Response to this article:
http://www.thenation.com/article/205049/theres-reason-gay-marriage-winning-while-abortion-rights-are-losing
I am from Texas, where the fight for both gay marriage and keeping clinics open has been fierce and intensely painful, and honestly, I disagree 100% with the premise of this article. I think it’s naive about how fundamentally gay marriage has challenged traditional ideas of gender and religious beliefs, and also about the potential for legal abortion to reshape society and cause some kind of feminist groundswell – a potential I think is not really all that strong, because legal abortion is, at heart, something that does not really challenge the status quo in any way. It can challenge the status quo if it became part of some radical movement (and feminism in the USA is nothing like a radical movement), but by itself, it doesn’t accomplish much. So in this way, I don’t see why it’s very different from equal marriage.
This article has some good points. It’s true it’s hard to argue against love and marriage, which are enshrined as cultural ideals and romanticized from birth and seen as the birthright of all human beings – so much so that even young (only young ones, mind) conservative evangelicals are now more likely to support gay marriage than to oppose it. I think the best insight from this article is that gay white men used their considerable economic and cultural power to mainstream gay marriage, and that being queer happens across class lines, making it much easier for gay people to win acceptance. In the USA, the entire economic system depends on white supremacy and the existence of poverty, but queers can win a variety of freedoms while leaving capitalism untouched. That’s why the issue is about culture, instead of genuinely opposing the status quo. If only people’s ideology can change, the issue can be won. It is much easier to win someone over to an ideology than to get them to do something which is against their interests.
However, the article was a bit incoherent in a few areas. Why, exactly, was the pro choice fight struggling? Because of patriarchy – women’s needs are stigmatized? Because of funds – gay men have more money than straight women? Or because gay marriage is a conservative, pro-family movement that supports conservative ideas about gender and sex, and the fight for reproductive choice is a radical, anti-family, pro-sex movement?
The thing is, the pro choice movement is a pro-free-love movement because it has been entirely shaped by the needs of middle class liberal women. The fight for abortion rights has been a diverse movement (as has the equal marriage movement), and both have a deep, radical potential. I agree that equal marriage has been stripped of its radical potential, but so has the pro choice movement – which is why “one is more radical” just doesn’t cut it for me.
When I say the pro choice movement is liberal and middle class, I am not erasing the contributions and ideas from working class women, but just saying that their voices have been consistently suppressed and erased and the movement as it stands seems entirely shaped by the concerns of middle class liberal feminists – and the discussion about working class women’s needs is usually also voiced by middle class liberals who speak *for* marginalized women, rather than listening to them or repeating the concerns they hear from them.
Liberals tend to focus only on abortion rather than reproductive justice, and you have women like Hillary Clinton who don’t give a shit about working class women taking a pretty fierce pro choice stand and being lauded for it. Hillary is no radical, and her feminism, while part of a greater “feminist movement” as referenced in the article, is certainly not one of the few kinds of feminism that genuinely challenge social and economic norms. So why pretend legal abortion, in itself, somehow supports deep and radical change? As far as I can tell, the entire narrative around abortion and contraception in the USA is an extremely liberal one – “individual right to choose”, with lots of “I can have sex with whomever I want” feminist anger from university students, with no analysis of structures of oppression. The idea is somehow that if women have the freedom to decide not to continue a pregnancy, that they are free and they have reproductive justice, and thus oppression crumbles. Yet abortion has been legal for decades, and no crumbling happened.
On the other hand, you have working class and marginalised voices such as Hispanic women’s groups in Texas fighting not *only* to keep clinics open (to provide not only birth control and abortions but also care for pregnant women and important gynecological and oncological services) but for economic equality, which would mean that low-income women who desperately want to keep their pregnancy, but who are forced into abortion due to poverty, would actually have the right to make a choice. Choice can *only* happen in a context in which there is no poverty. This perspective is almost never heard.
