The principle that grounds women’s reproductive freedom in a "right to bodily self-determination," or "control over one’s body," has three distinct but related bases: liberalism, neo-Marxism, and biological contingency. Its liberal roots may be traced to the Puritan revolution in seventeenth-century England. In that period, the Leveller idea of a "property in one’s own person" was linked explicitly to nature and paralleled the idea of a "natural right" to property in goods: "To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for every one as he is himselfe, so he hath a selfe propriety, else could he not be himselfe, and on this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature, and of the Rules of equity and justice between man and man. . . ."4 A person, to be a person, must have control over himself or herself, in body as well as in mind. This Leveller notion of individual selfhood, although phrased in masculine terms, had specific applications to the conditions of women in the seventeenth century: the enactment of the Puritan idea of marriage as a contract, restrictions against wife beating, and the liberalization of divorce.5 It had other applications that affected men and women: the introduction of habeas corpus in 1628 (bodies cannot be detained without cause); and, above all, a resistance to the idea of selling, or alienating, one’s body to another through wage labor. Thus, the original notion of "property in one’s person" was not only an assertion of individualism in an abstract sense but had a particular radical edge that rejected the commoditization of bodies through an emergent labor market. The Levellers were saying: My body is not property; it is not transferable; it belongs only to me.
While the liberal origins of the "bodily integrity" principle are clear, its radical implications should not be forgotten. In its more recent juridical expressions, for example the so-called right to privacy, the principle has been applied to defend prisoners from physical abuse, undocumented aliens from bodily searches, and patients from involuntary treatment or medical experimentation, as well as in the well-known "reproductive rights" cases.6 While privacy, like property, has a distinctly negative con
notation that is exclusionary and asocial, when applied to persons as persons—in their concrete, physical being—it also has a positive sense that roughly coincides with the notion of "individual self-determination." Control over one’s body is an essential part of being an individual with needs and rights, a concept that is the most powerful legacy of the liberal political tradition.
This principle clearly applies to persons as persons and not only to women. Nevertheless, it was the soil that nourished the growth of feminism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and many of the gains sought by women under the rubrics of "liberty" and "equality" still have not been won.7 A certain idea of individuality is also not antithetical to a Marxist tradition, which distinguishes between the idea of individual human beings as historically determined, concrete, and particular in their needs and the ideology of "individualism" (i. e., "the individual" conceived as isolated, atomized, exclusive in his possessions, disconnected from larger social fabrics). As Agnes Heller puts it, the former idea recognizes that the end of socialist transformation is ultimately the satisfaction of individual needs, which are always concrete and specific (unlike rights, which belong to "citizens" or "persons" in the abstract). Thus, "Marx recognizes no needs other than those of individual people"; while understanding needs as generally social or "socially produced," such needs "are the needs of individual human beings." "When the domination of things over human beings ceases, when relations between human beings no longer appear as relations between things, then every need governs ‘the need for the development of the individual/ the need for the self-realization of the human personality."8
Similarly, Marcuse argues in favor of restoring a sense of individual "happiness" to a revolutionary ethic ("general happiness apart from the happiness of individuals is a meaningless phrase"). Through his analysis of contemporary forms of domination and repression that alienate individuals from a sense of connectedness with their own bodies and thus with the physical and social world, Marcuse arrives at a hedonism containing a liberatory element. That element is a sense of "complete immediacy," of "sensuality," which is a necessary precondition for the "development of personality" and the participation of individuals in social life. The link between eroticism and politics is a "receptivity that is open and that opens itself [to experience]."9 Control over one’s body is a fundamental aspect of this immediacy, this "receptivity," a requirement of being a person and engaging in conscious activity. Understood thus, it is a principle of radical ethics that should never be abandoned.
