the domain of sexuality...
...Surely no pregnant woman (or any other individual member of the species) has created her own human nature by an individually willed act of consciousness, nor for that matter been able to guarantee her own human rights...
...it is the way every human being enters the world...
...The larger community is relieved of moral responsibility...
...In moral behavior persons must explicitly choose and aggressively exert their wills to intervene in the natural and social environments...
...It is not surprising that those who countenance late abortions are logically led to endorse selective infanticide...
...Another and different round of feminist consciousness-raising is needed in which all of women's potential is accorded respect...
...H OW DOES A pro-life feminist respond to these arguments...
...New feminist efforts to rethink the meaning of sexuality, femininity, and reproduction are all the more vital as new techniques for artificial reproduction, surrogate motherhood, and the like present a whole new set of dilemmas...
...4) the moral right of women to true social equality...
...In an effort to think about the essential requirements of a just society, philosophers like John Rawls recommend imagining yourself in an "original position," in which your position in the society to be created is hidden by a "veil of ignorance...
...in phobias it is the retreat from anxiety-producing events which reinforces future avoidance...
...Psychologically it is also true that whatever is avoided becomes more threatening...
...For that matter, why should the state provide a system of day-care or child support, or require workplaces to accommodate women's maternity "and the needs of childrearing...
...Furthermore, if explicit intentions and consciously accepted contracts are necessary for moral obligations, why should men be held responsible for what they do not voluntarily choose to happen...
...Since everyone has passed through the fetal stage of development, it is false to refuse to imagine oneself in this state when thinking about a potential world in which justice would govern...
...Female social equality depends upon being able to compete and participate as freely as males can in the structures of educational and economic life...
...Both these articles were written independently, and like all signed articles in Commonweal, they do not necessarily represent the views of the editors, who reserve the right to add their own comments later...
...You will have to weigh the possibility that any inequalities inherent in that society's practices may rebound upon you in the worst, as well as in the best, conceivable way...
...Fortunately, in the course of civilization there has been a gradual realization that justice demands the powerless and dependent be protected against the uses of power wielded unilaterally...
Vol. 113 • April 1986 • No. 8
