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CounterPunch
January
17, 2003
Roe
v. Wade: Thirty Years Later
Abortion and
the Left
by CARL ESTABROOK
There is no orthodoxy more firmly fixed on the
American political landscape than that opposition to abortion
belongs on the Right, while "defense of abortion rights"
is the linchpin of the Left. But a consideration of what Left
and Right mean suggests that the conjunction may be accidental
and only temporary.
It's a commonplace that the distinction
between Left and Right is fraught with ambiguity. (When the Democratic
party is spoken of as on the Left, it's gotten pretty silly.)
And it's also generally accepted that the terminology arose from
the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly of 1789.
But if we want a consistent usage for
the Left/Right distinction, we might think of political parties
ranged along a line according to how authoritarian or democratic
they are. The further Right one goes, the more authoritarian
the parties, and the further Left, the more democratic. (At the
far Left end are the socialists, who want not just a democratic
polity but a democratic economy as well -- investment decisions
made not by corporations but by elections.)
Lenin's Bolsheviks, then, must be seen
as a right-wing Marxist party, as must all twentieth century
communist parties in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, owing to
their authoritarianism And they were indeed so described by left-wing
Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek.
The commitment to democracy and an ever-widening
franchise means that it has been the Left under this definition
that has called attention to marginalized groups in the modern
West. The historic task of the Left has been to include in political
and civil society groups formerly excluded on the grounds that
their full humanity was denied -- e.g., Africans, Amerindians,
and women.
Most arguments that hold abortion to
be an ethically-acceptable choice depend on the assertion that
a fetus is not a fully human person, and therefore the rules
about killing human beings (e.g., that killing can be justified
in cases of self-defense) simply don't apply to the argument.
(It's true that some recent defenses of abortion have begun from
the premise that abortion means killing a human being: as the
defender of civil liberties Nat Hentoff puts it, it's finally
hard to deny that "it's a baby.") Physical dependency
-- the fact that the fetus depends on its mother's body -- is
often, curiously enough, alleged as an indication of the less-than-full
humanity of the unborn.
If the Left continues to draw out the
implication of its principles, it will discover the marginalization
of the unborn and unwanted as for example it discovered the marginalization
of women in the first and second waves of feminism in the 19th
and 20th centuries. And it's reasonable to suspect that the discovery
will take as long and involve as many contradictions as that
concerning women did -- and does.
There are of course groups on the political
Left who have drawn this conclusion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote
to Julia Ward Howe in 1873, "When we consider that women
are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should
treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit."
Emma Goldman thought that abortion was an index of the general
immiseration of the working class, and the suffragist Alice Paul
spoke of it as "the ultimate exploitation of women."
Contemporary groups with similar positions
include the Seamless Garment Network, which organizes against
war, the death penalty, and violence against women -- within
which they include abortion. A Feminists for Life group was expelled
from NOW for deviance on this issue, and there are a number of
religious-based radical groups that are anti-abortion, such as
that associated with the late Philip Berrigan, the anti-nuclear
direct-action group, Plowshares.
But it's not just that the Left should
oppose abortion if it is understood as it has wished to be for
more than two centuries, as proposing the increasing democratization
of human life. It should also do so because much of the thinking
that leads to the position that abortion is generally acceptable
depends upon a capitalist view of ownership, against which the
Left is properly critical.
That the Left is opposed to capitalism
should go without saying, although it's a bit abstractly theoretical.
The Left stands for real democracy, and capitalism is fundamentally
contradictory to democracy. (Democracy at a minimum presumes
one person/one vote, but capitalism depends upon inequality,
based on how much wealth one controls.) Of course what the Left
confronts today is hardly capitalism (as its right-wing promoters
and Ayn-Randists like Alan Greenspan should be the first to point
out), but "state-subsidized and protected private power
centers -- internally tyrannical, unaccountable to the public,
[and] granted extraordinary rights by US courts in radical violation
of classical liberal ideals," in Noam Chomsky's words.
But theory is always the last to know.
Even though capitalism doesn't exist, our general view of society
is no other than the ghost of deceased capitalism, sitting crowned
upon the grave thereof. (It's happened before: arguments drawn
from pre-capitalist societies, notably feudalism, still underlie
much of the common law.) And ownership is surrounded with mystification
in our understanding, because the modern ruling class is made
up of those who claim to have this peculiar relationship to the
means of production - they "own" them -- rather than
consisting of warriors, as in the feudal society, or drivers
of slaves, as in the ancient world. And those who don't control
productive property in our society are even spoken of by a massively
misleading analogy as "owning" their own labor (which
they must sell).
Abortion is among other things a matter
of political economy. Practically all of my friends who've had
abortions or seriously considered doing so -- mostly privileged
people -- have said that they acted for economic reasons, inability
to afford the care of a child in the midst of a career being
the principal one. It's our being caught in the cash nexus that
dictates to the poor and well-to-do alike that abortion is necessary.
Even the approval of abortion by Nixon's
Supreme Court -- not generally men of the Left -- depended in
part on a calculus that abortion was cheaper than the adequate
social services for which there was a popular demand a generation
ago (Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973). The justices were undoubtedly
motivated by visions of an insistent "underclass,"
at home and abroad, in those days of fear of both revolutionary
and demographic explosion. Like the US government officials contemporaneously
pressing anti-natal polices on the Third World, they agreed with
the remark (probably apocryphal) attributed to Che Guevara, that
"It's easier to kill a guerrilla in the womb than in the
hills."
Some recent defenses of the moral legitimacy
of abortion have shifted from arguments based on the non-humanity
of unborn children (i.e., that the fetus is not human enough
to have rights) to what in the US are called libertarian arguments
-- e.g., "I have the right to do what I want with my body
(including the contents of my womb)." Defense of abortion
on the basis of the ownership of one's own body is then similar
to the right- wing account of "takings," which resists
governmental attempts to limit what can be done with real estate.
But I don't own my body; I am
my body. Talking of owning one's body arises from a malign mix
of factitious capitalist theory and debased Christianity: I am
then regarded as an immaterial mind/soul related to my body as
the bus driver is to the bus -- a ghost in a machine, in the
classic phrase. (Some Christians seem to forget that the fundamental
Christian doctrine is the resurrection of the body, not the immortality
of the soul.) It's finally this distancing, dualist, indeed Manichean
idea of the self that casts abortion into the capitalist discussion
of ownership.
Defense of the general acceptability
of abortion on the basis of one's ownership of one's body is
a capitalist position that the Left should be skeptical of, on
its fundamental principles. But it's certainly correct -- if
a little oddly put -- to say that every person has rights over
her or his body: inalienable rights indeed (which means you can't
even give them away), to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The abortion argument reduces to the question of how many persons
are involved.
Carl Estabrook
teaches at the University of Illinois. He ran for congress last
year on the Green Party ticket. He can be reached at: galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
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