Small wonder, then, that three out of four American women who have an abortion give poverty as the reason: a tech fix for sometimes gruelling social and economic difficulties. Anyone who spends more than a few minutes on “Shout Your Abortion“, a website dedicated to normalising the practice by telling women’s abortion stories, will see how ambivalent many women were in practice about the choices that were open to them, and the one they took.
This dilemma feels all the more concrete since the recent US Supreme Court leak, that suggests judges are poised to overturn America’s nationwide right to legal abortion. Much has been written since by pro-choice feminists defending abortion access as a cornerstone of women’s freedom. And in the same sense as formula and birth control, it’s a technology that does indeed grant women greater freedom. But more broadly even than changes to marriage and sexual mores, Bachiochi argues that its wider social impact makes abortion a Faustian bargain for women, by placing placed mothers permanently on the back foot.
For in making the right to terminate a pregnancy a cornerstone of freedom and thus personhood, she argues, feminism embraced a male-standard idea of what people are as the default: unencumbered, atomised, free of caring obligations. Normalising this individualistic idea of what a person is has left everyone with caring obligations (ie especially mothers) structurally disadvantaged, even as it legitimises undervaluing and underpaying those who do caring work.
And even as caring work is structurally undervalued in an economy predicated on tech-enabled freedom, women are then castigated for choosing the ‘less caring’ tech fix – or blamed and scorned for their vulnerability when the tech is no longer available. The singer Bette Midler epitomised this attitude when she tweeted in response to the formula shortage: “TRY BREASTFEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.”
An even more callous Midlerism drips from every right-winger who has ever banged the drum for ending abortion access, while showing zero interest in the wider social context in which women opt to abort. This might mean improving perinatal healthcare access or social safety nets, incentivising paternal responsibility, or even advocating for a less hypersexualised society. But with the honourable exception of Catholic feminists such as Bachiochi, and a handful of post-liberals, American conservatism seems keener on leaning wholesale into the tech-enabled freedom and individualism consistent with a world where abortion is legal – just with an exception where women’s bodies are concerned. Examples are legion, but one that caused particular outrage amid the Dobbs furore was a video clip showing (male) members of New York’s Fire Department crowing: “you have no choice […] not your body not your choice, your body is mine”.
Given such an unforgiving backdrop, it’s understandable that many feminists prioritise defending abortion (or formula) over fighting an uphill battle to transform every other social factor that makes dependent babies and caring obligations such a frightening prospect for so many women. All other things being equal, I can see how a tech fix might seem women’s only option in a truly pitiless predicament.
But if the Right is hopelessly confused on technology and freedom, oscillating between wanting to ban gender surgeries and abortion and calling for us to colonise Mars, the Left is equally muddled. This progressive cognitive dissonance over technology and women celebrates tech’s liberatory upside, while hand-wringing guiltily about its innumerable ecological costs. Disposable nappies, for example, make up 30% of all landfill waste and take 500 years to decompose. Formula milk has a carbon cost. And the contraceptive pill many otherwise eco-conscious feminists rely on for sexual liberation is a disastrous pollutant.
Tech-optimists argue that we can fix all this with more tech. More likely, say the doomers, that in the future more of us will have to manage without – a prospect the current formula shortage is doing nothing to dispel. If the doomers are right, who will pick up all the labour-intensive domestic work currently eased by technology? Of course it’s possible that climate change will do what half a century of feminist activism never achieved, and level the still wildly uneven burden of housework between the sexes, but I’m not holding my breath.
In any case, regardless of what happens with formula supplies or US abortion law, it seems more than likely that these are not the only technologies that seemed to promise a level playing field between the sexes in the twentieth century, only to grow scarcer in the twenty-first. For even if Left and Right are differently muddled as to which liberatory technologies they defend and which they decry, the overall portfolio of such technologies is indisputably less certain than it seemed even a decade ago.
If I’m right, a women’s movement fit for the 21st century will need to work out what it means to defend women’s interests (and especially those of mothers) in a world with far fewer labour-saving devices, and potentially far less reproductive autonomy. Not a feminism of ever-increasing material abundance and freedom, but a new feminism of scarcity.
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