Help I have been enslaved by my unborn baby!

Help! Help! I’m being oppressed! You saw him oppressing me, din’t you? 🙂

I’ve just learned that I’m expecting #9, and sorry Ruthie, but I just can’t muster up that “enslaved” feeling.

When I saw it in my RSS reader, I thought this was Jeff doing some clever parody. Now that I found out it’s serious and true, I’m just depressed….

Hmmm, if you consider who has the power and who is completely powerless in the pregnant mother/unborn baby “conflict”,
is Ruth saying to the baby, basically, “Now look! You’ve made me kill you!”? What is scarier is that a vast mob is agreeing with her.

Why doesn’t the media treat people who view unborn babies as property of the mother the same way they treat creationists? Both views are disproved by science. I’m all for letting people do what they want with their bodies, but science clearly proves that an unborn baby is not the woman’s body, he’s a living human just as his mother is.

The media finds out that Sarah Palin has a whiff of creationism in her track record and they’re on her like a pack of dogs, yet when some of the most powerful people in our nation refer to unborn babies as parts of their mother despite the unrefutable scientific evidence otherwise there’s not a word in response.

Justice Ginsberg has just wrecked her whole argument, though. If someone can be “enslaved by” an unborn baby, that baby must be a person. Only a person can enslave someone else.

The “anti-slavery” option for arguing pro-abortion was influential when the subject of abortion as a woman’s right was first broached on a public platform, back in the late 1850s. At that time, of course, the leading “agitation” was Anti-Slavery, and the arguments around that profoundly affected the woman’s rights activists. The 1856 example of Margaret Garner was especially evocative for them. Garner was an escaped slave who, when she was about to be re-captured, killed one of her three children who had fled with her and was about to kill the other two before she was apprehended. She did not want them to go back into slavery. Around this excruciating story, woman’s rights activists argued that it was men (the “slavers” who were after Garner) who forced women into the terrible and great sin of killing their children, that is, following the analogy into other women’s lives, of forcing them to abort in order to prevent them from entering the world in terrible circumstances. This was the context for the positions of such people as Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton, who constantly talked about the evil of abortion: It was evil, but it was something that men forced on women because they “enslaved” them and “forced” the pregancy on them. Women would *never* abort, they believed, if it were simply up to them, which is to say, if marriage were not actually a form of slavery, in which women were regarded as chattel and had no right to refuse sexual intercourse with their husbands.

So the original “anti-slavery” argument for “a woman’s right to choose when and with whom to assume the maternal state,” as it was phrased, was indeed based on the analogy of the woman being a slave under the control of a slave owner–her husband–who exercised his property rights over his possesssion via the institution of marriage.

That argument obviously had limitations–for one thing, it hardly seemed plausible to most people that the institution of marriage was really equivalent to the institution of slavery. That is to say, in the simplest way possible, most people, male or female, married or unmarried, did not think that wives were actually slaves.

Given this history of how the anti-slavery movement interacted with the early woman’s rights movement, it seems to me that the gist of Ginsburg’s argument is simply that taking away the abortion option for women would “re-enslave” them to men. Would this argument turn out to be strong enough for pro-aborts to stand on? It seems unlikely to me. The main reason to think that it would not be strong enough was already present at the time the slavery analogy was made in the late 1850s: Getting pregnant–or, at the very least, *being* pregnant–does not just involve a man and a woman, but obviously a third person as well, the child. The “slave” analogy, even to work on its own terms, must ignore the unborn (and even newly-born) child as a person with her own interests to life, liberty, and happiness. As a result, the early abortion activists, while agreeing on the one hand that abortion was a “grave evil” (forced on women by men), argued that women had an absolute right to their own bodies, diminishing to zero the rather obvious fact that during pregnancy there was another body inside their own. Their rhetoric tended to treat the woman’s body as a kind of empire over which she had absolute sovereignty, including the power of life and death. Thus, the man was spoken of as if he were an invader across her borders and the unborn child that was the result of this invasion was simply his illegitimate colony in her bodily domain, which she had every right to eliminate. It was in this light that the unborn child came to be seen as somehow identified as the surrogate, one might say, of the father, who had invaded her territory, and this is how the confusion arises over whether Ginsburg is talking about the woman being “enslaved” by the man or by the child.

The phrasing of this old argument would seem to have been dependent on the Enlightenment’s notion of the independent, sovereign “self,” and on the rights language that evolved from that, both in the sense of absolute individual rights and in the way it was used to create the rights of nation-states and even empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. All of that was in the background–hovering like a “penumbra”–over the Supreme Court’s discovery of the “right to privacy,” which provided a foundation for Roe v. Wade.

But that was then, and this is now. These days, even the Left finds itself admitting that the “sovereign self” is an Emperor with no clothes. The Postmodern Age is supposed to be admitting–even yearning for–a world in which all borders are seen as permeable and transient. To me, this means that the “old” justification for abortion, relying as it does on the notion of the individual woman’s absolute right, as you might say, to protect the inviolable borders of her sovereign body, has now become weak. The sand is shifting under the foundations of that right, and those on the Left now sense that they won’t be able to rely on the argument of the “absolute sovereignty of the self” much longer, so they are looking for some other way to protect abortion “rights.” Thus Ginsburg makes her suggestion, which amounts to shifting the battle from defending it on privacy rights grounds, retreating back to a place where the notion of individual rights and their defense against coercion are more easily defensible–anti-slavery.

Would it work? I have a hard time seeing how it could. The logic here ultimately stands on the notion that the woman is merely a victim of the man’s violence. Leaving aside the question of the unborn child’s claim to her own rights, the notion that, in the real world in which we live, men’s and women’s sexual relations simply reduce to men’s violent attacks on unwilling and powerless (“enslaved”) women would seem ridiculous to most people. If the analogy once had any plausibility back in the 19th century, it has little today, when the institution of marriage–whatever it has become since then–has far less control or even influence over how people have sex, or when or with whom. Undoubtedly, Ginsburg et al would welcome that weakening of the marriage institution as precisely a freedom for the individual that must be “protected” against a “retrograde” move to restrict abortion (and thus to make marriage stronger, as an institution for protecting an nourishing whatever children are conceived). Even nowadays, agitators for sexual “reform”–abortion rights and gay marriage–still fear to reveal to the larger public that their aim is actually to eliminate marriage. Instead they insist that their aim is to *strengthen* marriage, either by reducing the number of children to a point where more of a couple’s resources are given to the children that they do have, or by giving the blessings of marriage to “nontraditional” arrangements or “groupings” of people. I do not think that rephrasing the argument in a way that requires an equivalency between marriage (still blessed) and slavery (still cursed) will play very well.