Critique of male-centered, american centered, arrogant perspectives on abortion

[TC]

I wanted to share this absolutely brilliant, well argued article, critiquing a self-defined 'pro-choice' american straight male, Will Saleton of Slate.com, who, despite his self-scribed 'pro-choice' position projects male possessory interests over women's bodies in the "abortion debate."

I thought this article was particularly appropriate for revleft given the similar behavior often seen on this forum.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/lord_saletan_asks_how_would_you_ladies_like_it_if_ someone_could_abort_your_/

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Lord Saletan asks, “How would you ladies like it if someone could abort your baby, huh?!” (http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/lord_saletan_asks_how_would_you_ladies_like_it_if_ someone_could_abort_your_/)


There’s something deliciously transparent about the masculine anxieties guiding William Saletan’s latest two hand-wringing pieces on how yeah, yeah, abortion should be legal, but omigod moral ambiguity. Thus, his tin ear to the notion that women are full human beings with every right to decide whether or not we shall continue to do work when the terms of the contract change is rather astounding. The devaluation of women as laborers is exactly why I say that feminism is an economic issue (http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/it_wasnt_sex_blogging_that_ruined_the_economy_but_ something_close_to_it/), and honestly, the attitudes he expresses about women’s right not to form a new human being with our own bodies if we don’t want to explain as much about why there’s a persistent pay gap between men and women as anything else. But less upfront framing, more quoting, right? First piece is remarkably transparent, right from the get-go (http://www.slate.com/id/2214057/pagenum/all/).

Would you abort a fetus just because it wasn’t yours?
I’m sick of supposedly pro-choice people who engage in non-medical language like this---you abort the pregnancy, and the woman (remember her?) is the patient. She has a condition she would like to go away. So you stop, aka, abort the process. But really a minor detail compared the obvious issue with this opening statement: In the view of anti-choicers, all abortions are due to a woman aborting someone else’s fetus. That fetus was made by the father and belongs to god, and a mere woman has no right to touch it. Plus, it’s assumed that no woman really wants to---childbirth is submission to our feminine destinies, and we may resist that up front (because we’re sinners), but if we submit, we’ll be happy we did.
But what Saletan is talking about is an unfortunate situation where a doctor’s office mixed up two embryos, and implanted the wrong one in a woman. This all happened in Japan, a relevant detail because of what happened next, which is that the woman who had the wrong fetus inside her decided to abort at 8 weeks. (Saletan makes this sound like it’s far in a pregnancy, but in fact the Guttmacher uses that as the defining point for really early abortions.) Saletan viciously characterizes the woman who chose abortion as finicky, and even hints that there was a second screw-up, or could have been:

