Are Women Human? "Feminists for Life" Doesn't Think So

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 9:47 AM on January 23, 2008.

When trying to think of an angle to write for Blog For Choice day, I was lucky enough to get this email from a reader asking me to look over a new attempt by Feminists For Life to recast anti-choice politics as somehow feminist-friendly, by arguing that allowing women to control their own fertility is a human rights violation. Now, I realize that most of us tend to think that “human rights violation” is traditionally about violating someone’s rights—their liberty, their freedom, their autonomy—and thus the argument that taking away women’s rights is saving women’s rights doesn’t quite make sense. But we’re from the old school feminist camp that believed that women are humans, with rights similar to those traditional human rights.

But FFL basically argues that we can’t frame women’s rights as human rights because women don’t have the agency to enjoy freedom.

However, we differ with Amnesty’s call upon all nations to ensure access to abortion for any woman who becomes pregnant as a result of rape, sexual assault, or incest, and would strongly urge you to consider the concerns and perspectives expressed in this and subsequent paragraphs. FFL supports the protection of women from abortion, which is itself a form of violence against women, and for this reason we appreciate Amnesty’s consistent efforts to protect women from coerced abortion. We therefore urge you to reconsider this aspect of your recently adopted policy on abortion, which we believe does not protect the rights of women and children.

We understand that your position is one which advocates access to abortion particularly in countries where rape has been used as a deplorable tool of cultural oppression and where the pregnancy may produce further discrimination and even persecution. This position was captured well in one of your press releases: “…Our policy reflects our obligation of solidarity as a human rights movement with, for example, the rape survivor in Darfur who, because she is left pregnant as a result of the enemy, is further ostracised by her community.1″ However, abortion is not an expression of solidarity with this woman; it will in fact compound her suffering and is an endorsement of her community’s unjust view of her. The rape survivor in Darfur deserves much better than abortion.

Rape is not just traumatic because people are mean to you afterwards, but this letter implies that’s the main issue. Considering that rape is a tool of genocide—the idea being that you’re forcing the hated people to bear the children of their oppressors—I’d suggest that women seeking abortion after a genocidal rape probably have good reasons outside of just “caving into pressure”. But FFL imagines women as single-minded baby-making machines, and any choices we make that go against that must be the result of oppression or force, because a woman can no more choose not to have a baby right now than a bird can choose to quit flying and get around with a teeny-tiny Volkswagen bug.

You can tell that FFL is just a right wing organization pretending to be feminists because their view of feminism correlates not with the way it actually exists in the real world, but with this image that right wingers have created of feminists. You know the argument—the only reason that feminists would seek justice for women is because we believe that women are weak little beings incapable of taking care of ourselves. That if you call the cops after getting beaten or raped, you’re just “playing the victim”, an argument that presupposes your average conservative man would be kind enough not to phone the cops after getting mugged, lest we accuse him of playing the victim and having no agency. Real feminists believe that women do have agency that’s cramped by the patriarchy. (Read Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Second Sex for a really great overview of this idea.) FFL, however, seems to think that women’s agency is so limited that we can’t even choose not to have children. That it’s literally impossible for a woman to actively seek to control her fertility (because FFL is both anti-abortion rights and deeply unwilling to suggest that contraception might be a good way to prevent abortion).

It’s this belief—that women have no agency and therefore can’t really have rights to use in the traditional sense that we imagine men having rights—that explains how assholes like Issues 4 Life can argue with a straight face that abortion is genocide, that a woman who privately seeks out abortion might as well be, I don’t know, I guess raping herself in Darfur? It doesn’t hold up to much investigation, and as BFP points out, is a fundamental insult to black women who seek abortion (most of the time, as I say in the podcast, with the survival of existing or future children in mind as well as for their own survival), because it’s accusing them of genocide against their own people. How can anyone who claims to care for black people say with a straight face that black women should be prevented from managing their own lives? How can anyone wave the flag of civil rights while arguing that women don’t deserve rights?

See above: We’re dealing with a fundamental disagreement about whether or not women are human. Rights are based on the realization that self-determination is the best path to justice, and most discussions about rights are about what set of them best assists self-determination.* Issues 4 Life isn’t arguing that black women are committing genocide against their own people, because they reject the notion that women have the agency to make the choices, that some agency-possessing man is doing all the thinking there.

There will be a lot of blog posts today about the specifics of why women make the choices they do, be it to abort, use contraception, seek infertility treatments, have a baby, keep a baby, give a baby up for adoption, never have children, or have many. Most will be telling stories as part of the larger effort to argue this fundamental belief, that women are human and have agency and therefore have the same right to self-determination as men.

*Example: The argument over social welfare. I would argue that something like Social Security or universal health care is a right that helps people engage in self-determination, because it helps their economic decisions rise above mere survival. Conservatives would argue that high taxes squelch self-determination. Why they’re wrong is another post, but it’s important to note that everyone is arguing on the same terms at least.

Tagged as: reproductive justice, pro-choice, abortion, roe v wade, feminism, human rights

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.