Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 18:35:48 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Historicize the Fetus (was Re: M-TH: Britain's abortion   row)


Okay Ralph,

I'd written:

>>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.

and you wrote:

>This is of course the key question, which you are too wimpy to explore
>further. Framing this decisive question as an either-or question is
>precisely what makes Yoshie's thesis possible.

I'm sure everybody on this list knows I'm committed to the 'intrinsic' line
- what sense I make wholly depends on it.  Indeed, I've been claiming we
are intrinsically inclined to value the foetus because the foetus is us.

>Secondly, the word
>"transhistorical" both fingers and somewhat confuses the issue.  The word
>"intrinsic" would avoid the more questionable connotations of
>"transhistorical", which indicate an empirical invariability which may never
>have really obtained.  Not only is there a historical variability to the
>valuation of the fetus, but there is obviously a synchronic one, manifested
>not only in the abortion debate, but in the highly variable emotional
>investment that exists, not only among individuals, but within the same
>individual at various times, towards any given fetus.

Good point.

>But one cannot seriously emend one's convictions if one doesn't have them in
>the first place.  Why not show the courage to pursue those convictions and
>not be so worried about being un-pc?

Because I'd already staked my claim, and taken its ramifications a long
way.  Or so I thought.  I did want to hear more re. Yoshie's reasoning -
old as this shit-fight is, I have been chewing over arguments of late I'd
not considered before.  And I don't reckon I've gotta show my commitment to
my argument by telling people to fuck themselves (although such advice is,
I suppose, consistent with my argument).

Yoshie:
>>>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.
Me:
>>I do realise this.  In our world, this is absolutely true.
Ralph:
>No, this is bullshit, even in our world.  Mind you, nobody is more cynical
>than I about procreators, but to suggest that the desire to have children is
>absolutely a function of the negation of women's autonomy is the worst sort
>of stalinist-feminist horseshit, and should be rigorously opposed.

Okay.  In our world, it's true on balance then.

>It also denies the high degree of feminine agency that actually and
>concretely exists in today's world.  Yoshie's nonsensical statement reflects
>the fundamental assumption behind all middle class feminism: that women are
>helpless, delicate creatures to need to be protected, esp. by chivalrous
>male feminists, who are so oppressed that they can't make any decisions for
>themselves, that they can be neither autonomous nor responsible nor
>accountable for anything they do.  The class prejudice behind such a
>dishonest axiom has struck me only recently, in my unpleasant many contacts
>with left intellectuals.  With all this fraudulent whining about female
>helplessness, you would never know that the USA in 1998 is not the USA of
>the 1950s, or Europe of the 19th century, or the Middle Ages, or the Japan
>of today, or Saudi Arabia.

Yeah, but the scales are, as Yoshie and others observe, turning back.  For
practical purposes, it would be quite impossible to formulate a personal
motivation/agency index against which a demand for abortion could be
weighed.  A socialist knows the important thing here, we live in a society
that oppresses women in a way they need not be oppressed.  Now, I believe
the presence or the absence of a womb does confer freedoms and constraints
as a matter of fact.  But those facts become the focus of my argument only
when patriarchal capitalism's exacerbation/distortion of them are gone.

>>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.
>
>MacKinnon's fraudulent social-fascist career is predicated on the total
>non-agency of women, a non-agency that no more exists than a managerialist
>feminist fantasy world.

Could be.  I recruited MacKinnon's name opportunistically 'coz Justin told
me about her take on this.  Maybe that wasn't appropriate.

>>Unfree woman is no more responsible for
>>any abortion in our world than the rest of her unfree fellows.
>
>I think I agree with this proposition as a free-standing assertion, in spite
>of the lame framework in which it is encased.  This would be a true
>statement even if abortion were morally wrong, just as a hungry person's
>stealing bread would be a morally supportable decision even if theft in
>general were wrong.  However, people who do all sorts of "wrong" things are
>not devoid of the consciousness of the seriousness of the moral choices they
>make.  I have known people who have stolen out of hunger, and they have no
>less strong a sense of right and wrong than anybody else.  Pure amoralism is
>a conceit of intellectuals.

