File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 442


Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 23:23:42 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Britain's abortion row


Well, I did try to stay out of this one.

I hesitate to add my own take on this - debates like this might get
particularly close to some people's emotions.

And anyway, Yoshie has heard it all before.  But ...



As some of you may remember, I'm instinctively a pro-lifer (ultrasounds 'll
do that to ya - I know sentience when I see it, Yoshie, and I hold it's
already there at 13 weeks - which is close enough to subjectivity to do me,
James).  Now, you may accuse me of all those romantic residuals that need
pushing aside by the tide of proletarian enlightenment, but I feel at least
that my position can be dissociated from the televangelists.

I shan't repeat at length the difference between sex (half of us have wombs
and half don't) and gender (the historically contingent, which imposes
disproportionate responsibility and cost by way of 'motherhood').

But I point to it so that abortion too can be historically conceptualised.
Pregnancy in a world where women cop a load of responsibility, moral
pressure,twenty years' hard labour, and the end of all hopes of alternative
self-fulfillment, is, I'd argue, a very different thing than pregnancy in a
more enlightened world, where only the physical facts impose themselves -
in other words, where the 'motherhood' on the part of a single anointed
ceases either at child-birth or, perhaps, at weaning.

Abortion in the former case is, to me, the killing of one by all.  In the
latter - well, we can talk about that if you want to.

And I can't speak for Boddhi, but I reckon men and women are indeed morally
bound (and equally so) not to risk conception if a child is not wanted.
Making love, or getting off, does not require shagging (we live in a
shag-obsessed culture).  This ain't prudery, the menu of alternatives is
extensive: I think Woody Allen once said something like 'sex is only dirty
if it's done properly'.

Here endeth the sex education lecture.  Like Justin says, it's
philosophically difficult - and I realise all I've done is add a few more
questions to the plethora already posed here.

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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