traumas in the womb. Fetal psychology—tracing a grown man’s
life back into the womb, where, as a fetus, he had a whole human
self and psychology—developed on the therapeutic Left (the residue of the male counterculture Left) before any right-wing minister or lawmaker ever thought to make a political stand on the right of
fertilized eggs as persons to the protection of the Fourteenth
Amendment, which is in fact the goal of antiabortion activists. *
The argument that abortion was a form of genocide directed particularly at blacks gained political currency, even though feminists from the first based part of the feminist case on the real facts and
figures—black and Hispanic women died and were hurt disproportionately in illegal abortions. As early as 1970, these figures were
*The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, has five sections, the first
of which is crucial here, the second of which is interesting. Section 1: “All
persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge
the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process
of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws. ” The second section guarantees the vote to all males. It was
purposely written to exclude women. Even though women have subsequently been given the vote, laws in the United States routinely abridge the privileges and immunities of women and deprive women of liberty and
property (there are still states in which married women cannot own property on their own)— and women do not have equal protection of the laws.
The fetus, once legally a “person, ” would have all the protections guaranteed by this amendment but not in practice extended to women. The Equal Rights Amendment was in large part an effort to extend the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to women.
available in Sisterhood Is P ow erfu class="underline" “4 . 7 times as many Puerto Rican
women, and 8 times as many black women die of the consequences
of illegal abortions as do white women. . . In New York C ity, 80
percent of the women who die from abortions are black and
brown. ”9 And on the nonviolent Left, abortion was increasingly
considered m urder— murder in the most grandiose terms. “Abortion is the domestic side of the nuclear arms race, ” 10 wrote one male pacifist in a 1980 tract not at all singular in the scale and
tone of its denunciation. Without the easy fuck, things sure had
changed on the Left.
The Democratic Party, establishment home of many Left
groups, especially since the end of the 1960s ferment, had conceded abortion rights as early as 1972, when George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon and refused to take a stand for abortion
so that he could fight against the Viet Nam War and for the presidency without distraction. When the H yde Amendment cutting off Medicaid funding for abortions was passed in 1976, * it had
Jesse Jackson’s support: he had sent telegrams to all members of
Congress supporting the cutoff of funds. Court challenges delayed
the implementation of the H yde Amendment, but Jim m y Carter,
elected with the help of feminist and leftist groups in the Democratic Party, had his man, Joseph A. Califano, J r ., head of the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, halt federal funding of abortion by administrative order. By 1977 the first documented death of a poor woman (Hispanic) from an illegal abortion had occurred: illegal abortion and death were again realities for
women in the United States. In the face of the so-called human-life
amendment and human-life statute— respectively a constitutional
amendment and a bill of law defining a fertilized egg as a human
being— the male Left has simply played dead.
The male Left abandoned abortion rights for genuinely awful
* Except when the mother’s life is at stake in the original version (Hyde’s
version); as amended in the Senate, also in cases o f rape and incest.
reasons: the boys were not getting laid; there was bitterness and
anger against feminists for ending a movement (by withdrawing
from it) that was both power and sex for the men; there was also
the familiar callous indifference of the sexual exploiter—if he
couldn’t screw her she wasn’t real.
The hope of the male Left is that the loss of abortion rights will
drive women back into the ranks—even fear of losing might do
that; and the male Left has done what it can to assure the loss. The
Left has created a vacuum that the Right has expanded to fill—this
the Left did by abandoning a just cause, by its decade of quietism,
by its decade of sulking. But the Left has not just been an absence;
it has been a presence, outraged at women’s controlling their own
bodies, outraged at women’s organizing against sexual exploitation,
which by definition means women also organizing against the sexual values of the Left. When feminist women have lost legal abortion altogether, leftist men expect them back—begging for help, properly chastened, ready to make a deal, ready to spread their
legs again. On the Left, women will have abortion on male terms,
as part of sexual liberation, or women will not have abortion except
at risk of death.
And the boys of the sixties did grow up too. They actually grew
older. They are now men in life, not just in the fuck. They want
babies. Compulsory pregnancy is about the only way they are sure
to get them.
*
Every mother is a judge who sentences the children
for the sins of the father.
Rebecca West, The Judge
The girls of the sixties had mothers who predicted, insisted, argued that those girls would be hurt; but they would not say how or why. In the main, the mothers appeared to be sexual conservatives:
they upheld the marriage system as a social ideal and were silent
about the sex in it. Sex was a duty inside marriage; a w ife’s attitude
toward it was irrelevant unless she made trouble, went crazy,
fucked around. Mothers had to teach their daughters to like men as
a class— be responsive to men as men, warm to men as men— and
at the same time to not have sex. Since males mostly wanted the