I go along with this and I don't think it challenges my argument.

Me:
>>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.

Ralph:
>Though I wouldn't take a pro-fetus position in se, this is a serious
>argument.  Now, if technology were to advance to the point that a fetus
>could be removed from the womb and brought to term artificially--or, let's
>consider the real practical possibility of surrogate motherhood)--then the
>ethics of the situation change.

Most certainly.

>we live with concurrently existing ideologies of total personal
>responsibility and total personal irresponsibility.  The latter comes about
>as moral collapse when faced with the impossibility of the former.  People
>get to the point where they don't think they are responsible for anything
>they do.  Hence, the reaction to a reactionary political environment is a
>disavowal of any personal responsibility, esp. when one can take on the
>protective moral status of the sacred victim: blacks can't be racists; women
>are too helpless to be blamed for their stupid and thoughtless stupid
>actions and misdeeds.  Who believes this shit?  You do.

No, I don't.  The greyness of our experience/world is, by definition, made
black and white in our praxis.  We gotta act.  My idea of 'best practice'
here is to situate the woman/abortion relationship within its historical
context.  I've been arguing that 'pro-choice' is the only tenable stance
under conditions of capitalism which are, in at least the context of what
we're discussing, demonstrably patriarchal.  For me, this would change
where (a) woman has control over what gets into her womb and (b) 'mother'
need mean no more than being the owner of the womb in which the baby is
gestating.

>Reminds me of a
>Phil Donahue show I saw a few years back: "I'm not sorry I beat you to a
>bloody pulp, Reginald Denny, I'm just sorry it happened to you."  I live to
>oppose this filth, and to oppose the left for supporting it.

Going on very little here, I'm with you on this.

>Now before all the caterwauling starts about what a "sexist" I am, there
>should be no question about my position on women's rights, a rather
>different matter than the status of feminism as an ideology.

You've said nothing yet I'd call sexist.  Although I have been pushing for
what I regard as a necessarily 'feminist' position.  As this portion of
that debate evinces, it ain't a feminism others go along with.  But I do
hold that the female experience of capitalism has been different from the
male experience (necessary generalisations there) and that, given the two
options, being a woman so far has been even more awful than being a man.

>If this really
>were the nineteenth century, or Japan, or Saudi Arabia, or Somalia, I'd be
>the most militant and rabid of feminists.  But it is not, and the
>presumption of female helplessness, which seems to be shared by just about
>everyone on all of these lists, is the presumption I most ruthlessly oppose.

I agree 'female helplessnes' is practically stupid as politics and
untenable as description.  But once a woman has a child, society very
powerfully designates much of the rest of her life to that child.  For no
tenable reason.  And in much of the world, women don't get a real say into
what gets into their wombs and when it gets there.  That's true, innit?

>It is so much a presumption that I will bet that Rob, the cavilling wimp
>that he is, tolerant to the point of violating the very charter of thaxis,
>which is to keep out m-int and m-g, would immediately do a turnabout and
>expel me from this list for making one "sexist" remark,

I'm even more tolerant than that, it seems.  And anyway, I don't think
you've made a sexist remark.

>just like that
>pathetic cowardly hypocritical little piece of shit Hans Despain did on the
>Bhaskar list because I referred to Mother Nature as a bitch, (which She--if
>it's a she--surely is)

Well, it ain't a she.  And it ain't a bitch.  It just is.

>shocking the shit out of that cabal of prissy
>mediocre academic parasites.  These dogmatic presumptions of the middle
>class intellectual left are what I am determined to fight to the end.

That's *aspiring* intellectual left to you, Ralph.  And mediocrity doesn't
necessarily present as dogmatism - I hope mine doesn't.

>You got a problem with that?--go fuck yourself!  Go fuck yourself!

I don't intend to excise you at this stage (with the exception of this bit
of posturing nonsense, your post was choc'a'block full of good stuff, after
all). I can't even tell you to go fuck yourself, because to do that from
ten thousand miles away would indicate to most that I probably am a wimp.

And that'd do me no good at all.

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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