The right to have or not have children; the right to have both children and a selfhood not dependent on them; these are still being fought for, and this fight threatens every part of the patriarchal system. We cannot afford to settle for individual solutions. The myth that motherhood is "private and personal" is the […]

It is frequently overlooked or dismissed in the debate about the "mo­rality" of abortion that the corollary of "fetal personhood" is forced moth­erhood. For all the antiabortionists’ insistence that the fetus is biologically distinct from the woman and not part of her body, the fact remains that human embryos and infants are completely dependent on […]

Constructing a feminist politics of reproductive freedom, including abortion, requires that we analyze women’s consciousness in relation to the abortion decision. But that is not an easy thing to do. How women act to resolve an unwanted pregnancy is not in itself expressive of their consciousness; we cannot comprehend their reasons and their understand­ings from […]

[Women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. karl marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte . . . it is not simply that there is a […]

Under the impact of "fetal personhood" ideology, women’s autonomy in pregnancy and decisions related to it has been subjected to new kinds of challenges in workplaces, clinics, and courts. These have included (1) employer actions to exclude women from jobs where there may be sub­stances hazardous to reproductivity, (2) medical "advances" that treat the fetus […]

The doctrine of fetal personhood is morally offensive from a feminist, socialist, and humanist standpoint because what makes human life distinct is its capacity for consciousness and sociability. To reduce it to genetics, to equate Holocaust victims with aborted fetuses, is to demean human life and the moral value of consciousness. It is, moreover, to […]

Like its view of the fetus, the "right-to-life" view of motherhood is a remarkably Victorian mixture of religious and biological-determinist elements. On the one hand, there is the Augustinian image of woman as ordained by God to procreate; the passive receptacle of the male seed, "selfish" and "sinful" if she evades that destiny and directs […]

Increasingly, in response to accusations of religious bias and violations of church-state separation, the evidence marshaled by antiabortionists to affirm the personhood of the fetus is not its alleged possession of a soul but its possession of a human body and genotype. In addition, by relying on biological, or genetic, determinism, the "right-to-life" move­ment asserts […]

"Right-to-life" spokespeople strenuously oppose the characterization of their movement as primarily religious, despite all the evidence (see Chapter 7) about the centrality of religious personnel and institutions in antiabortion organizing. Many liberal Catholics are sensitive to the charge that the antiabortion cause is led by the church hierarchy, or to the association of the "right-to-life" […]

The paramount right to life is vested in each human being from the moment of fertilization without regard to age, health, or conditions of dependency. PROPOSED TEXT, HUMAN LIFE AMENDMENT The position that a fetus at any point in a pregnancy, beginning at conception, is a full human person bearing the panoply of rights available […]