This whole debate over the limits of identifying as feminist has been really healthy for feminism. I love seeing serious discussion of feminism as a philosophical movement in the media instead of endless puff pieces written by non-feminists about what all those feminists think, even though the author isn’t a feminist and doesn’t bother to read any feminism, and besides, their next article is going to be about how feminism is dead.
(There is something else about this debate that appeals to me and that is the way in which it is calling ‘choice feminism’ into proper question for a wider audience. I know this puts me at odds with some feminists, some whom I greatly respect, but I remain highly dubious of ‘choice feminism’, that is, the notion that simply making a choice makes any act feminist for a woman and that all choices are equally feminist. Yes, this makes feminism personally confronting at times – it should be. We live in a patriarchy, feminism challenges that, and removing all the splinters of patriarchy from our brain should be a difficult exercise, it should be one where we have to stop and think and re-examine ourselves and wonder and struggle. Being raised in a system of thinking that oppresses you and then trying to identify all the reaches of that oppression? That’s hard work. And because it isn’t a system that oppresses us all equally, some are disadvantaged many times over (eg. racism, poverty, ableism, homophobia etc.), and because many of us are also advantaged by others’ disadvantage the work of identifying oppression is actually incredibly difficult).
Now, back to the topic of this post, here are two fantastic pieces about why pro-life is anti-feminist, you should really read them in their entirety but here’s excerpts anyway.
From Anne Summers in The Age:
So what is a feminist? Can you be a political conservative and a feminist? I would say, Yes. Can you be (that heavily loaded oxymoron) ”pro-life” and a feminist. I say an emphatic, No.
Let me elaborate. Feminism might be blandly defined as the support for women’s political, economic and social equality, and a feminist as someone who advocates such equality, but these general principles need practical elaboration and application. What does economic equality actually mean? How can women in practice achieve social equality? As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women’s ability to be independent.
There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one’s fertility. To achieve the first, women need the education and training to be able to undertake work that pays well. To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.
Feminism has taken on all sorts of issues over the decades, from the need for childcare to criminalising domestic violence to the rights of sex workers. Feminism has undertaken campaigns for everything from equal pay to paid maternity leave to the need for more women in parliament. There have been debates with, for example, some supporting women in the military, others claiming women are inherently pacifist.
But whatever the differences and however the issues have evolved over the years, with new ones (like sexual harassment) emerging as we develop greater understanding of women’s experiences as new barriers are broken, the fundamentals have not and will not change.
From Tedra Osell in Crooked Timber:
The bottom line about abortion is this. Do you trust women to make their own moral judgments? If you are anti-abortion, then no. You do not. You have an absolute moral position that you don’t trust anyone to question, and therefore you think that abortion should be illegal. But the second you start making exceptions for rape or incest, you are indicating that your moral position is not absolute. That moral judgment is involved. And that right there is where I start to get angry and frustrated, because unless you have an absolute position that all human life (arguably, all life period, but that isn’t the argument I’m engaging with right now) are equally valuable (in which case, no exceptions for the death penalty, and I expect you to agonize over women who die trying to abort, and I also expect you to work your ass off making this a more just world in which women don’t have to choose abortions, but this is also not the argument I’m engaging right now), then there is no ground whatsoever for saying that there should be laws or limitations on abortion other than that you do not trust women. I am completely serious about this.
Finally, for good measure and because it is also relevant you could read Margaret Atwood’s current piece for The Guardian reflecting upon her brilliant novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which was first printed way back in 1985:
I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the “Christian” tradition, itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the church’s behaviour and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organisation would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)
The Handmaid’s Tale has often been called a “feminist dystopia”, but that term is not strictly accurate. In a feminist dystopia pure and simple, all of the men would have greater rights than all of the women. It would be two-layered in structure: top layer men, bottom layer women. But Gilead is the usual kind of dictatorship: shaped like a pyramid, with the powerful of both sexes at the apex, the men generally outranking the women at the same level; then descending levels of power and status with men and women in each, all the way down to the bottom, where the unmarried men must serve in the ranks before being awarded an Econowife.
srsly right, choices are about what you’d like to do in your life. effing public policy/laws/etc do not fall under into that realm. Feel free not to have an abortion by all means, but please stop trying to act like working to curtail other’s women’s abilities to do so is consistent with any philosophy of feminism
The problem with the “but feminism is about choices, therefore you can’t criticise any choice I make” line (that some trot out) is that the whole “feminism is about choice” sound bite is a truncated summary, and without the rest of the context within feminist theory that sound-bite becomes trite and asinine.
