These bleak misgivings turned out to be prescient. As the writer Virginia Ironside wrote recently of her own youth in the Sixties: Armed with the pill, and with every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly.” And, Bachiochi argues, women consenting to unwanted sex was not the only downside of the pill.
Contraception may have reduced the rate of accidental pregnancy as a total proportion of casual sex, but the existence of contraception so radically changed social norms that much more casual sex took place. And contraception was only mostly effective – so the absolute number of accidental pregnancies went up. This in turn drove feminist demands for legal abortion — a practice Wollstonecraft, and most 19th-century feminists, viewed as abhorrent and indistinguishable from infanticide.
And as feminist campaigns to legalise abortion gathered steam, their arguments turned chiefly on personal autonomy. Betty Friedan argued in 1967 that a woman’s “right to control her reproductive process” was core to the “personhood and dignity of woman”. The feminist jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg went further, saying that the right to terminate a pregnancy was key to affording women “equal citizenship status”.
But this had repercussions for how our societies make sense of motherhood. In effect, Bachiochi argues, making “equal citizenship status” contingent on the power to end a pregnancy entrenched in law a Hobbesian view of the “state of nature”: a vision of “radically autonomous and self-interested male and female individuals”. Indeed, I’ve written on several occasions about the liberal world’s blind spots concerning motherhood, dependency and care. But on abortion, I’ve always been in the “safe, legal and rare” camp. So I found this book challenging, for Bachiochi makes a persuasive case that as long as we uphold women’s right to end a pregnancy, we conclusively favour the Hobbesian vision of selfhood over one that makes room for dependency and care.
As the pro-life feminist Clair de Jong put it in 1978, “Accepting the ‘necessity’ of abortion is accepting that pregnant women and mothers are unable to function as persons in this society”. US President Joe Biden’s recent description of mothers as “locked out of the workforce” by caregiving responsibilities is typical. Mothers are, in effect, illegible to the prevailing conception of personhood — which is based on market participation — except when we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realisation.
An unborn child is absolutely dependent on its mother, and she cannot be replaced. Within an atomised understanding of what humans are, we have no way of weighing competing interests in such a context. And if personhood relies on us having absolute autonomy over our bodies, we must begrudge any claim, however slight, of a dependent baby still contained in that body — lest its rights-bearing nature conflict with ours.
Polls consistently show us to be ambivalent on this question, across both sexes. More women than men believe life begins at conception, while in this 2017 poll, 41% of UK women supported reducing the gestation limit to 12 weeks or lower, compared to 24% of men.
We can only resolve this via positions most people find intuitively repellent, such as the claim that signs of trying to avoid pain aren’t evidence of life. Or even, as the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Peter Singer argues in Practical Ethics, that because “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time,” therefore “they are not persons”. If you’d told me, when I was grieving a pregnancy loss, that I was mourning “little more than cells and electrical activity“ I’d have punched you. And yet we nod along to this idea in other contexts, where doing so supports women’s bodily autonomy.
The atomised vision of personhood is nigh-on unchallenged today. So, many decades into the victory of autonomy over dependence, in the name of feminism, it’s easier to see why even Right-wing young women were unwilling to hear Bachiochi’s arguments. The Right may speak more warmly than the Left about family life, but while we grant personhood and citizenship on the basis of bodily autonomy, what sane woman would seek to deny those goods to her own sex?
Yet abortion rights cut to the heart of yet more contentious issues on the feminist Left. Here, bitter debates rage between those who denounce the marketisation of women’s bodies, for example in surrogacy or the sex industry, and those who defend such practices as potentially empowering and limited only by the need for individual consent. But most feminists on either side of even these fierce disagreements are unanimous on the need to protect a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy.
Bachiochi, though, makes an uncomfortable argument that cuts across both these positions. Nothing, she suggests, could more viscerally epitomise the conflict between the individualistic logic of the market, and a more communitarian one that values and centres dependency and care, than the question of abortion. A women’s movement that “regards abortion rights as equal citizenship rights”, Bachiochi suggests, has already conceded nearly the entire battle on valuing dependency: it has “surrendered, once and for all, to the logic of that market”.
And this means, in effect, that the central political demand of feminism is for women’s rights to enter a “marketplace” of notionally free, unencumbered individuals on the same terms as men. To compete in the workplace without asymmetrical reproductive handicaps; to live without strings. In other words, to be functionally indistinguishable from the most Hobbesian vision of men at their most radically rootless.
And from this vantage-point, even those feminists who resist the claim that “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” find their proposition fatally undermined if they support abortion. For if Bachiochi is right, then they are defending the distinction between the sexes while fiercely committed to the medical intervention most critical to collapsing the distinction between the sexes. Can we really protest the degradation of feminism into a campaign to free us from our biology, while digging our heels in to defend a vision of personhood that rests on exactly that? For 21st-century feminism, the question of choice poses some difficult choices.
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