Or, rather, because it may have come from the wrong family. Remember, the first two embryos that went into the woman were hers. For complex reasons, the doctor inferred that the one that had grown was the third one. According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, doctors told the woman on Nov. 8 that “it was not possible to confirm the source of the fertilized egg at that time, but they could analyze the mother’s amniotic fluid in six weeks. However, if she waited that long, it would be too late to terminate the pregnancy.” Apparently, the fetus was subsequently discarded, leaving no way to settle the question.
He goes on at length, describing it as aborting a “child” and suggesting that any decent pro-choicer would find the situation agonizing (because of the “child” thing), and he pits the “bad” woman who had the abortion against the “good” woman who may or may not have lost an embryo, and who needs it more because she’s 40. Really, the whole thing is disturbing, because he gets so hung up on these details, he glosses over the fact that the case is fundamentally about a woman who decides that she doesn’t want to give her body over to develop a child that isn’t hers. And that’s her right. As a decent-minded pro-choicer who remembers that women are people, too, I’m appalled at the idea that we would even consider coercing or bullying a woman into bringing a child into the world with her body to make a complete stranger happy. That Saletan expects such an immense sacrifice of self---and of time the woman could spend trying to start another pregnancy that she wants---speaks to a belief that women’s sacrifice is expected and not appreciated, that our labors are simply worth less than those of men. Look, I think the fact that I feed my cat every day and change her box should mean that she’s my cat, and I’m not going to magnanimously hand her off as proof that I’m a good, self-sacrificing woman. I can only imagine how rough that pressure is if you made a child with your own body. In fact, I don’t have to imagine---birth mothers don’t speak out as much (probably because they don’t want to break the taboo that adoption is nothing but rainbows and roses), but when they do speak about the profound loss they’ve suffered, it’s devastating (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/03/breaking-silence-on-living-pro-lifers.html).*
Saletan, I suspect, sympathizes more with the woman who made the embryo than the woman who aborted the pregnancy, because the woman who made the embryo is, to be blunt, in a position that’s closer to what a man could find himself in than a woman. But he’s being myopic beyond just his male-centric worldview---he’s also being American-centric. He’s assuming that people’s views about abortion are universally held, and that the universal tailors close to what he, William Saletan, believes. But while Japan’s take on abortion is probably just as complicated as America’s, it’s complicated in much different ways. Abortion was legalized in Japan in 1948, but the pill was only legalized in 1999. It’s still not popular (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/20/health/main637523.shtml) (condoms are favored), and the Japanese birth rate is really low, so the only conclusion is that they use abortion.....a lot. Some people like to point to the Japanese tradition of offering a small bribe to a temple to keep the ghosts of children not born from haunting you as proof that the Japanese are just as nutty anti-abortion as Americans, but I’m not buying it. Routine religious observations don’t necessarily tell us squat about lived beliefs. None of this is to say that I know exactly what’s going on, but I’m offended at Saletan’s assumption that we can project our attitudes on them.
Essay #2 is along the same lines (http://www.slate.com/id/2214498/), only the “women’s labor is less valuable” assumptions underlying the abortion debate are more obvious. A company that arranged surrogacy agreements took money from a bunch of couples and then didn’t pay the surrogates. Color me unsurprised---the baby-getting industry is rife with this sort of sleazy behavior. Which isn’t to slam all of it, of course. There are a number of respectable, progressive agencies working with in fertility treatment, adoption, and surrogacy. But there’s a lot of fertility specialists who fudge their numbers, adoption agencies that are affiliated with misogynist religious organizations, black market baby traders who may even steal babies (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/10/did-i-steal-my-daughter-tribulations-global-adoption), and of course, you have major anti-choice activists who’ve been caught trying to buy babies from desperate women (http://www.plannedparenthood.org/issues-action/sex-education/leslee-unruh-6248.htm).
But what this means is that a group of employees are being asked to work for no pay. If they weren’t women who were already subjected to sexist romanticizing about the sacrificial feminine nature, I doubt that anyone would even be concerned for a moment if they chose to abort, especially since surrogate mothers are subject to all sorts of discrimination. None have chosen to abort, which just makes Saletan’s anxiety even more suspect. Apparently, it’s a problem that women even have the option to refuse to work for no pay. That he technically accepts this right only mediates the offensiveness of his stance---if he really respected women, he wouldn’t even consider such a right to be an excuse to pearl clutch.
Again, I have to point out that the context for this hand-wringing is, as Amy Benfer noted (http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/03/19/saletan_ivf/), that this lack of legal control over a woman’s choice to terminate or continue a pregnancy is SOP for men. Now, that’s legal control---socially, many people still operate as if men have the final word over what women do with their bodies, which is why MRAs can generate so much outrage when a man’s wishes for a pregnancy outcome are overruled by the woman who is actually pregnant. That’s why Saletan’s hand-wringing is so damn offensive, because he’s concern trolling the idea that a woman’s right to control her body is for real, and no one should have a trump right over that. Personally, I consider the social beliefs that women don’t have a right to abort (or use contraception) if they damn well please to be nearly as big an issue as legal access, because the authority that parents, boyfriend, churches, husbands, and other people have over a woman’s life can feel and therefore be as real as the government’s authority. If, for instance, you fear violence if you make certain choices, then you aren’t free to choose, are you? But here’s Saletan, feeding into the idea that a woman’s right to her own labor and control over her body is, if not a legal issue, subject to exactly that sort of social pressure that feels as real, and sometimes more real, than legal authority.



