The flaws in liberation

Mary Kenny

When Sir George Baker gave his ruling last week in the family division of the High Court — that a father or a husband has no rights in law over a woman's decision to have an abortion — Mrs Diane Munday of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service described the event as `an enormous step forward'. It would, I think, be fair to regard Mrs Munday's views as representing both the pro-abortion lobby and what might broadly be described as the women's movement, in this country.

Abortion has been a central issue to women's liberation ever since the present phase of feminist politics began. Indeed, for many people it has been the central issue, the summum bonum, of the whole ideology. Once I heard two women discussing a third; they were trying to decide whether their mutual friend was, or was not, a proper feminist. 'But she must be,' decided one, at last. 'Why, I saw her on an abortionon-demand march.' Abortion, more than any other question, decides in the eyes of the feminist establishment who is and who is not a feminist, and politically-minded women who regret that abortion and feminism are now almost synonymous think it wiser to keep their mouths shut.

It is simply not done, in enlightened circles, to raise any objections at all on this issue; to say that one hesitates, or that one is ambivalent, or that one dislikes the idea, or that it is a matter for regret —such things are 'reactionary'. Abortion is always 'an enormous step forward'. This is the diktat, and nobody steps outside it unless they wish to be denounced for being nutcases, hysterics, 'emotional', Roman Catholics, or men. Two women's editors have confided to me, in the greatest secrecy, that personally they feel ghastly about abortion but they would never publish such views, or allow such views to be published under their aegis; they wouldn't want to be considered to be out of touch, they wouldn't like people to think they weren't supportive of the movement, and they wouldn't want to award propaganda points to 'the other side'. As an interviewee said in The Guardian's woman's page recently (25 May) describing a depression she was trying to suppress: 'My first abortion had been a serious decision, but I had taken it, had the operation, talked it out with other women, and dealt with it as a free and adult decision. Now here I was, behaving like the propaganda peddled by the anti-abortion lobby. It seemed unworthy of me and a betrayal of everything I believed in.'

The reasoning behind the terrific commitment to the freedom to terminate pregnancy is in one sense a logical one, and has a dimension of consistency worth considering. It has two elements, the practical and the ideological. The practical element is obvious. In past times in this country, and at the present time in many other countries, women were physically harmed both by repeated pregnancies and by backstreet abortions. Judy Steel, wife of the Liberal leader, once told me that she and her husband really became converted to abortion reform simply by their social experiences in the slums of Glasgow, and the appalling physical state in which poor women were sometimes found. Leaving aside the legend of the rusty knitting needle, herbal and folk remedies have been used to terminate pregnancies for as long as we know. Safe, painless, surgical removal of the foetus is, therefore, simply the civilised, up-to-date method of dealing with the practical element, with the added bonus that it almost never damages the women physically, even if it can slightly reduce subsequent fertility.

The ideological side is equally important, and it provides one of the reasons why abortion is the central question of feminism. The traditional view of a woman's body in medicine, as in many religious theologies, is that it belongs to her husband; and the idea that a man owned his wife's person has been implied, if not actually asserted, in most of men's laws. In Christian theology — certainly of the Pauline or Augustinian tradition — a wife may not refuse her husband's pleasure; and the very notion that it is impossible, in law, for a husband to rape his wife, implies that her body belongs to him. For many gynaecological operations, in particular, the permission of a husband is still sought, and in many European countries it must still be given before any operation on the reproductive organs of a woman can legally take place.

Thus did women see themselves as 'colonised' by men, a slave nation, as it were, like. a people under the yoke of an imperial power; compelled to obey men's laws, which were not our laws, men's logic which was not necessarily our logic; suppressed in our native creativity and idiom by the coloniser; everything, from our very flesh upwards, belonging to the laws of men. Liberation, runs the doctrine, must begin with the freedom of the body, and the freedom of women to control their own reproductive systems, banishing forever the idea which is inherent in most dynastic systems — that woman is merely a vessel for the continuity of male heirs. It is obvious that the female control of abortion is fundamental to this strategy for liberation. And Mrs Joan Paton was chosen by history to be the apotheosis of this strategy. She came out, too, with the right words at the right time, showing she had completely absorbed the lessons that the sisters have so resolutely taught. 'It's my body,' she said. 'It's my choice.' The slogan of the pro-abortion lobby is, of course, A woman's right to choose.

The argument for abortion has a .symmetrical kind of logic to it, mounted both on the practical and the ideological line of reasoning. Yet on closer examination, it contains weakening contradictions and conundrums. Like Karl Marx, who devised an economic system that was so scientific that it couldn't fail, except that it does fail because there is more to human motivation than mere science; so the argument for abortion — superficially clear and even morally righteous, yet beyond the superficialities, incomplete and imperfect.

Indeed, the debate about abortion is not only central to women's liberation; it is the very symbol of the paradoxes, the contradictions and the philosophical puzzles that are part of women's liberation. That is, by correcting one error, you may be inviting another; in pursuing one idea to its consummation, you may be totally demolishing another. You can throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Consider, for example, this problem. The pro-abortion lobby naturally claims to be feminist; that's what it's all about. However, in excluding men from all rights over the foetus, does it not therefore follow that one is by the same token letting men off the hook as far any participation in pregnancy is concerned? If men have no rights, neither need they have responsibility. In claiming that pregnancy is the exclusive domain of the mother, we must therefore claim that the father has no conceptual role beyond that of a stud. But that is not at all what another part of the doctrine of women's liberation says. On the contrary, the feminist child development people are busy trying to prove that as far as parenting is concerned, men and women are practically indistinguishable. A friend, a doctor and psychologist, writes to me from Dublin: 'I don't know, if you have come across the work of Michael Rutter, a child psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, but he is now a very influential figure . . . The conclusions [of his studies] are that mothering is not either the exclusive property of one single individual in a child's life, or even of mothers. In fact, in one study where mothers were the providers of most of a baby's daily needs, one-third of the children had formed what was regarded as their primary bond with their father.'

