Abortion politics
Petchesky, Rosalind P.
WHY DOES the abortion debate refuse to go away? Why, thirty years after Roe v. Wade was supposed to have settled the issue, does it remain the most politically incendiary, polarizing pressure...
...Democrats use it to attract women voters...
...This is peculiarly true in the American context because of the particular historical trajectory in which "abortion rights," more so than any others, became hitched to ideas about liberating women and women's autonomy—a pattern that has not happened similarly in other countries...
...But none of this helps to explain why the abortion debate continues to define the central difference between the two major parties...
...She argues that "Republicans use the abortion issue to forge coalitions with rightwing and fundamentalist Christian voters...
...or why groups such as the Christian Coalition and the National Right to Life Committee in the case of the Republicans, the Feminist Majority and NARAL in that of the Democrats, continue to win identity as the party's "base...
...and second, the belief, so deeply rooted in American political culture, in the right of privacy and personal choice in intimate matters...
...Indeed, this right was the constitutional bulwark of Roe and was recently reaffirmed in the Court's historic ruling in Lawrence v. Texas concerning lesbian and gay sexual rights...
...Second, such opinion poll responses are notoriously sensitive to the wording of the questions...
...While as a feminist I deplore all such legal restrictions, I have never thought they spelled a "slippery slope" that would mean the loss of legal abortion altogether, and here I agree with Shrage that the mainstream feminist campaign mirrors the fear-mongering of its right-wing opponents...
...2003...
...politics and a total transformation of the Democratic Party mainstream, one that would make it truly distinguishable from the Republicans...
...Reflecting this pattern, I wrote in the 1990 preface to Abortion and Woman's Choice: Birth control and abortion services, widely available without age or marital restrictions, have helped to make the young, white woman's sexuality visible, thereby undermining historical race and class stereotypes of "nice girls" and "bad girls...
...She berates both parties, and the "right-to-life" and feminist organizations they respectively try to placate, for failing to recognize the broad middle ground that public opinion data handily offers them...
...the denial of Medicaid funding for abortions...
...True enough, but hardly surprising...
...Supreme Court...
...Without addressing that question, no sensible formula for seeking compromise or "common ground" is likely to work...
...Shrage is correct to cite the politics of DAWN as a model for such a vision...
...The reasons have to do with delay because of "the difficulty in arranging for an abortion," fears of stigma, and parental reprisals.' This is about the vicious climate of moral judgment that still surrounds both abortion and teenage women's sexuality...
...This of course would require a virtual revolution in U.S...
...www.dawn.org.fj . DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 77...
...The clinic represents the existence of her sexual identity independent of marriage, of paternal authority, perhaps of men ; . . . [it] thus becomes a target of white patriarchal wrath...
...Ah, but this is a very different argument from the one based on political parties and opinion polls, only it arrives too faintly and too late...
...If saving fetuses, viable or otherwise, were their motive rather than deeply held sexual and gender anxieties, then anti-abortionists would be pounding the pavements for better and more available contraception...
...3. See DAWN Informs, Special Supplement on Abortion produced for the World Social Forum, Jan...
...So is it fair to blame feminist groups or Justice Blackmun's opinion in Roe for this state of affairs, when Roe has been successively whittled away by restrictions right along...
...counties to provide any abortions...
...Why, thirty years after Roe v. Wade was supposed to have settled the issue, does it remain the most politically incendiary, polarizing pressure point in U.S...
...Opinion polls prior to the late 1990s foDISSENT / Fall 2003 n 75 ARGUMENTS cused on "reasons" for abortion, not on gestational age...
...Similar omissions occur in how Shrage invokes public opinion surveys...
...wHAT GIVES abortion its perpetual valence as a signifier with such resonant meanings in American political culture...
...Shrage recognizes this when she suggests her formula for "reform" would work for women "only if states, through the regulation of insurance and drug companies and the development of social welfare programs, guaranteed that women had access to adequate reproductive health care...
...T]he majority of American voters," according to the polls Shrage relies on, "support the right to choose in the first trimester but would like to see more restrictions on access in the second...
...But none of this "resolves" the debate...
...Political parties and politicians use whatever they can to win voters...
...judicially sanctioned refusal of public hospitals in the majority of U.S...
...Large, established organizations focused on lobbying and electoral strategies fear losing funds and adherents if they veer too far from their familiar, single-issue line...
...they reflect a dominant discourse of right and wrong but tell us very little about how people actually negotiate decisions around abortion in everyday life...
