Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop: Abortion in South Africa, China, Germany, South Africa and International Human Rights Law

I. IntroductionFeminists involved in international human rights law have long recognized that reproductive rights are an essential part of any larger struggle for women's human rights.2 As noted at the World Conference on Population in Cairo in 1994(3) and reiterated at the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995,4 control over their own reproduction is a prerequisite for any meaningful conception of women's human rights.At the same time, feminists have recognized that reproductive rights, in fact, involve a range of related but distinct rights-from access to birth control for minors to environmental safeguards that protect women from involuntary sterilization from industrial pollutants.6 These rights play out in an equally broad range of contexts-from intimate decision making within the nuclear family to state family-planning policy making.This paper focuses on the right to abortion and the inability of feminists to generate consensus regarding that right on the international level, despite widespread agreement as to its basic importance.7 This inability can be traced partly to the different functions abortion serves in different countries and partly to the different strategies that feminists have employed at the national level to safeguard or limit the right to abortion.8 This paper examines the political and social constructions of abortion in China, Germany, and South Africa9-states that have all reformed their abortion laws within the last ten years10-to show how subversions of national abortion policies have effectively subverted attempts to produce an intelligible international position.11By way of caveat, this paper does not attempt to provide the rigorous immersion in each culture necessary to understand reproductive rights within a particular cultural context.12 Such an immersion would necessarily include a full account of reproduction within that culture, including an examination of state population policy, available contraception, access to healthcare, and analysis of women's status.13 As Vivian Curran has argued, such an immersion necessarily requires an understanding of the language as well as the culture.14 My purpose here is much more limited; this paper simply explores the kinds of obstacles feminists confront in reaching an international consensus. The international project must take the underlying cultures into account, but it should not be driven by them.15 Rather, if the international project is realized, it will become the driving force to which the respective cultures must conform. The relationship between the international project and the underlying culture is obviously subject to a shifting dynamic. A key question for international human rights is how to protect the most vulnerable, especially during transition. Yeats's "Crazy Jane" is a crone, a poor woman who somehow gets by, a defiant outsider. She challenges the Bishop to show that his abstract theology addresses her very earthy needs. In the "Crazy Jane" series, written near the end of his life, Yeats assumes a woman's voice to express the range and complexity of women's experience. Just as Crazy Jane challenges the Bishop, the pragmatic strategies adopted by feminists on the national level16 challenge the abstract, universal constructions of international human rights law.17"Abortion" includes a broad range of procedures, depending in part upon the stage of fetal development at which it is performed.18 Abortion includes a similarly broad range of social and political meanings.19 In South Africa, the debate over the new abortion law became a microcosm of national politics as Islamic, tribal, and other factions struggled with the rhetoric of equality and the bitter legacy of apartheid.20 In China, abortion is both a human rights rally cry against the coerced abortions performed pursuant to the one-child policy (and a ground for asylum claims21) and a privilege limited to those who can afford the sex-selective abortions that remain technically illegal. …