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 […]

The idea that biological reproduction is a social activity, distinct from the activity of childrearing and determined by changing material condi­tions and social relations, is essentially Marxist. In The German Ideology, Marx defines ‘Three aspects of social activity": along with "the production of material life" and "the production of new needs," human procreation— reproduction within […]

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" […]

. . . that ail the while the Foetus is forming. . . even to the Moment that the Soul is infused, so long it is absolutely not in her Power only, but in her right, to kill or keep alive, save or destroy, the Thing she goes with, she won’t call it Child; and […]

In tension with the racism and patriarchal familialism embedded in American political culture is the deep-rooted belief in "individual choice" and "privacy" in intimate personal matters—a belief that cuts across the political spectrum. Likewise, the sphere of privacy in American consti­tutional law has come to be associated by liberals and conservatives alike with matters of […]

Since the original publication of this book, two developments have prodded me to pay much closer attention to the racial dimensions of abor­tion politics than I did earlier: first the increase in virulent, overt racism that has marked both everyday life and the law in the context of neo­conservatism; and second, the profound impact of […]

Looking at who actually gets abortions in the United States today helps to deconstruct the ambivalence with which many people respond to abortion as a signifier. Consistent with the analysis in Chapter 4, abortion is still overwhelmingly a phenomenon of young, unmarried women, the majority of them teenagers or in their early twenties. Eighty-two percent […]

As a brief submitted by over four hundred professional historians in the Webster case argued, never before in history has the fetus been the primary focus of campaigns to restrict abortion. In the mid-to-late nine­teenth century in the United States, such campaigns had a variety of pur­poses all unrelated to "protecting fetal life": the protection […]

During the past decade of legal abortion in the United States—a period of heightened political conservatism—advocates of women’s reproductive freedom have faced a complicated paradox. Women’s "right" to abortion remains, at least at this writing, embedded in the formal apparatus of the law and, depending on the wording of the questions, commands re­markably consistent and […]

What has the white, male lawgiver to say to any of us? To those of us who love life too much to willingly bring more children into a world saturated with death? Abortion, for many women, is more than an experience of suffering beyond anything most men will ever know; it is an act of […]