File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 463


Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 12:01:44 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Historicize the Fetus (was Re: M-TH: Britain's abortion row)


G'day Thaxists,

>Shouldn't you also historicize the fetus? When and how did some people
>begin to make emotional investment in the fetus? Why? For what purpose? To
>what effect?

Yeah.  I should do that, for this emotional investment does come into
society as a tyrrany.  'Trouble is, my knowledge of the relevant history is
non-existent.  Is the emotional investment in the foetus a transhistorical
fact of humanity that is being exploited to oppress people, or is it an
invented phenomenon?  I dunno.  Like all of us, I'm capable of feeling
hegemonically imposed tendencies with as much passion as essential
tendencies.  Given my modernist respect for rationality (whether my
attempts to exercise it amount to 'fluff' or not, Ralph), a convincing
historical argument could upset my current convictions, sure.

>I venture to say that to the extent that people make emotional investment
>in the fetus, people disinvest from the ideals of women's agency,
>self-determination, sexual freedom, and emancipation.

I do realise this.  In our world, this is absolutely true.  The price our
society pays for the 'personhood of the foetus' claim is substantial and
falls squarely on women.  Under MacKinnon's feminist world or my socialist
one (and Carrol is right about one thing, we shouldn't seek to write
cookbooks for the future - I was doing this for the purposes of necessary
abstraction in argument) the agency of the woman is assumed, such that the
responsibility for her actions may justifiably lie with her.  That, I would
have thought, is part of the definition of agency, self-determination,
sexual freedom and emancipation.  Unfree woman is no more responsible for
any abortion in our world than the rest of her unfree fellows.

>As marxists and feminists, we ought to historicize this new "haven" of
>"innocence," as we have done so with the nuclear family.

I hope you get us started, Yoshie.  Carrol will be happy to know I can't
contribute on this thread, but I shall most definitely be reading.

And Justin wrote:

>Sure, if fetuses are persons, that has to be the answer. (Unless we can
>get some Judith Thompson type argument off the ground.) But if fetuses are
>persons,why isn't that the answer under patriarchal capitalism?

Obviously my argument is predicated on the personhood of the foetus.  And
hence the killing of a foetus is wrong everywhere and all the time.  But,
destroying the life of a woman is equally wrong.  And under patriarchal
capitalism, that's what a prolife stance adds up to.

Under patriarchal capitalism, the food I (as unfree bourgeois) hoard (EU
cheese mountains and wine lakes) contributes to misery elsewhere.  It ain't
my fault because capitalist economics dictates I let food rot if prices are
fragile.  Society is at fault.  In an unfree world, it is difficult to
apportion blame to individuals.  The abortion I have (as unfree woman) is,
I think, to be considered along these lines (conceptually at least, I dare
say, the trapped bourgeois in this example is not confronted with the
stakes the woman is).  And in both examples, wholesale social change is the
only meaningful response.  Like that of cheese mountains, the abortion
question can simply not be resolved in the world today.

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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