...18, No...
...Laurie Shrage joins the legions of ethicists, constitutional lawyers, and political scientists who have grappled with this question over the years...
...and now a congressional ban on D&X, which I suspect will eventually succeed with the exceptions for health that Shrage recommends...
...It consists of restrictions on access of young and poor women, through parental consent and notification requirements...
...2. Rosalind Petchesky and Carole Joffe, "Wayward Women," Conscience, Vol...
...I do find it alarming that nearly twenty years have passed since I first wrote my book on abortion, yet the political and cultural climate surrounding abortion in the United States remains much the same as it was then.' In the midst of two other conservative Republican regimes, I argued that abortion achieves its power in American politics because it's not really about the procedure itself or even the fetus but rather about the contentious relations—especially those of gender, race, sexuality, and maternity—abortion has come to signify...
...But the Democrats—like the mainstream feminist groups—prefer the individualist notion of "a woman's private choice" to a much more radical and transformative vision of social rights and public obligation...
...a "moderate" policy of some restrictions "after a period of unrestricted access" would not by itself address the sexual politics of abortion in America in the slightest...
...1. Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, Sexuality and Reproductive Freedom, 1st ed...
...Indeed, this "moderate" policy already exists and has been ratified by not only many states but also the U.S...
...And even if one believed such responses gave us a compromise that could resolve the abortion controversy (I don't, for reasons stated below), it wouldn't budge those who are actively vocal around abortion politics from what Shrage considers their extremist positions...
...And how do Shrage and Sunstein think even further restrictions on second-trimester abortions should be enforced—through criminal penalARGUMENTS ties on doctors and women...
...I have always maintained that abortion access for all who need it would never be won unless abortion itself, as both a political issue and a medical procedure, is embedded in a much larger political frame that addresses health care, child care, housing, jobs, education, and the whole cluster of social rights and needs that make having wanted and healthy children possible...
...4 (Winter 1997/98...
...But "privacy" as a constitutional doctrine is an inadequate guarantor of genuine reproductive and sexual freedom, especially for the poor and very young women most disadvantaged by abortion restrictions...
...Two things make the outlawing of abortion in this country very improbable: first, the gradually but inevitably increasing availability of medical abortion and emergency contraception (a development Shrage ignores...
...Moreover, sex education programs and other cultural media that regulate sexuality would have to affirm the varieties of sexual expression across the life-cycle, rather than clinging to an anachronistic heterosexist conjugal mirage that most of the society no longer lives by...
...In the first place, this only tells us how successful the campaign against so-called "partial birth" abortions has been in the past five years in shifting the ground of the debate (indeed, Shrage's article itself is evidence of this success...
...Neither party will risk modifying its rigid position for fear of alienating the constituencies that the abortion issue has helped attract...
...But Shrage's argument mistakes symptoms for causes and leaves most of the hardest problems unsolved...
...That is a messy issue the article evades...
...it only makes things worse for women, as she remarks...
...2d revised ed., Northeastern University: Boston, 1990...
...What is it about the all-or-nothing approach to abortion that makes it so intractable...
...Longman, 1984...
...The pragmatism she brings to the effort and her candor in seeking some distance from both the right-wing ("pro-life") and mainstream feminist ("pro-choice") dogmas that monopolize public discourse are admirable...
...If women's health were the only problem necessitating late-second-trimester abortions, then maybe feminist groups would be well advised to seek the sort of accommodation (a federal ban with exceptions for the woman's life, her physical and mental health and "fetal abnormalities") Shrage seems to recommend...
...3 • ROSALIND P. PETCHESKY is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author, most recently, of Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights (Zed Books, 2003...
...This is why retreating from Roe to a law 76 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 that restricts abortions after the first trimester is beside the point—because the stakes of abortion politics for both sides have more to do with the self-determination of women and girls than they do with the survival of second-trimester fetuses...
...but DAWN'S position on abortion is not one of "compromise" but of women's and girls' empowerment: to make abortion legal and safe for all women in the many countries where it still isn't and to provide the social conditions under which women will no longer pay for abortions with their lives or health, their rent money, or their dignity...
...In fact, only about 3 percent of all abortions in the United States occur after the first trimester, and among these one-third are among teenagers...
...electoral, judicial, and even foreign assistance politics...
...Sounding more like some of my colleagues in American politics than a philosophy professor, Shrage immediately moves the discussion to the level of political parties and opinion polls...
Vol. 50 • September 2003 • No. 4
