Social Reproduction and Abortion

marjorie says...

I'd like to introduce you all to a very good friend of mine, Jo Ann Gutierrez Bejar, who is the new communications staff person at SWOP. Jo Ann has been putting up great commentary on swopblogger and I encourage you all to have a look. I particularly liked her comments about the Supreme Court decision last week to uphold the "partial birth" abortion ban. What I appreciate most about Jo Ann's comments are her views about the preponderance of males making these reproductive rights decisions. Reproduction is largely a woman's task. Let's face it...women are the ones who bear children and who raise children, by and large. I know there are some great men out there, who are very responsible when it comes to raising children. I'm fortunate to know several of them so don't take me wrong. But its indicative that they get the praise they get for childrearing by virtue of their gender. As if they deserve special praise for it. Well, in fact, they do. Because when it really comes down to it, by the numbers, its to women that the task of social reproduction in this society falls. And it should be women who make the decisions about whether or not to send another woman to prison for terminating her pregnancy.

Isn't that what we're talking about? Criminalizing women for terminating a pregnancy? We live in a society in which criminalization is our solution to perceived social problems...has anyone noticed? Jo Ann is equally right on in her admonishment to Archbishop Sheehan to make it easier for women to have their children and raise them without living in penury: "If you really want to bless us, make concrete changes to the economic and social structures in place. This new decision to uphold this ban is not only a set back for women, it's a precedent for dictatorship."

"Dictatorship" is an interesting choice of words. If you think of the status of women historically, we have obviously been a second class gender. When it comes to individual rights and economic status, clearly the women of our families historically were subject to men for their wellbeing. Its quite evident. In stories of the fabled anglo American west, for instance, women show up as either wives or whores (and I don't think its a given that I would automatically have preferred to be a wife, frankly).

If you've read my other commentary over the years about abortion and women's rights you know that I think the women's movement suffers from an almost myopic mobilization around abortion. Most women want to have children, very much. I want to live in a society in which women don't have to make economic decisions to not have children. I want the politically engaged women out there to work just as hard for socialized childcare as they do for the right to an abortion. And I want the rightwing, and the Catholic Church, to work just as hard for socialized childcare as they do to criminalize women who choose abortion. For instance.

As a woman, I'm quite fortunate to live during the era that I do, largely due to the women's rights movement in this country which struggled for centuries to achieve some measure of equality. Abortion is just part of that package. It's about the right of women to control their destinies through control of their own bodies. For this reason, I come down squarely on the pro-choice side and understand the importance of maintaining our rights in this area. But I wish for a different battleground entirely, one in which the fight is about expanding the wellbeing of families headed by single women. That is where we truly get into questions about the value of social reproduction to our society, and by extension the unrecognized economic and social value of women's work in the home.