19 August, 2004
The Puzzle of Reproductive Rights

It's time for a public vocabulary check. The time rolls around every decade or so, when the point-ends of words like choice and life have been digging into the skins of non-polemically-oriented people for some time. Pro-choice polemicists probably don't mind the other side's self-serving rhetoric about respect for life as much as polemical neutrals do. For that matter, neither side can match the gun lobby for brass-plated sophistry. But America's feminist movement, as a liberal movement, is heir to much distrust engendered by years of linguistically-implemented social engineering projects (the belief behind them being that if one can just get everybody to salivate at certain words and shrink from certain others, one will have society on track for progress). It would be well advised to keep such verbal pets as pro-choice and reproductive rights on short leashes.

Please understand that this is not an attack on abortion. It sets aside all objections to abortion per se. It sets aside the entire subject of abortions performed to protect the mother's life, which should be unobjectionable in this day and age. It has less to do with any aspect of abortion than with honesty in public discourse. The point of it is that believing in a cause does not have to mean winking at whatever cynical rhetoric people may use in service to that cause. In other words, it's a plea for feminism without Leninism.

As a political label, the term pro-choice covers three categories of intent: (1) pro-choice, (2) pro-abortion, and (3) anti-baby. The first category, being indiscriminately benign, is unpopular among political activists. Within the greater pro-choice camp, it's a holding area for those earnest individuals who would also enter an "adult book store" in the hope of finding books for mature people. The second category, being the one for which the marketing-savvy pro-choice label was designed in the first place, is by far the most popular. Its adherents are not necessarily against childbearing; it's just that all their public time is taken up with promoting the alternative. The third category, sick though it is, enjoys current respectability with people who'll buy anything peddled from a feminist pushcart. This is the alleyway where damaged personalities gather to trade pictures of children wielding whips and manacles (review the informal online discussions of the Andrea Yates infanticide case and note how many people blame the mother's psychosis on the supposedly oppressive experience of childcare).

Then there's that phrase reproductive rights, which now turns up as a verbal touchstone in nearly every essay, editorial, or letter to the editor written from a pro-choice perspective. It's most effective when brought in referentially, as if it stood for an established concept, and left to ring in the mind's ear without explanation. Explaining such a phrase could, after all, prove awkward.

Who possesses reproductive rights? Do they belong to the species as a whole? That proposition makes sense, except that it defies debate at present. Until something comes from outer space, there's no need to secure the rights of homo sapiens.

Well, then, do reproductive rights belong to the couples that do the actual baby-making? That makes even more sense, but it presupposes that couples will work things out in a spirit of mutual commitment and care for each other's happiness. Who today can be so bending, so bonded, so twentieth-century? This is not the Greatest Generation.

And yet it would be a radical feminist indeed who claimed, for members of her own sex, sole authority to decide whether other human beings are to be or not to be. Even many less-radical feminists do make that claim, in effect. However, they do so not by directly asserting a right to control the reproduction of the species, but by changing the subject, in mid-argument, from reproduction to the woman's own body. This is possible only by slipping into a set of anachronistic ideas about the relation between the two.

The early inhabitants of Northern Europe apparently believed that unborn babies were fairy-like creatures that hid in glens or in the crevices of rocks until it was time to enter their mothers' bodies. Today, some inhabitants of North America apparently believe that a man performs a function rather like that of Frankenstein's lightning, providing the necessary jolt to a thing that is really a woman's product. Her baby. Her creature. Some pro-choice activists even speak of a fetus as "part of a woman's body," and the rest seem not to notice. These are educated people, for the most part, and at the same time they're throwbacks to that unenlightened age when childbearing was thought to be an affair between women and the gods. Societies of the more recent past indulged the male-chauvinist notion that a woman merely bears her husband's children. It seems that societies of the future are to indulge the female-chauvinist notion that she merely bears her own.

It should go without saying that no part of a human body has its own separate supply of blood or its own incipient brain, heart, extremities, sense organs, and so on, all developing toward independent life. The fetus is connected with its host, the mother's body, only for the purpose of supplying its current needs, and that connection is filtered to keep the host from gaining fuller access to the fetus than is necessary for its healthy development. An important function of the placenta is to protect the fetus from the mother's body. If the mother imbibes a harmful substance — cigarette smoke, for example — the placenta acts to override her judgement and keep that substance from reaching the fetus. It may fail, and then a severely retarded child may come into the world. But like the rest of nature, it is no respecter of human will.

To understand what abortion involves, then, one must acknowledge that a woman in pregnancy is not crafting her own offspring, over which she holds moral sovereignty, but is carrying the offspring of herself and another; taking part in a natural process in which neither the mother nor the father, but the fetus, is central. This is a fact. It may be the kind of fact that drives people up the wall, especially when they're accustomed to marshalling facts with a truncheon. Nonetheless, it is a fact.

It would be politically offensive, and offensively predictable, to speak for the father who wants a baby to be born when the mother does not. So let's consider a different case: one in which the mother wants the fetus to become a living child, and the father wants — an abortion. His reason may be as good as some of those which women give for making the same choice. It may be that he's exhausted by his responsibilities and simply can't work hard enough to feed another mouth. It may be that he has been tricked into fathering the child as a way of binding him to the mother. But where is he to turn for support in the struggle to assert his personal reproductive rights? Not to the pro-choice camp. Not here, either. Since a father-chosen abortion would mean invading the mother's body (though to get at something that was no more a part of her body than of his), it's improbable that anyone in the post-medieval sections of the world would approve of it. Obviously, a man should not be able to force an abortion. Less obviously, a woman should not be able to force one, either. If there are such things as reproductive rights, they must, after all, belong to the couple. That can only mean that the exercise of those rights must be subject to negotiation between woman and man.

The phrase reproductive rights may have been devised in the first place as shorthand for "strategic annexation of the fetus." If so, it's shorthand with a double usefulness. Besides being short, it vaguely suggests one of those large truths which we hold to be self-evident. Like pro-choice, it's an attempt to replace accurate terms of debate with advantageous ones. Sooner or later, though, people will inquire into the language being used on them. Political sympathies have been known to change, in American society, out of sheer exasperation with verbal rot (we tend to forget it, but neoconservatism started as a rebellion of non-partisan thinking liberals against partisan liberal cant). If the aim of pro-choice activism is really to assert that a woman's autonomy must take precedence over her role in the reproductive process, it would be best to drop the line about reproductive rights. And if the aim is to promote abortion single-mindedly, it would be best to drop the line about choice.

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