Liberals seem to imagine that as long as abortion services are available, there is justice, when in reality, this is very far from the case. You have a very different interest between pro choice middle class women, who need clinics to be open so that they can make the choice between keeping a pregnancy, and, for example, continuing a university course until a few years down the road when they are economically comfortable and can easily afford kids “at the right time” – the righteous, “make something of yourself” liberal abortion narrative Americans are going to hear during the Presidential elections.
And then you have women who can never, ever afford children – for whom children are a burden that is absolutely impossible to carry, who will never have a time in their life when they can choose to have children. Maybe they already have a few children, and they have to choose to abort a child they want or risk forcing the kids they have into homelessness. Poor women who end up homeless don’t get support – they get their kids taken away and put into foster care. American foster care is so underfunded and dangerous that kids are routinely beaten and abused and even killed in it, at a death rate much higher than normal.
And then take religious rights – if women are religious but in poverty, many are forced into an abortion that goes against their beliefs and religion. Many women who are politically pro choice personally do not feel at all comfortable having abortions, and although some liberals pretend that no women ever struggle or feel guilty or regret abortions, some women do – those who were coerced into abortion due to poverty, or domestic violence, or other horrible circumstances in which they were given no support. Those women who are happy with their choice are usually happy because the choice was not coerced and was genuinely in their best interest. When the alternative is destitution, there is a factor of coercion.
Who is demanding that people have a real choice? The conservatives aren’t, because they are using anti-choice narratives in order to draw voters to their economically conservative policies, and because their rhetoric is so deeply anti-poor and anti-women. And the liberals aren’t, because they are liberals – they fight for middle class women, which means keeping abortion legal is the only thing worth fighting for. Making it affordable? Changing the structure of working life so that women can have kids and work? Getting rid of poverty wages? Making child care affordable? Pipe dreams that aren’t the priority. That’s why the Clintons slash welfare while fighting to keep abortion legal, while being bankrolled by banks & PACs.
I agree that women just don’t have the cultural or economic influence to fight for their own rights, even with hard hitting wealthy neoliberals like a Clinton fighting for them – but I still think that the liberal narrative around abortion and birth control in the USA is a non-threatening narrative that leaves capitalism untouched, and even works in its interests. So honestly, I think both movements are extremely liberal, should-be-easy-to-win movements that leave the status quo intact. The reason one is doing well and the other is struggling isn’t because one is more subversive, but because of how these controversies have been whipped up and made into poker chips between the two neoliberal parties, and about how people are reacting to that.
And you can bet that this same liberal ‘pro-choice’ narrative will be arguing that when women have fewer children, they can work longer hours, they need less welfare, and they are more valuable to bosses. Are we hearing about how Texan women are now unable to access desperately needed health services, such as cancer screenings, because of clinics being shut down? Not really – because the narrative is entirely focused on how giving women access to abortions makes them more productive workers, with more skills, and more time to offer employers, and gives them the ability to succeed and realize the American Dream. It’s an aspirational thing. The idea that human beings should be able to choose to have children or add new members to their family, or not, as part of their intrinsic human rights, in an economic system without poverty and which is structured around the needs of mothers and families instead of being structured around the needs of those who can get someone else to watch their kids (men and, now, wealthy women, who get poor women to watch their kids for low pay) is not even on the radar.
The fight is being cast as a “sexual freedom” fight by women who aren’t facing any other struggle than the struggle to have sex when they want, with whomever they want, and to be able to have birth control options. The actual, desperate needs of women with families are being utterly ignored – Republicans who pretend to have ‘family values’ do not genuinely care about families, women, or children, and honestly, neither do liberals. For either political party, poor women can go die under a bridge as far as they’re concerned. I am all for having sex when you want, and having access to abortion, but honestly, this is not all that radical, as far as movements go. I think both equal marriage and legal abortion are desperately needed civil rights that help people, but both are liberal band-aids (plasters, if you are from the UK). It’s as naive to argue that legal abortion will become some left wing feminist revolution that changes the shape of society and the economic structure of a nation as it is to argue that equal marriage will sweep in the radical change that angry queers have been fighting for and end the impoverishment and murder of trans women, for example.
