Even if contraception were perfected to infallibility, so that no woman need ever again bear an unwanted child; even if laws and customs change—as long as women and women only are the nurturers of children, our sons will grow up looking only to women for compassion, resenting strength in women as ‘control/ clinging to women when we try to move into a new mode of relationship.40
How do we break out of the apparent contradiction between "women’s right to control" over reproduction and their need not to be defined by reproduction? How do we transform the social relations of reproduction to bring men, as potential fathers, into those relations on an equal basis? How would such a transformation affect the principle of "control over our bodies"? The two ideas of reproductive freedom discussed here must be incorporated into a revolutionary feminist and socialist politics. Despite the real tensions between these ideas—stressing changes in the social relations of reproduction and stressing women’s control over their bodies—neither is dispensable for feminists. Yet no political movement for "reproductive rights" or women’s emancipation, including our own, has yet sustained this double agenda in a systematic and consistent way.
The failure to integrate these two ideas in practice in a political movement is illustrated dramatically by Atina Grossman’s account of the abortion struggle that united feminists, socialists, and communists in Weimar Germany.41 "The Communist left and its women’s movement" saw abortion as primarily "a class issue": the proposed law making abortion a criminal act would affect working-class women most severely, since middle-class women could both afford and get access to illegal abortion and contraception. Feminists emphasized "women’s right to sexual pleasure and control of their bodies," suggesting that maternity is a special female realm of experience that cuts across class divisions.
Grossman correctly stresses the positive aspects of this political campaign: It brought together in a single coalition the women’s movement and the working-class movement; it appealed to women of all classes on the basis of their oppression as women in reproduction; it moved even the German Communist party (KPD), for mainly tactical reasons, to put forward a feminist slogan: "Your body belongs to you." Yet the different ideological bases on which groups supported the abortion struggle implied differing senses of why that campaign was important and must have had an impact on the cohesiveness of the movement and its ability to make its ideas felt, for "the politics of reproduction were never. . . adequately integrated into Communist ideology."42 Thus a theory that related the need of individual women for control over their bodies to the needs of the working class as a whole was not—nor has it yet been—articulated.
Reproductive politics in the context of socialist revolutions have been still less cohesive or consciously feminist. In general, where liberalized abortion and divorce reforms have been introduced as a fundamental aspect of socialist revolutions—for example, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—the purpose has been mainly to facilitate women’s participation in industry and the breakup of feudal and patriarchal forms. Such measures have not been inspired by either of the ideas I have been examining, nor by a feminist movement self-consciously struggling to put those ideas into practice. Accounts of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s43 and of Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s44 richly and poignantly illustrate the limits of "reproductive reforms" when they are neither accompanied by material changes that would augment women’s real power in society nor brought into effect through a mass independent women’s movement. Foreshadowing experience in the United States since Roe v. Wade, such reforms were used in a later, reactionary period as a pretext for sexual and reproductive repression. The tendency these cases point to is a reactive chain of developments in which measures such as liberalized abortion and abolishing illegitimacy unleash a rise in sexual activity, abortions, and divorce followed by a period of backlash in which there is an outcry against the "breakup of the family," women are blamed and accused of "selfishness," and the society is chided by population experts about its declining birthrate. In the absence of either adequate material support (incomes, child care, health care, housing) or shared male responsibility for contraception and childrearing, women are left, after these reforms, in some ways more vulnerable than before.45
Scott’s assessment of the situation in Czechoslovakia, while critical of the repressiveness for women of the later, backward shifts in abortion policy, tends nevertheless to focus the blame on abortion. She intimates that abortion is intrinsically a method of birth control that puts women at a disadvantage and "encourages irresponsibility on the part of men." "Abortion as a birth control method puts all the responsibility for the future of the unborn child [sic] on the woman. She makes the application, she agrees to the operation, she pays the fee. If, as in Czechoslovakia, she must go before an interruption commission, she is the one who receives the lecture, is subjected to pressure to have the child, is reproached for getting herself ‘into trouble.’ " 46 What is most striking in this account is the absence (as in Russia) of any women’s organization, movement, or tradition that made reproductive freedom a value in its own right. Clearly, there is nothing inevitable, nothing written into "nature," about the presumed relationship between abortion and male "irresponsibility." One could perfectly well imagine a system of abortion decision making that involved potential fathers to the same degree as potential mothers, although whether women would or should give up their control over this decision is another question. What reinforces male irresponsibility is the reliance on abortion in a social context in which the sex-gender division remains unchanged and in a political context in which that division remains unchallenged.