*Not that all birth mothers feel this way, of course. But there’s a reason that most women who are “supposed” to give babies up for adoption don’t, and there’s a reason that they had to tie pregnant girls to tables, force them to deliver, and take the baby away before the mother even saw it in the 50s and 60s.
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[Die Neue Zeit]

So how do you view the Stalin-era ban on abortions in order for "baby factories" to help boost the population?

[Module]

Erm, how to you view it? :confused:

[Glenn Beck]

What an idiot this Saletan is. A woman has no right to abort another person's embryo? As the author pointed out EVERY embryo is another person's (the father's). The ethical argument for abortion rooted in a woman's autonomy has NOTHING to do with genetics or the "ownership" of the embryo and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that it is unethical and a violation of human autonomy to force a person to use their body for something they don't want it used for.

The author of this article is spot-on when she pointed out that Saletan's sympathy for the woman whose eggs produced the embryo is simply a masked identification with the "male" in this case. The logical corollary to the argument that the "biological mother" should have had some kind of veto power over the other woman's abortion of an embryo made from her eggs is that men should have the same veto power over the decision of a woman to abort an embryo made with their sperm, which is transparently anti-choice. Saletan should do some soul-searching as to whether he really believes that women own their own wombs or not.

[TC]

Erm, how to you view it? :confused:

Thanks; I'm not responding directly to Jacob's attempts to derail this thread especially when i've discussed the specific subject of this line of his troll provocations; if he wants to know my position he can look it up.

[BobKKKindle$]

I don't know anything about Saletan's politics beyond his insulting position on abortion, but this article does remind me of something I read recently on the libertarian defense of private property. It is common for libertarians to operate from a rights-based perspective by claiming that we all hold our own bodies as items of private property (otherwise known as the principle of self-ownership) and so if we use our bodies to change the external world in some way, such as ploughing a field, or using materials that we have received through market transactions to create a useful product, we have the right to assert ownership over whatever it is we have changed, and this is what forms the basis of private property, such that any violations of property rights - such as expropriation - can ultimately be understood as violations of self-ownership. If we accept the basics of this argument, and then apply it to questions of reproductive freedom, we can reach some interesting conclusions. If a woman buys some sperm, such that she is the exclusive owner of that sperm, and then impregnates herself, then the self-ownership argument would suggest that a woman should own the fetus, and, if she chooses to carry the pregnancy to term, the neonate, since she used her body, combined with something she owned legitimately and exclusively (the sperm - the argument I read placed emphasis on the fact that the sperm was bought, and hence exclusively owned, because a self-ownership libertarian could argue that a pregnancy resulting from a couple having sex would yield a jointly-owned fetus/neonate), to produce something - an organism. There are obviously no libertarians or members of any other school of political philosophy - including Marxists - who would accept the conclusion that children can be owned as property in the sense of having no rights or interests independent of the owner (in the abstract, at least - putting aside instances of children being denied rights under patriarchy) and so the proponents of self-ownership are forced to acknowledge that their concept cannot be applied in every instance, and in particular is not valid for pregnant women. This can be seen as evidence that self-ownership is a sexist and/or incoherent theoretical concept.

...I know this isn't directly related to the article as such, and I may actually sound completely reactionary here, but I do think this further demonstrates the futility of trying to understand reproductive freedom through a theoretical framework that is based on the assumption that ownership is a concept that can be applied to human beings as well as material objects. As Gonzeau pointed out, the right to abort has nothing to do with whether a woman can be said to have ownership over the embryo or not - it's about the relationships between use, consent, and personal autonomy. I also think, however, that Marxists are often too happy to accept self-ownership as valid and useful when it comes to defending the right of each individual to defend their autonomy by whatever means necessary - as with abortion rights. It's perfectly possible, and, in my view, philosophically more desirable, to root personal autonomy in the simple notion that people are their bodies, without resorting to self-ownership. For that reason, I think we need to problematize what Gonzeau implied - that women own their wombs, and that questioning this notion amounts to questioning a woman's right to abort.