Now here is the kernel of a great contradiction; On the one hand, women, and women exclusively, have the right to choose whether a child shall exist or not; on the other, men and women are equally as important to a child when it is actually born. The father, though of no consequence when it comes to deciding on pregnancy or abortion, suddenly becomes a figure who forms 'a primary bond' with the live baby. It doesn't add up, and it doesn't add up because of the warring intellectual theories In feminism about men. Are men there to be resisted and fought against, to be ejected as the 'imperialists'? Or are men there to be drawn into the female spheres of caring and nurturing, of family and social relationships, of 'feeling' logic as well as of Mathematical, 'thinking' logic? The answer to that has just never been found.

This is the first flaw in the argument of the Pro-abortionists, then; that the ideas which they are putting forward, though logical When considered in isolation, do not at all knit in with the greater, overall ideology. You just can't argue that reproduction is exclusively a woman's domain in one breath and that men must share equally in its responsibilities in the next. But the second flaw is yet deeper, in terms of the dearest ideals of feminism.

'Liberation' means, literally, to become free, and one of the most attractive characteristics in the best feminist writing is this idea of freedom, not merely in terms of laws, but from stereotypes, and from received thinking. One of the things that attracted me to women's liberation in my Youth was that it seemed to me to free Women from having to paint their fingernails every day.

Refreshingly, feminism did not say 'you must not paint your fingernails' any more than it said 'you must paint your fingernails'. It said — 'what do you feel like doing? Express what you really think. What are your true reactions? Don't do what is in fashion, act according to your heart's desire.' Women's Liberation actually tried to liberate people's minds by leading them to be reflective, to consider properly their natural ideas, to be spontaneous and to break free from the rigidities of passive conformism. It discouraged collapsed thinking. Women's Liberation had theories, but not doctrines, and it rejected the doctrinaire as it rejected hierarchies.

And so it seemed to me that part of the Whole ideas was that emotions were in themselves a perfectly valid reason for doing something or for not doing something. A man might use the phrase 'emotional' dismissively or in a pejorative sense, but this was the error in masculine attitudes; this was the problem with men — that they did not sufficiently understand that feeling Was an important part of thinking, and instinctive responses were as valuable as Measurable calculations. Feelings had to be acknowledged. The liberation was partly from the chains of dry logic, which left so much to be desired where human requirements were concerned.

And now here we are with this question Of abortion, absolutely hidebound by rigid attitudes, by doctrinaire thinking, by total refusal to acknowledge ambivalences, Contradictions within oneself, pain, dif!leaky or regret. Like the depressive lady interviewed in The Guardian, 'feminists' are so anxious not to cede propaganda points to the other side, that they refuse completely to acknowledge their feelings, which are infinitely more untidy than Mrs Munday would allow.

Much is written about abortion, but it is nearly always on the same narrow note; it is either about comparative laws ('Abortion in the US') and figures; or it is about the need for more or less liberal reform. Whole areas of the subject are left totally unexplored; and, irony upon irony, should one ever touch upon the feelings that are evoked by the illustration of a ten-week foetus, one is denounced as — 'emotional'. The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child is anathema to the feminists because the tactics it uses are 'emotional' ones. Yet that is precisely what women's liberation was supposed to liberate: one's emotions. No; the pro-abortionists use a masculine technique of thinking; they say, it is logical, it is necessary, it is pragmatic. Another conundrum.

And the third flaw is this; the slogan, 'A woman's right to choose', is brilliant, and symbolically, too, it conveys in one sentence the essential idea of feminism — that women may choose the kind of lives they wish to lead, liberating themselves from past notions of a woman's enforced social passivity. But the slogan is based on a false premise, for women do not necessarily have the ability, much less the right, to choose whether to have a child; they merely have the ability to choose not to become mothers. Widespread birth control on the National Health Service is a good and fine thing, but it can lead — excuse the pun — to false expectations; because women can control their fertility in terms of not getting pregnant, they get to believe that automatically they can control their fertility in terms of getting pregnant.

But it is not so; woman proposeth, but God still disposeth. Many a woman has spent years carefully practising birth control, only to discover when she tries to exercise her right to choose that she can't have a child after all. People have abortions — and then later can't conceive; where is the right to choose in that? It's not the right to choose at all; it's only the right not to have. At the bottom of all this clear logic lies a false logic.

Ten years after the liberalising of the abortion laws, the debate is considered to be closed. But it is not, because whole areas have not yet been touched upon, let alone talked about, and medical science is now leading us into new territory on this very subject. What, for example, is going to happen to the ethical side of this problem when medical science ensures the viability of the foetus at five months? At four months? If birth control gets even more efficient, will abortion become less acceptable? What will happen to the law — and the emotional climate — if men fight back? Like the whole dilemma of feminism itself, there is a lot more to be thought about, and talked about. Nobody should yet think of closing the account.