The direct connection between "control over one’s body" and feminist claims regarding women’s control over reproduction seemed obvious to early birth control advocates. Ezra Hey wood, an anarchist birth controller in the 1870s, asserted "Woman’s Natural Right to ownership of and control over her own body-self—a right inseparable from Women’s intelligent existence."10 This connection is as real today. Because pregnancies occur in women’s bodies, the continued possibility of an "unwanted" pregnancy affects women in a very specific sense, not only as potential bearers of fetuses, but also in their capacity to enjoy sexuality and maintain their health. A woman’s right to decide on abortion when her health and her sexual self-determination are at stake is "nearly allied to her right to be."11
Reproduction affects women as women; it transcends class divisions and penetrates everything—work, political and community involvements, sexuality, creativity, dreams. Gordon illustrates this point with reference to the conditions that generated the nineteenth-century birth control movement:
The desire for and the problems in securing abortion and contraception made up a shared female experience. Abortion technique was apparently not much safer among upper-class doctors than among working-class mid wives. The most commonly used contraceptives—douches, withdrawal—were accessible to women of every class. And what evidence there is of the subjective experience of women in their birth-control attempts also suggests that the desire for spaced motherhood and smaller families existed in every class, and that the desire was so passionate that women would take severe risks to win a little space and control in their lives. The individual theory and practice of birth control stems from a biological female condition that is more basic even than class.12
It is surprising to find Gordon reverting to a "biological female condition" in the midst of an analysis of the social construction of women’s reproductive experience. Yet it reminds us that the "bodily integrity" principle has an undeniable biological component. As long as women’s bodies remain the medium for pregnancies, the connection between women’s reproductive freedom and control over their bodies represents not only a moral and political claim but also, on some level, a material necessity. This acknowledgment of biological reality should not be mistaken for biological determinist thinking about women; my point is simply that biology is a capacity as well as a limit.13 That it is women who get pregnant has been the source of our confinement (in all senses) and our (limited) power. An abundance of feminist anthropological literature reminds us that pollution rituals, fertility cults, prohibitions against abortion, and chastity rules imposed on wives and daughters are signs of men’s envy and fear of women’s reproductive capacity. Indeed, the current attack on abortion in the United States and elsewhere in the West has been interpreted by some feminists as a massive recurrence of male "womb envy."
I would be the last to romanticize the control that comes from our biological connection to childbearing, or to underestimate its repressive social aspects. On the other hand, women’s control over their bodies is not like preindustrial workers’ control over their tools; it cannot be wrested away through changes in technology or legal prohibitions and repression— which is why no modern society has succeeded for long in outlawing abortion or birth control, only in driving it "underground."
It is important, however, to keep in mind that woman’s reproductive situation is never the result of biology alone, but of biology mediated by social and cultural organization. That is, it is not inevitable that women, and not men, should bear the main consequences of unintended pregnancy and thus that their sexual expression be inhibited by it. Rather, it is the result of the socially ascribed primacy of motherhood in women’s lives. Yet biology as it is socially mediated by male-dominant institutions affects all women. Today there is prolific evidence of this "shared female experience." The cutbacks in abortion funding, whose hardest impact has been on low-income women, have spearheaded a right-wing movement to curtail abortion services and reimbursements for working-class and middle-class women dependent on health insurance plans as well. While sterilization abuse has mainly been directed at poor, Third World, and mentally disabled women, the ultimatum to well-paid women chemical workers that they get sterilized or lose their jobs has widened our perspective on this issue.14 Indeed, the fact that female sterilization, an irreversible procedure, has become the most widely used, medically encouraged, and economically reimbursable method of contraception among all but the very young in the United States,15 as evidence grows of the pill’s dangers to health and abortions are restricted, raises questions about reproductive "choices" for most women. That the two major birth control methods in current use are, on the one hand, irreversible, and, on the other hand, dangerous to health, affects women of all classes. It is a condition set, not by reproductive technology, but by a reproductive politics that seeks to curtail the efforts of women "to win a little space and control in their lives" and freely to express their sexuality.
The principle of "control over our bodies," then, has a material as well as a moral and a political basis. The "liberal," the "radical" or "neo- Marxist," and the "biological" elements of this principle should not be seen as alternatives to one another but as different levels of meaning that give the principle its force and complexity. Sorting out these levels should make it easier for us to distinguish between situations when we are describing "control over our bodies" as a material fact, when we are asserting it as a right, and when we are defining it as part of a larger set of socially determined human needs.