I'd be interested to hear some other views on the validity of self-ownership as a concept, and where personal autonomy actually comes from, if not from a property-based relation between people and their bodies. Or, is there a way to change our conception of self-ownership, so we don't end up arguing that children should be the property of their mothers, or being selective in our application of the concept?

[Lynx]

Personal autonomy is a measure of your control over your own body. It is a fundamental right. Defining this in terms of property relations is not necessary and kind of insulting.

[TC]

This response is for Bobkindles. I will not be responding to people who extract nuggets out, have an inadequate appreciation of the philosophical and social theoretical issues involved, and quote for the sake of misconstruing, intentionally or otherwise, this post for debating/rhetorical purposes. I will (try, providing I have time) to respond to Bobkindles, or from others who read it in its entirety and can respond thoughtfully: I'm interested in considered positions only.

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The concepts of ownership and property is, on an analytic level, not a relationship of people to things, (i.e. I 'own' this toothbrush because the toothbrush is mine) but the capacity of a person to exclude others from a thing, in other words a relationship between people and each other with regard to the use of something (i.e. I 'own' this toothbrush because, were you to use it without my permission, i could appeal to state backed violence against you).


In a primitive communist society, a pre-state, pre-agricultural society, the only objects that could be conceptualized as property were personal affects, trinkets, etc, that an individual could control themselves without assistance from a state. How can a hunter gather in a pre-state society 'own' a square mile of land, for instance, when s/he has no way of denying others use of the land. Property without the state is limited to what you can carry around on your person.

"Ownership" on this level a thing is yours when you're holding it, someone would have to physically disrupt you to use it without your permission. This bead necklace is "yours" because its around your neck, someone would have to overpower you to take it and use it.

Claims to property, after the development of an advanced state, can be radically different. What does owning a square mile of land, after the state, actually involve? You can "own" it without actually setting foot on it. Someone else could start cultivating it, or relax on it, without causing any violence against your person. What practically means, however, in the social order created by states, is that if someone cultivates or relaxes on "your" land without your permission, you can call a force of armed people to threaten violence against them. The square mile is "yours" not because someone would have to overpower you to use it, but because you can employ the police to overpower others who try to use it.

Bourgeois ideology conflates these two senses of 'ownership', the first referring to immediate physical possession, the second the ability to control others via the expectation of state violence, but we don't need to accept this conflation without skepticism. You "own" your own body in the first sense of "ownership": using your body without your permission requires physical violence. If you plough a field or otherwise change the world, you could only, at best, "own" the field in the second sense of the world: using "your" field without your permission requires no physical violence, rather your claim to "own" the field requires the reliable threat of state violence.

There is absolutely no logical reason to think that from a principle of self-ownership, it must necessarily follow that anything someone builds or changes is also theirs. Properly deconstructed, the idea that you "own" your body only requires that you are free from violence, the idea that you "own" a field you plowed requires that you may employ organized violence against others.

To say that you should be free from harm does not entail saying you have the right to harm others; this logical leap is totally unnecessary and it is logically erroneous, not a logical entailment of the concept of "self-ownership." And, as this is not a logical entailment, the illogical libertarian notion of property "rights" can and must be decoupled from the intuitively sensible notion of "self ownership."

Marxists need not deny 'rights,' or expected entitlements that are effectively protected in a pre-state society, simply because the bourgeois has made a false attempt to extend these expectations to "rights" that can only be expected in a state that grants them powers over others. Communism is collective ownership of the means of production, the abolition of privately owned means of production, of land, resources, and the abolition of currency and the monetary system of interest and market exchange. It is not the denial of customary 'property,' of personal affects. Communism doesn't mean nationalizing your toothbrush. And so, it also certainly doesn't mean nationalizing your womb.