That a socialist revolution is a necessary but far from sufficient basis for reproductive freedom is illustrated in a different way by the current antinatalist drive in China. The effort of the Chinese government to limit births to two per couple, through a massive campaign of propaganda and education as well as economic incentives,47 raises numerous questions. While the political decision that the Chinese economy and educational system cannot support an increasingly young population may be rational on some level, one wonders, first, whether the economic sanctions on households are accompanied by as vigorous efforts to equalize the position of women in work, economic, and political life; or to develop birth control education and methods for men. Moreover, do the measures fall more heavily on some groups so that poorer families feel a greater pressure to comply? Finally, how and by whom were the decisions made? Were those most affected by them (parents) involved in the process? One disturbing aspect of the Chinese policy is its emphasis on chemical contraceptives and IUDs, with all the known risks and side effects.48 Once again it is women whose bodies are subjected to reproductive and contraceptive risk.
Strategies for establishing reproductive freedom must distinguish between different historical and political contexts. Under the conditions of advanced capitalism existing in the United States today—particularly as the right wing seeks to restore patriarchal control over whether, how, and with whom women have children—reproductive politics necessarily become a struggle for control. Moreover, that struggle is greatly complicated by persistent class and race divisions. For most women in capitalist society, the idea of reproductive control (or "choice") is unthinkable short of a vast array of social changes that are themselves predicated upon a socialist revolution. In the meantime, "control" in a more limited sense may mean different things to different women (birth control information is one thing, possession of your reproductive organs and custody of your children is another). In a class — and race-divided society, "pronatalist" and "antinatalist" policies coincide (e. g., restrictions on abortion and involuntary sterilization), making it necessary for "reproductive rights" proponents to articulate continually that "reproductive freedom means the freedom to have as well as not to have children."49 Because women are subordinate economically, politically, and legally, a policy emphasizing male sharing of childrearing responsibility could well operate to divest women of control over their children in a situation where they have little else. (We are currently getting a foretaste of this danger, with increasing losses of custody fights by women, particularly lesbian mothers.) The "collective" principle could play into the suggestions of "right-to-lifers" that the responsibility for childbearing is too important to be left to women.
On the other hand, because the sexual division of labor around childrearing prevails and defines women’s position, a policy emphasizing improved benefits and services to encourage childbearing may ease the material burdens of motherhood; but it may also operate to perpetuate the existing sexual division of labor and women’s social subordination. This has been the case in Eastern and Western Europe. And in the United States it is easy to imagine an accretion of reforms such as pregnancy disability benefits, child-care centers, and maternity leave provisions, which, if unaccompanied by demands for transforming the total position of women, can be used to rationalize that position.50 The point is not that present attempts to secure funded abortion, pregnancy and maternity benefits, child-care services, and other reforms should be abandoned but that those attempts must be moved beyond the framework of "a woman’s right to choose" and connected to a broader revolutionary movement that addresses all the conditions for women’s liberation.
A feminist and socialist transformation of the existing conditions of reproduction would seek to unleash the possibilities for material (economic and technological) improvements in reproduction from traditional family and sexual forms, to place those positive changes in a new set of social relations. Foremost among these new relations is that concerned with the care of children. Men must be "ready to share the responsibilities of full-time, universal child care as a social priority"—that is, the responsibility for children must be dissociated from gender, which necessarily means that it becomes dissociated from heterosexuality. The writings of feminist theorists51 reveal deeply rooted cultural and psychic bases of traditional childrearing arrangements; they help explain why it is this aspect of presocialist patriarchy that seems most intractable in postrevolutionary societies. The changes we require are total; ". . . no decisive changes can be brought about by measures aimed at women alone, but, rather, the division of functions between the sexes must be changed in such a way that men and women have the same opportunities to be active parents and to be gainfully employed. This makes of women’s emancipation not a ‘woman question’ but a function of the general drive for greater equality which affects everyone. . . . The care of children becomes a fact which society has to take into consideration."52
Under different conditions from any that now exist, it may become possible to transcend some of the individualist elements of feminist thinking about reproductive freedom and move toward a concept of reproduction as an activity that concerns all of society. At the same time, a basis could be created for the genuine reproductive freedom of individuals, ending systems of domination that inhibit their control over their bodies. We need to envision what those conditions would be, even though they seem far from present reality. Charting the development of reproductive politics in the past, especially abortion, and rigorously analyzing their conditions in the present, ought to help us transform those politics in the future.