From: dholtsin@nyx.cs.du.edu (Doug Holtsinger)
Subject: Pro-life feminism
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Date: Sat, 29 Aug 92 18:12:31 GMT


Daphne de Jong, "The Feminist Sell-Out", New Zealand Listener,
January 14, 1976, reprinted without permission.

  The woman's movement suffers from three classic defense mechanisms
associated with minority group status: self-rejection, identification
with the dominant group, and displacement.

  The demand for abortion at will is a symptom of group self-hatred
and total rejection, not of sex role but of sex identity.

  The womb is not the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence. But it
is the physical centre of her sexual identity, which is an important
aspect of her self-image and personality. To reject its function, or to
regard it as a handicap, a danger or a nuisance, is to reject a vital
part of her own personhood. Every woman need not be a mother, but unless
every woman can identify with the potential motherhood of all women,
no equality is possible. American Negroes gained nothing by straightening
their kinky hair and aping the white middle class. Equality began to
become a reality only when they insisted on acceptance of their different
qualities--"Black is Beautiful".

  Women will gain their rights only when they demand recognition of the
fact that they are people who become pregnant and give birth--and not
always at infallibly convenient times--and that pregnant people have the
same rights as others.

  To say that in order to be equal with men it must be possible for a
pregnant woman to become unpregnant at will, is to say that being a woman
precludes her from being a fully functioning person. It concedes the point
to those who claim that women who want equality really want to be imitation
men.    

  If women must submit to abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career,
their economic or social status, they are pandering to a system devised
and run by men for male convenience. The politics of sexism are perpetuated
by accommodating to expediential societal structures which decree that
pregnancy is incompatible with other activities, and that children are the
sole responsibility of their mother.

  The demand for abortion is a sell-out to male values and a capitulation
to male lifestyles rather than a radical attempt to renegotiate the terms
by which women and men can live in the world as people with equal rights
and equal opportunities. Black "Uncle Toms" have their counterparts not
only in women who cling to the chains of their kitchen sinks, but also
in those who proclaim their own liberation while failing to recognize
that they have merely adopted the standards of the oppressor, and fashioned
themselves in his image.

  Oppressed groups traditionally turn their frustrated vengeance on those 
even weaker than themselves. The unborn is the natural scapegoat for the
repressed anger and hostility of women, which is denied in traditional
male-female relationships, and ridiculed when it manifests itself in feminist
protest. Even while proclaiming "her" rights over the fetus, much 
liberationist rhetoric identifies pregnancy with male chauvinist "ownership".
The inference is that by implanting "his" seed, the man establishes some
claim over a woman's body ("Keeping her barefoot and pregnant"). Abortion is
almost consciously seen as "getting back at" the male. The truth may well
be that the liberationist sees the fetus not as a part of her body but as
a part of his.

  What escapes most liberationist writers is that legal abortion is neither
a remedy nor an atonement for male exploitation of women. It is merely
another way in which women are manipulated and degraded for male convenience
and male profit. This becomes blatantly obvious in the private abortion
industries of both Britain and America, and the support given to the
proabortion lobby by such exploitative corporations as the Playboy empire.

  Of all the things which are done to women to fit them into a society
dominated by men, abortion is the most violent invasion of their physical
and psychic integrity. It is a deeper and more destructive assault than
rape, the culminating act of womb-envy and woman-hatred by the jealous
male who resents the creative power of women.

  Just as the rapist claims to be "giving women what they want," the
abortionist affirms his right to provide a service for which there is
a feminine demand.

  Offered the quick expedient of abortion, instead of community support to
allow her to experience pregnancy and birth and parenthood with dignity
and without surrendering her rights as a person, woman is again the
victim, and again a willing participant in her own destruction.

  The way to equality is not to force women into molds designed for men,
but to re-examine our basic assumptions about men and women, about child-
care and employment, about families and society, and design new and more
flexible modes for living. Accepting short-term solutions like abortion
only delays the implementation of real reforms like decent maternity and
paternity leaves, job protection, high quality child-care, community
responsibility for dependent people of all ages, and recognition of the
economic contribution of child-minders. Agitation for the imaginative
use of glide time, shared jobs, shorter working weeks, good creches,
part-time education and job training, is more constructive for women--and
men--torn between career and children, than agitation for abortion.  

  Today's women's movement remains rooted in 19th-century thinking,
blindly accepting patriarchal systems as though they rested on some
immutable natural law; processing women through abortion mills to manufacture
imitation men who will fit into a society made by and for wombless people.
Accepting the "necessity" of abortion is accepting that pregnant women
and mothers are unable to function as persons in this society. It indicates
a willingness to adjust to the status quo which is a betrayal of the feminist
cause, a loss of the revolutionary vision of a world fit for people to
live in....

  Human rights are not exclusive. Any claim to a superior or exceptional
right inevitably infringes on the rights of someone else. To ignore the
rights of others in an effort to assert our own is to compound injustice,
rather than to reduce it.


Daphne de Jong is a feminist writer and a former president of
Feminists for Life of New Zealand. 



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