grief-stricken by the way men use her uterus, the woman who has
finally refused to be forced and so she must be punished by the
pain and the blood, the tearing and the terror.
The law gives a married woman to her husband to be fucked at
w ill, his w ill; the law forced the woman to bear any child that
might result. Illegal abortion was a desperate, dangerous, last-
ditch, secret, awful w ay of saying no. It is no wonder that so m any
respectable, m arried, God-fearing women hate abortion.
*
A n estimated 20 million illegal abortions are performed in the world each year and are a leading cause o f death among women of child-bearing age, a
study issued today said.
The report by the Population Crisis Committee
also said that another 20 million abortions were selfinduced annually and that the number was growing.
The New York Times, April 30, 1979
Women cannot be responsible for pregnancy, in the sense of acting
to prevent it, because women do not control when, where, how,
and on what terms they have intercourse. Intercourse is forced on
women, both as a normal part of marriage and as the prim ary sex
act in virtually any sexual encounter with a man. No woman needs
intercourse; few women escape it.
In marriage a man has the sexual right to his wife: he can fuck
her at w ill by right of law. The law articulates and defends this
right. The state articulates and defends this right. This means that
the state defines the intimate uses of a woman’s body in marriage;
so that a man acts with the protection of the state when he fucks
his wife, regardless of the degree of force surrounding or intrinsic
to the act. In the United States only five states have entirely abrogated the so-called marital rape exemption— the legal proviso that a man cannot be crim inally charged for raping his wife because rape
by definition cannot exist in the context of marriage, since marriage
licenses the use of a woman’s body by her husband against her
will. Nearly three times that many states have extended the husband’s right to forced intercourse to cohabiting men or, in some cases, even to so-called voluntary social companions. But even
where marital rape is illegal, the husband has at his disposal the
ordinary means of sexual coercion, including threat of physical violence, punitive economic measures, sexual or verbal humiliation in private or in public, violence against inanimate objects, and threats
against children. In other words, eliminating the legal sanctioning
of rape does not in itself eliminate sexual coercion in marriage; but
the continued legal sanctioning of rape underlines the coercive
character and purpose of marriage. Marriage law is irrefutable
proof that women are not equal to men. No person can enter into
an agreement in which her body is given to another and remain or
become or act as or effectually be his equal.
The law takes the form it does with divine sanction: civil law
reiterates religious dogma. The law enforces a relationship between
men and women that has its origins in so-called divine law; the law
enforces the divinely ordained subordination of women through its
regulation of sex in marriage. The law is an instrument of religion,
and it is precisely as an instrument of religion that law regulating
marriage gets its special character: laws against assault and battery
pale in importance when compared with the divine law giving a
man authority over his wife’s body. The man’s authority over his
wife’s body is willed by God—even if the same relationship outside of marriage and without reference to gender would be described as slavery or torture. The laws of God are upheld by the laws of this republic, this proud secular democracy. The marriage
laws fundamentally violate the civil rights of women as a class by
forcing all married women to conform to a religious view of
women’s sexual function. These same laws violate the civil rights
of women by compelling women to serve their husbands sexually
whether they will it or not and by defining women as a class in
terms of a sexual function that must be fulfilled. *
Women feel the pressure to submit in a m yriad of w ays, none of
which have to do with marital law as such. The woman is likely to
encounter marital law when she has been abused and seeks to act in
her own behalf as if she had a right to the disposition of her own
body. The point is that the law sets the standard for the disposition
of her body: it belongs to her husband, not to her.
The good wife submits; the bad wife can be forced to submit.
All women are supposed to submit.
One of the consequences of submission, whether conforming or
forced, is pregnancy.
Women are required to submit to intercourse, and women may
then be required to submit to the pregnancy.
Women are required to submit to the man, and women may
then be required to submit to the fetus.
Since the law sets the standard for the control, use of, function
of, purpose of, the wife’s body, and since the law supports the
right of the man to use force against his wife in order to have sex,
women live in a context of forced sex. This is true outside the
realm of subjective interpretation. If it were not true, the law
would not be formulated to sanction the husband’s forced penetra
*The American Civil Liberties Union has a handbook on women’s rights.
In that handbook, laws against prostitution are discussed in terms of the
right o f women to have sex: “the central focus of all these laws is to punish
sexual activity” (The Rights of Women, Susan C. Ross [New York: Avon, 1973], p. 176); equal right to sexual activity is seen to be the civil liberties
issue of paramount importance and laws against prostitution are simply a
cover for denying women the right to sexual activity. This is not a narrow
discussion o f laws on prostitution and their sex-discriminatory language or
enforcement. It is a position on what rights are for women, what freedom
is. There is no mention o f marital rape or o f the marital rape exemption as
violations of civil liberties and no discussion whatsoever of sexual coercion
in marriage sanctioned by law in letter and in practice as a violation o f civil