Comments Elsewhere

On those who spend so much time and energy on making the wrong argument:

… The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

… Until just a couple of years ago the abortion movement was a tiny handful of good people who were still having to concentrate just on getting the taboo lifted from public discussions of the topic. They dared not even think about any proposals for legal change beyond reform (in which abortion is grudgingly parceled out by hospital committee fiat to the few women who can prove they’ve been raped, or who are crazy, or are in danger of bearing a defective baby). They spent a lot of time debating with priests about When Life Begins, and Which Abortions Are Justified. They were mostly doctors, lawyers, social workers, clergymen, professors, writers, and a few were just plain women—usually not particularly feminist.

Part of the reason the reform movement was very small was that it appealed mostly to altruism and very little to people’s self-interest: the circumstances covered by reform are tragic but they affect very few women’s lives, whereas repeal is compelling because most women know the fear of unwanted pregnancy and in fact get abortions for that reason.

… These people do deserve a lot of credit for their lonely and dogged insistence on raising the issue when everybody else wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. But because they invested so much energy earlier in working for reform (and got it in ten states), they have an important stake in believing that their position is the realistic one—that one must accept the small, so-called steps in the right direction that can be wrested from reluctant politicians, that it isn’t quite dignified to demonstrate or shout what you want, that raising the women’s rights issue will alienate politicians, and so on.

Because of course, it is the women’s movement whose demand for repeal—rather than reform—of the abortion laws has spurred the general acceleration in the abortion movement and its influence. Unfortunately, and ironically, the very rapidity of the change for which we are responsible is threatening to bring us to the point where we are offered something so close to what we want that our demands for radical change may never be achieved.

—Lucinda Cisler (1969), Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women, ¶¶ 2–10

… which pretty much accurately predicts the trajectory of the last 33 years, four years before Roe was written. If there’s one thing that the abortion rights movement needs in the face of recent events, it’s just feminism, and if there’s something else it needs, it’s a bit of creative extremism. The simple truth is that we are up against people (or specifically, men) who have no problem with commandeering real women’s bodies and lives for involuntary servitude in the name of their sad little theologico-political power trips, while too many of the sanctimonious pols (or specifically, men) supposedly on our side wring their hands and bite their lips and act like this is a position deserving anything other than contempt and resistance. I think the sooner we jeer the doughfaces into silence and live up to the part of abolitionists (since that is, in the end, just what we are), the better.