I don’t know why I’m so pissed off about “blog for choice day” but the very idea just rubs me the wrong way – it’s the sort of symbolic politics, like celebrating Black History Month or wearing an AIDS ribbon, or Buy Nothing Day, that can’t help but irritate the shit out of me. These efforts can’t help but carry the whiff of social coercion – “you’d better blog to show how committed you are!” or “what kind of horrible person are you that you won’t wear a breast cancer button?” Fuck you bushvchoice, I don’t need you to validate my pro-choice bonafides.
I wouldn’t be so offended by this, if I thought there was an actual point to it. At least the money spent buying an AIDS ribbon goes to research, but this project just reeks of irrelevance. While bushvchoice, describes the project as a “day of activism for choice,” and invites us to explain why we’re pro-choice, this enterprise just seems to be another set of utterances that will bounce back and forth among the pro-choice echo chamber, or more specifically the pro-choice blogosphere. Not that I blame the pro-choice activists exclusively, as it seems that neither they nor their pro-life counterparts are able to do anything but preach to the choir.
Part of this has to do with the incommensurability of the terms of debate over abortion. The feminist refrain of “Get your laws off of my body” does not at all respond to the placards wielded by pro-lifers containing graphic pictures of aborted fetuses. Neither group even speaks the same language, nor can they meet on any common ground. Abortion is either murder, or it isn’t, depending on whether the fetus is a person or it isn’t. These are apparently black and white issues. Thanks to Roe v. Wade, we as a nation don’t even get to debate these questions, since they did us the favor of deciding for us. However, my biggest objections is not that the court, summarily and through judicial fiat, quashed a much larger, national debate about what counts as life and about the status of the fetus (although I would argue that it did, and which Kugelmass brings up and does not really address). Rather, it’s because the blunt instrument of the law is incapable of making the fine gradations, of taking into account the shades of gray and the ambiguities entailed by the very complex question of the fetus’ ontological status.
One of the most bizarre moments in the 2004 Presidential debate was, when asked about his future Supreme Court picks, Bush said that he wouldn’t pick anyone who would have voted for Dred Scott. At the time I thought this incoherent non-sequitur was a hopelessly out of touch attempt to court the black vote (something along the lines of: “you guys, I promise I won’t try to re-enslave you”). Later, I read that it was code for his religious base, that what it really meant was that he would use opposition to Roe v. Wade as a litmus test for his future nominations. The reason for this, according to the logic of pro-life groups, was fairly simple: under the law, a fetus, like a slave is considered to be a non-person. It doesn’t take a large step to extend the analogy to imply that the fetus, also like the slave, is merely property, to be used as the owner/mother sees fit. While you may think the analogy ludicrous, the fact that you do so speaks to the fundamental incompatibility between the necessarily imprecise legal categories and the very fluid and malleable degrees of life to which they are supposed to respond. Moreover, it reflects the utter inability of those legal categories to address questions that go beyond simple binaries, like person/property, life/not-life, human/animal. Declaring the fetus a “non-person” is a non-solution to this problem.
Consider for a moment the grounds of the ruling. Privacy, has absolutely no relevance to the current state of debate (such as it is) about abortion and I find that problematic. I don’t think you will find anyone who says that privacy was the issue at stake in Roe v. Wade just as I don’t think you will find anyone who thinks that property rights were at stake in Dred Scott. Privacy was just a cover, and by ruling on those grounds, the court sides with tomemos who says that
an embryo or fetus is part of a woman’s body. Its status is the same as that of all her other cells: biologically dependent on her. It’s nourished by her nutrients, and if she dies, it dies. It’s her responsibility, a responsibility that cannot be shared, and as such it’s her decision whether to sustain it or not
I don’t find this account very persuasive mostly because, well . . . I think it’s just more complicated than that. First of all, even if we assume that a fetus is no different than a cyst, or say a really big hairy mole that we want to surgically remove, that still doesn’t mean that people have complete autonomy over their own bodies to begin with. To return to the trope of property rights, you can’t sell your organs (although you can give them away), you also can’t prostitute yourself, or be euthanized. We’ve established ethical and legal boundaries (one might call them taboos) around bodily acts, or more precisely acts performed upon the body that we as a society have deemed unacceptable because they violate our notions of life’s sanctity, or sacredness. These taboos, euthanasia being a prime example, are in the process of being debated and I don’t think it’s difficult to foresee an inevitable legalization of doctor-assisted suicide.
Kugelmass argues that the state allows people “to make any number of other decisions (about diet, use of intoxicants, occupation, sexual activity or abstinence, and so forth) that affect reproduction.” True, but the state regulates plenty of things for the sake of public health, and for the health of the unborn – why do you think wine bottles and cigarette boxes carry warnings that imbibing while pregnant could cause birth defects? Why do you think that Courtney Love’s admission that she used heroin while pregnant was such a scandal? Why do you think the public health discourses surrounding “crack babies” and fetal alcohol syndrome babies reached such a heightened emotional pitch? Now, I’m not saying that we should give into all of our biopolitical impulses, but I think that these examples are all indicative of deep-seated cultural anxieties about the expecting mother’s relationship and obligation to her unborn child and the general uncertainties surrounding the status of the fetus, legal or otherwise. Pro-choice activists can’t simply pretend that these feelings and uncertainties don’t exist. Of course, as L points out, these anxieties are precisely why access to abortion must be guaranteed by law. Otherwise we risk so as to prevent a slippery slope that could potentially penalize pregnant, or even potentially pregnant women who aren't taking enough folic acid.
Earlier, I wrote that pro-life activists and PETA had a lot in common because they were both at the bleeding edge of discussion about what constitutes life and about what kinds of life should be preserved. The problem with Roe v. Wade (whose anniversary provided the occasion for “blog for choice day”), and the reason that I don’t want to celebrate it but rather think of ways to move past it, is that the legal system as such is unable to acknowledge the gray areas that these debates need to address. Obviously it is a good thing that Roe v. Wade guaranteed access to abortion facilities. But I think pro-choice activists need to reorient the direction of their debate and begin to ask themselves some really difficult questions about the ethical and moral implications of abortion. I can’t help but feel that too much ground has been conceded to the pro-life movement by not engaging them in their own terms, but rather retreating to legalisms and the rhetoric of the inviolability of female reproductive rights. Pro-choice proponents need to begin taking control of this part of the debate, as it serves no one’s interest to allow the pro-life camp to do so.
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