Feminism is about ensuring that choices for women are not artificially constrained by sexist gender stereotypes and laws/traditions which uphold them.
Obviously, life itself constrains everybody’s choices to some degree because our variable circumstances limit the number of options available to us in any situation. It’s the imposition of other limitations on our choices, via kyriarchal power structures favouring certain social identities above others, which becomes oppressive.
This blog was commended from Hoyden and well worth a visit. A sober site; a good intro, three issues oriented takes and TigTog’s gift for summation, commenting.
No :”whatever it takes” lobbyists and sophists, here.
Not wanting to adhominem Tanky, but these sorts of sites compare to MTR’s nervous, formulated, chattery threads, perhaps an example of what Eva Cox described as the man-hating aspect of this line of thinking, like cheese to chalk. Definitely knows to “protect brand”.
Men are subject to the conditions of an immature culture also, we, too spend a life time picking the “shards” of cultural inheritance and conditioning from our “brains”.
I wont overdo the working class hero bit, I’ve come to learn that is eventually too self serving, but it is a drag to discover that the source of much of your own sense of futility with life, including your entrapment in your own head and alienation from women, is a high price to pay for nothing at all, except much remorse for what could have been. I ought to empathise with someone like Tanky.
In the buggering-up of someone like that, why haven’t I recognised the buggering up of me?
As mentioned above we have enough to cope with within the human condition , without authoritarianism being reimposed, on irrational criteria.
This is a great discussion (post and comments) on some of the issues, too. http://larvatusprodeo.net/2012/01/18/its-complicated/
I agree, of course. With your comments about the choice feminism, and about feminists necessarily being pro-choice. I wrote about it a few years back, in much the same terms as Tedra Osell.
This seems to be something that a lot of us grapple with sooner or later: how do we understand feminism if we come across someone who claims to be feminist, and does masses of feminist things, but calls herself pro-life?
Great links, thank you, Blue Milk. And as ever, a great post.
‘removing all the splinters of patriarchy from our brain should be a difficult exercise’. Love this, describes exactly how I feel – difficult, sometimes scary and sometimes, just like a real splinter, it is tempting to just leave it there because removing it seems to be the greater pain. But, just like a real splinter, failure to remove will result in infection and ultimately sepsis.
[…] Let’s cut to the chase: why pro-life is anti-feminist (bluemilk.wordpress.com) […]
what if you dont wish for abirtion to be made illegal but you think it is morally wrong and you do not support women who do it?
what if you are a woman and you are against abortion?
That’s fine. Everyone is entitled to their own personal views on abortion. I, myself, would find it difficult to have an abortion. It’s trying to stop the choice being available to others that I have a problem with.
There is a sticker you can get that says ‘Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one”. I don’t like them, but I’ve never been in a position to need one either. I can only make decisions for myself on abortion not for other women.
I am a feminist and I dislike the use of the words pro-life when anti-abortion is meant. The only circumstances I am uncertain about my support for the woman’s unfettered right to have an abortion is if the father is prepared to assume absolute responsibility for the child after birth i.e. The mother can chose never to acknowledge the child if that is her wish. I know that is unusual but I have seen it. I cannot quite work out how I feel in this circumstance.
Since my pregnancy experiences have messed me up in lots of ways*, and I know I’m not alone in that, I know exactly where I stand; nobody else has the right to make a woman go through that.
*Emotional and physical symptoms that impede or altogether stop normal life from being able to continue in any way for as long as the pregnancy continues, long-term physical effects like loss of internal organs, brought on by pregnancy hormones, etc.