Honestly, I think both sides of the abortion debate are extremely neoliberal, with no left wing or working class voice *at all*. So I think it’s genuinely about a culture war – about two different ideas about sexual freedom, and religion, and all of that – and not, really, in the end, about anything that harms the status quo. Yes, low income women desperately need access to abortion services, but no one really gains anything from cutting them off – again, it’s a pawn used by both parties.  This article has a few misleading ideas. One is that government funding is involved in abortion, and people don’t want to pay for it. This is not the case. In the USA, it is illegal for any federal funding to be used to provide abortions. No government money funds abortion. It is 100% down to ideology, not money. Another is that ‘gay’ marriage doesn’t take power from clergy and from men, but that abortion does. I think it’s pretty clear that gay marriage attacks both patriarchal masculinity and women’s dependence on men, as well as the power of clergy. Providing abortion services costs society nothing (no pennies from any taxpayer) and takes no power away from anyone. Male economic power is kept intact, and women are still the ones shouldering the financial burden of birth control and abortion. My theory is that it’s a poker chip used by the Republicans to distract from economic issues and recast themselves as the “moral party”. The reason I believe this is that it is a manufactured moral issue – American protestants were pro choice until about the 1970s and early 1980s, when Republicans realized that race issues (like fighting to keep segregation) were not going to work anymore, and they had to move on to other hot-button social issues, and embarrassingly openly settled on abortion. The Republicans manufactured the abortion issue in order to control religious groups and gather them as a voting base. The “culture war” issues are extremely new issues that no one cared about just a few decades ago.
The pro choice movement is a mainstream movement, promoted by extremely rich women (regardless of what the article said), and entirely shaped by wealthy women’s ideas and by the ideological needs of the Democratic party. The massive mainstream discussion of the “war on women” is almost entirely focused on birth control and abortion. That is why the narrative around leaves out cuts to WIC, and focuses on female CEOs and ‘Lean In’ type policies when looking at the wage gap, instead of the needs of women who are working horrible minimum wage jobs and who are unable to pay for child care. Who is talking about how the USA is the only economically ‘developed’ country in which more and more women are dying in childbirth – and where the rate of maternal death for inner city women approaches that of subsaharan Africa? No one – especially not the “general feminist movement” that this article says will sweep in if abortion rights are protected. There is intense energy and passion in the hardcore fight to keep abortion legal, which is raging fiercely in the USA (see the passionate support for Wendy Davis as governor for Texas after her filibuster, and the defeat everyone knew she would face, partly due to the gerrymandered voting districts in the USA). And this is great. When clinics are closed, poor women are forced into dangerous childbirth and into poverty and horrible conditions (and their choice is taken away from them), women die giving themselves abortions/being given unsafe abortions, and it’s a horrible situation for everyone. But keeping clinics open is not the revolution – ‘free love’ already happened 50 years ago and doesn’t threaten capitalism at all, and works out great for men, so I’m not sure why it’s seen as all that radical, in the end.
I agree that marriage equality won’t fundamentally alter social and economic arrangements, but I fail to see how legal abortion alters social or economic arrangements, either. How is legal abortion more linked to the “larger project of feminism” and more radical than equal marriage – considering that abortion was made legal decades before having gay sex was made legal? What “larger project of feminism” is the author talking about – mainstream, middle class, white liberal feminism, which has already failed to be radical or a challenge to the status quo? With so many FeminISMS, I am not sure speaking of the movement as one umbrella movement is useful or accurate, or even gives us any information about what such a movement would accomplish. I fail to see how legal abortion will alter social and economic arrangements, when it has already had decades to do so and not accomplished this radical sea-change. Equal marriage was a genuine force for change, but that change only goes so far – it can be continued in a further fight, but you’d need people to take the fight further, and the more it challenges other interests, the harder it will be to win. Exactly the same can be said for birth control and abortion rights.
Just my input on this article.
hannamaria 