Dr. Tiller and Professor Frye

Today, on the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the National Abortion Rights Action League is sponsoring Blog for Choice Day.  According to the Blog for Choice web page, "In honor of Dr. George Tiller, who often wore a button that simply read, `Trust Women,' this year's Blog for Choice question is: What does Trust Women mean to you?

Dr. Tiller, of course, is the Kansas abortion provider who was murdered by an anti-choice terrorist last May. Dr. Tiller was often villified by right-wing Christians because he was one of the few doctors in the country who would provide late-term abortions. To the Christian Right, the only reason that a pregnant woman would end a late-term pregnancy was because she was an irresponsible blood-thirsty fiend intent on murdering her unborn baby (or perhaps was being forced to murder her baby by a fiendish blood-thirsty relative). Real life, of course, is more complicated.

I suspect that there are indeed cases -- particularly in fundamentalist families in which pregnancies "out of wedlock" are considered shameful -- where a pregnant woman chooses, or is forced by her family, to abort a viable late-term fetus. I suspect that this secret, shameful family history is part of what motivates some anti-choice activists. But in most cases, when a woman ends a late-term pregnancy, it is because continuing the pregnancy would seriously endanger her health, or because the fetus has a serious condition that would doom it to a brief and very painful life. By oversimplifying the issue of late-term abortion, and exaggerating its frequency, the anti-choice movement hopes to turn the public against abortion rights in general.

The button that Dr. Tiller wore was meant to say that women, in general, are reasonable people, and not bloodthirsty fiends. We can be trusted to make decisions about  what goes on inside our bodies. Why would anyone argue otherwise?

Tulsa native Marilyn Frye suggests an answer in her essay Some Reflections on Separatism and Power. First, Frye notes that both feminist and anti-feminist literature seem to agree that males and females live in a parasitic relationship -- "a parasitism of the male on the female... that it is, generally speaking, the strength, energy, inspiration and nurturance of women that keeps men going, and not the strength, aggression, spirituality and hunting of men that keeps women going." She says that it is this analysis that accounts for right-wing panic over the issue of abortion.

The fetus lives parasitically. It is a distinct animal surviving off the life (the blood) of another animal creature. It is incapable of surviving on its own resources, of independent nutrition; incapable even of symbiosis. If it is true that males live parasitically upon females, it seems reasonable to suppose that many of them and those loyal to them are in some way sensitive to the parallelism between their situation and that of the fetus. They could easily identify with the fetus. The woman who is free to see the fetus as a parasite might be free to see the man as a parasite. The woman's willingness to cut off the life line to one parasite suggests a willingness to cut off the life line to another parasite. The woman who is capable (legally, psychologically, physically) of decisively, self-interestedly, independently rejecting the one parasite, is capable of rejecting, with the same decisiveness and independence, the like burden of the other parasite. In the eyes of the other parasite, the image of the wholly self-determined abortion, involving not even a ritual submission to male veto power, is the mirror image of death.

Another clue here is that one line of argument against free and easy abortion is the slippery slope argument that if fetuses are to be freely dispensed with, old people will be next. Old people? Why are old people next? And why the great concern for them? Most old people are women, indeed, and patriarchal loyalists are not generally so solicitous of the welfare of any women. Why old people? Because, I think, in the modem patriarchal divisions of labor, old people too are parasites on women. The anti-abortion folks seem not to worry about wife beating and wife murder-there is no broad or emotional popular support for stopping these violences. They do not worry about murder and involuntary sterilization in prisons, nor murder in war, nor murder by pollution and industrial accidents. Either these are not real to them or they cannot identify with the victims; but anyway, killing in general is not what they oppose. They worry about the rejection by women, at women's discretion, of something which lives parasitically on women. I suspect that they fret not because old people are next, but because men are next.

To the Christian Right, the parasitism of men upon women is ordained by God and unavoidable. To me as a radical lesbian feminist, it is obvious that men really are quite capable of taking care of their own physical and emotional well being, and it is neither necessary nor right for them to control women's bodies and lives.Once the rest of the world figures that out, the world will be a very different and much better place.