Yet the idea of "a woman’s right to choose" as the main principle of reproductive freedom is insufficient and problematic at the same time as it is politically compelling. For one thing, this principle evades moral questions about when, under what conditions, and for what purposes reproductive decisions should be made. Feminists writing on abortion usually have not claimed that a pregnant woman "owns" the fetus or that it is part of her body. On the contrary, feminists have generally characterized an unwanted pregnancy as a kind of bodily "invasion."16 Recognizing a real conflict between the survival of the fetus and the needs of the woman and those dependent on her, the feminist position says merely that women must decide because it is their bodies that are involved, and because they have primary responsibility for the care and development of any children bom.
But determining who should decide—the political question—does not tell us anything about the moral and social values women ought to bring to this decision.17 Should women get an abortion on the grounds that they prefer a different gender, which amniocentesis can now determine? Such a decision would be blatantly sexist, and nobody’s claim to "control over her body" could make it right or compatible with feminist principles. That is, "a woman’s right to control her body" is not absolute, but we have not developed a socialist-feminist morality that would tell us what the exceptions should be.
Admitting that we have not fully articulated a feminist morality of abortion does not imply that all or most women who get abortions do so thoughtlessly or irresponsibly. On the contrary, women who seek abortions know and experience better than anyone else the difficulty of that decision. Much more serious is the potential danger in the assertion of women’s right to control over reproduction as absolute or exclusive, for it can be turned back on us to reinforce the view of all reproductive activity as the special, biologically destined province of women. This danger grows out of the concept of "rights" in general, a concept that is inherently static and abstracted from social conditions. Rights are by definition claims staked within a given order of things. They are demands for access for oneself, or for "no admittance" to others; but they do not challenge the social structure, the social relations of production and reproduction.18 The claim for "abortion rights" seeks access to a necessary service, but by itself it fails to address the social relations and sexual divisions around which responsibility for pregnancy and children is assigned. In real-life struggles, this limitation exacts a price, for it lets men and society neatly off the hook.
The notion of rights has tremendous polemical power, but rights tend to be seen as isolated, rather than as part of a total revolutionary program. This is different from Marx and Engels’s view of "bourgeois rights" as necessary preconditions and as means to building a class-conscious movement but not as ends in themselves (as feminists often think of them). It is also different from the more radical concept of control over one’s body as a social and individual need, implicit in the requirements of personality and sensual "receptivity." Needs, unlike rights, exist only in connection with individuals and within concrete historical circumstances. For a Native American woman on welfare, who every time she appears in the clinic for prenatal care is asked whether she would like an abortion, "the right to choose an abortion" may appear dubious if not offensive.19
Finally, the idea of a "woman’s right to choose" is vulnerable to political manipulation, as demonstrated in recent legislative and judicial debates. Thus "right-to~lifers" exploit the liberal concept of "informed consent" by promoting legislation that would require abortion patients to be "informed" in graphic detail of a fetus’ physiological characteristics at each stage of development. Physicians opposing the federal, California, and New York City regulations to curb involuntary sterilization, particularly the requirement of a thirty-day waiting period, have claimed that such regulation is "paternalistic" and inhibits women’s "right to choose" sterilization.20 During hearings before the House Select Committee on Population in 1978, a spokesman for the Upjohn Company, manufacturer of Depo-Provera (an injectible contraceptive drug currently banned from U. S. distribution because of evidence it is carcinogenic), opposed FDA regulation of contraceptives on the ground that it "deprives the public of free choice": ". . . safety cannot be absolute—it can be defined only in relative and personal terms. The individual with advice from his or her physician—not a governmental regulatory agency—should decide which risks are ‘reasonable’ under these circumstances."21
That judgments about contraceptive safety can be made only "in relative and personal terms" assails the commitment to establishing and enforcing generalizable standards of health and safety that transcend individual judgments. Moreover, when the risks include thromboembolisms, myocardial infarction, breast cancer, and cervical cancer, the need for social standards and their vigorous enforcement is a matter of life and death. Recent applications of laissez-faire ideology to reproductive policy are clearly part of a larger right-wing push that seeks "deregulation" in many spheres; seen within this general political context, they are to be expected. But the ease with which the principle of individuality and control over one’s own body may be perverted into bourgeois individualism— and capitalist greed—should make us pause, clear our heads, and think through more rigorously the social conditions of individual control.