THE OPEN-MINDED LEFT :

And Another Thing... (KATHA POLLITT, June 10, 2002, The Nation)

What if a woman ran for President who had great progressive politics except for one thing--she believed that any man accused of rape or sexual harassment should be castrated without a trial? How many progressive men would say to themselves, Oh well, she's got great positions on unions, the environment, the death penalty, and all the rest, and besides, women really like her, so she gets my vote! Ten men? three? two?

Of course, no progressive woman would ever put this crazy notion forward. Our hypothetical candidate would understand all too well that she couldn't propose to kick men in the collective teeth and expect them to vote for her. Back in the real world, however, this is precisely what some progressives apparently expect women to do for Dennis Kucinich, whose anti-choice voting record was the subject of my last column. Besides numerous e-mails thanking me for "outing" him and two or three upholding the "human rights" of the "itty bitty zygote," I heard from a few readers like Michael Sherrard, who urged "liberals" to "get over their single-issue abortion orthodoxy." Instead of asking women to give up their rights, why not pressure Kucinich to support them? To get that "broad based multi-issue progressive movement" Sherrard wants, Kucinich is the one who needs to get real, to face the demographic truth that without the votes, dollars and volunteer labor of pro-choice women and men, no Democrat can win the White House. His anti-choice votes may suit his socially conservative Cleveland constituents, as his supporters claim, but America isn't the 10th Congressional District of Ohio writ large.

What Kucinich's fans may not understand is that for pro-choice women, abortion is not just another item on the list. It goes straight to the soul. It is about whether society sees you as fully human or as a vessel for whom no plan or hope or possibility or circumstance, however desperate, matters more than being a nest for that "itty bitty zygote." As I've written before, despite the claims of "pro-life feminists" and "seamless-garment" Catholics, progressive social policies and abortion rights tend to go together: Abortion bans flourish where there are backwardness, poverty, undemocratic government and politically powerful patriarchal religion, where levels of education, healthcare and social investment in children are low, and where women have little power. Instead of asking women to sign over their wombs for the cause, progressives should demand that "their" politicians add abortion rights to their agenda. No progressive would vote for someone who opposed unions or wanted to bring back Jim Crow. Why should women's rights matter less? It's disgusting that the AFL-CIO supports anti-choice politicians--as if their members aren't getting (or causing) abortions in vast numbers--and it backfires, too. In Pennsylvania's Democratic gubernatorial primary, pro-choice centrist Democrat Ed Rendell trounced anti-choice labor-endorsed Bob Casey Jr., 56 to 44 percent.

A few things seem worth mentioning here. First, her analogy makes absolutely no sense. Without delving too deeply into the moral issues here, it seems fair to characterize the pro-life position as follows : a fetus is a human being and has human rights which may take precedence over a woman's right to control her body. This position requires women to accept responsibility for a prior act, their impregnation. She compares this to a position which would say that a man's right to control his body must yield following a simple accusation that he has done something wrong. this position does not require that a prior act have occurred for which the man must take responsibility. A more apt, though still inexact analogy would be to compare the pro-life position towards a woman's control over her body to a position which would allow men who are convicted of rape to be castrated. At that point we'd have two policies that each hold people morally accountable for what they do. I suspect the pro-castration candidate would fare quite well with both men and women.

Second, note the dismissive term she uses to describe the fetus : "itty bitty zygote". Whom we wish to kill we must first dehumanize.

Finally, she gets one big thing right. Abortion really has nothing to do with privacy or health or any of the myriad excuses that are offered for allowing it. Abortion is primarily an assertion of power on the part of women--a statement that they wield the power of life and death over someone. There is no greater power that we humans have over one another and the right to exercise it is an awesome thing. As such it must be the defining issue for "feminists", because it more than anything else conveys the sense of empowerment that is at the core of the movement. Presumably the insistence on the exercise of this power--which is so much at odds with the rest of women's politics and their general desire for physical and economic security for even the weakest members of society--is simply a function of the immaturity of the movement and will be relaxed and even reversed once they gain confidence that they are truly equal to men politically.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2002 6:57 PM