To clarify that last bit;
Pregnancy hormones caused gallstones for me, which meant my gallbladder reacted whenever I imbibed anything even mildly “fatty” (an omelette, a steak, a piece of white toast with nothing on it..) causing agonising pain, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting that could last from 20 minutes to hours after eating. I had the gallbladder surgically removed, but as a result of that/the gallstones I will spend the rest of my life being far more careful of my food choices and eating habits, and a mild issue with dairy has turned into a full-blown sensitivity that comes with its own lovely effects.
Having my child totally crystallised my pro-choice position. I would never wish any of these experiences onto anybody.
Me too, Aphie. Mine was pre-eclampsia, which isn’t even at all rare.
Anti-choice arguments come down to ignoring the process (and risks) of pregnancy and jumping straight to the baby, erasing the woman. Making that judgement about who/what is important clear is really important.
I’d second Anne, believing it’s possible to be simultaneously feminist, pro-life AND pro-choice. To champion wide-spread contraceptive use as a means of reducing the need for abortion without denying women who need it from receiving it is also a “pro-life” stance. To paint all those who wish to fight for the best way to balance the rights of both the pregnant woman and the unborn child as “anti-choice” is as untrue as when people claim pro-choice campaigners are “anti-life”.
Many of our laws are based on moral judgements, which is why there is so much variation across the world and rights frequently clash. Our right to free speech does not extend to inciting hate crime, and to sanction women because they have made the judgement that a foetus’ right to live (or a father’s right to bring up his own child) needs to be defended does not make them inherently unfeminist, it can simply mean they are not a single-issue party.
I hate trying to sum up a deeply complicated issue in a blog post comment because this is far more nuanced than anything I can write here but I feel very strongly that to claim that the entirety of whether a person is for or against women’s equality can be summed up in his/her stance on abortion is divisive and unhelpful.
I have to say I disagree Kat, because as Aphie so beautifully illustrated, it is not as easy for many women as ‘just having a baby’ because of the toll on the woman’s body and making judgements about the foetus’ right to live – which is not guaranteed anyway even in the course of a normal pregnancy – every mother I know has had a miscarriage, at least one – and a ‘father’s right to raise his child’ ignores the fact that this then forces a woman to continue with an unwanted pregnancy, an adult woman who should have rights of her own. You can’t say a foetus has rights and a father has rights and ignore that the person most impacted is the woman expected to carry this foetus despite the effect on herself and pretend that once she got pregnant her rights went out the window. Perhaps the movement should call itself forced birthers, because that is really what it means.
But I didn’t disregard a woman’s right to have an abortion, I was just saying that these things are far more complicated than it’s a black and white, it’s one or the other, decision. I definitely wasn’t trying to say that a woman doesn’t have rights, while the foetus or potential father does. I was simply saying that there are a lot of conflicting potential “rights” and an adult woman is not the only person who has them.
My main aim of my comment was to convey that someone who is striving to reconcile these (very difficult to reconcile) positions should not be labelled as anti-feminist, just because (s)he hasn’t instantly put the woman’s right to abortion over any other.
Just to be absolutely clear, I completely support every woman’s right and access to abortion. My concerns are with the theme of the post itself – the claim that to be “pro-life” is “anti-feminist”.
But the problem with balancing the rights of the pregnant person and the interests of the fetus (fetuses do not have formal rights in the US) is that, as long as pregnancy occurs in women’s bodies, any restrictions on their capacity to avoid pregnancy (by means of contraception or abortion) are an attenuation of their rights.
You can certainly believe that fetal interests are a relevant consideration, and father’s rights. But you can’t at the same time believe that women should have the full body of rights guaranteed to them by law. That is, it’s inconsistent to believe that fathers have some right to see their fetuses born, and that women have bodily autonomy and the right to be free from bodily coercion.
It’s a fundamental feminist position that women have rights that are not weakened by, or contingent upon pregnancy. If you believe that, it’s logically inconsistent to also believe that men may make demands on women’s bodies against their will, or that lawmakers may make demands on women’s bodies against their will. (Or doctors, or laypeople, or whomever.) You can’t legally consider these outside interests without doing damage to the rights of women.
But there is a crossover, once the foetus is considered viable and is deemed to have a right to life. Do you argue that the right to life should give way to the right to bodily autonomy?
I think that this is particularly complicated given the differences in age at which a baby is deemed viable: while it’s 28 weeks in the US (I think? I’m not American) but 18 in Sweden, with some babies having survived birth at 22 weeks.
Yes, my right to bodily autonomy trumps another’s right to life, even if that person is a full grown adult.
I don’t have to donate a kidney to another person, even if they will die without it; I don’t even have to give them food, legally, if they are starving, unless I have an official role of responsibility (such as nursing home worker or prison official).
“Do you argue that the right to life should give way to the right to bodily autonomy?” What Rosa said but also:
this is part of a greater myth that lots of women are having late stage abortions. Women having late stage abortions are often aborting much loved pregnancies that for whatever reason have gone wrong, and it is rare. Late stage abortions may be done at a stage where a pregnancy without complications may have produced a viable foetus, but since they are most commonly done in pregnancies without a viable foetus, i.e. where the foetus is not going to survive whether carried to full term or not then the no. of weeks when the abortion occurs is of no relevance.
I think the reply structure has gone a bit out of sync here, so…
Rosa: Those examples are not equivalent, as they down to inaction in relation to someone you have no responsibility for, not an explicit action to end life, as in the case of abortion. (And that is leaving aside the fact that you can be prosecuted for criminal negligence.) While you don’t have to give food to a starving person, neither are you allowed to take food from them. And while you don’t have to donate a kidney either, if you have already donated one, you can’t demand it back.
Mindy: The premise of the argument I was responding to was that the right to bodily autonomy is held above all others, so the *frequency* of late abortions isn’t really a factor (unless late abortions never happened). It is whether it is anti-feminist to believe that during that period of time when the two rights are in conflict – when the baby is judged viable but is still in the womb – women should no longer be allowed to have an elective abortion.
They are equivalent, because the food and internal organs belong to the woman, and are being used by this other creature which is either a part of her body (that she has total autonomy over) or another human being (that she has no reason to continue to host).
If my dad comes to visit and gets blind drunk and I tell him he has to leave my house, and he stumbles out into the snow and freezes to death, I didn’t kill him. Even if I push him out the door knowing he has no place to go.
“when the baby is judged viable but is still in the womb” I would say that abortion in this instance is so rare it is practically a unicorn.
I’m American. Under U.S. law, in the third trimester of pregnancy, elective abortions are not allowed. The only abortions at that point are of pregnacies that are non-viable, life-threatening, or both. That’s because the third trimester is when a fetus might otherwise be viable.
Now, why are you arguing so hard against the right to something—a late-term abortion—that already is a last-ditch defense, not a freely chosen option?
I’m a feminist and I’m sick to the death of the emotionally hardened feminists trying to rule the roost. Abortion isn’t natural for the woman’s body and I believe the child’s rights is just as important if not mire so than the mother.
There’s more to being feminist than claiming the title.
Because of course everything else in our lives is completley natural.
[…] Let’s cut to the chase: why pro-life is anti-feminist – blue milk […]
for those who are pro life, why don’t you transplant the baby into your woumb if the fetuses life is that important
I would, quite happily actually. But as far as I am aware, we do not currently have a procedure that will allow for the safe transplant of a child in utero from one uterus to another. If such a procedure is in existence, I’d be thrilled to know. It could aid in developing artificial wombs, which could in turn be a great aid to many medically difficult pregnancies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-life_feminism
If one cannot be feminist and pro-life, then I must say that feminism is not at all what I thought it was. And I quite happily turn in my “Feminist” membership card.
Just wondering, did you actually read any of this writing? If you have, please explain why you disagree.
Gosh, feel the hate! So you can’t be Catholic and feminist? You can’t be Muslim and feminist? You can’t be Buddhist and feminist? You can’t believe in non-violence and be a feminist? Yes, let’s exclude the majority of the women in the world from feminism in the name of our own western liberal values.
The argument about “control over your own body” is obvious hogwash. Are feminists required to support legalisation of hard drug use now?
Are you really saying that a woman who fights tooth and nail for equal rights and against discrimination, who devotes her whole life to improving the lot of women, cannot be a feminist simply because, for religious or ethical reasons, she believes abortion is immoral and should not be legal?
If so, God help you, and God help feminism.