Re: Nationalism is Always Gendered

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol Cox wrote:

>I thought I would add a general question to Margaret's question to
>me. Could anyone attempt to define what is in the head of all the
>people who accept the slogan, "family values"? I take for granted
>that the inner meaning it bears for the people who push it is "Keep
>them pregnant and barefoot!" but the slogan must have a somewhat
>more complex effect on those who swallow it.

Since a lot of the people who hold those views are women, you'd have to
change that to "keep us pregnant and barefoot!," though I've never heard a
woman actually say that.

Kristin Luker devotes a chapter in her book Aobrtion & The Politics of
Motherhood to the worldviews of those she calls pro-life and pro-choice
advocates. The pro-lifers are generally religious and believe that gender
roles are "natural" and divinely ordained. The pro-choicers believe in
reason and social constructions of gender. From a Marxist-feminist point of
view, things can get pretty complicated on close examination. Here's the
conclusion to that chapter.

Doug

----

[from Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (University of
California Press, 1984), pp. 186-191]

World Views

All these different issues that divide pro-life and pro-choice activists
from one another-their views on men and women, sexuality, contraception,
and morality-in turn reflect the fact that the two sides have two very
different orientations to the world and that these orientations in turn
revolve around two very different moral centers. The pro-life world view,
notwithstanding the occasional atheist or agnostic attracted to it, is at
the core one that centers around God: pro-life activists are on the whole
deeply committed to their religious faith and deeply involved with it. A
number of important consequences follow.

Because most pro-life people have a deep faith in God, they also believe in
the rightness of His plan for the world. They are therefore skeptical about
the ability of individual humans to understand, much less control, events
that unfold according to a divine, rather than human, blueprint. From their
point of view, human attempts at control are simply arrogance, an
unwillingness to admit that larger forces than human will determine human
fate. One woman made the point clearly: "God is the Creator of life, and I
think all sexual activity should be open to that [creation]. That does not
mean that you have to have a certain number of children or anything, but it
should be open to Him and His will. The contraceptive mentality denies his
will, 'It's my will, not your will.' And here again, the selfishness comes
in."

This comment grew out of a discussion on contraception, but it also reveals
values about human efficacy and its role in a larger world. While
individuals can and should control their lives, pro-life people believe
they should do so with a humility that understands that a force greater
than themselves exists and, furthermore, that unpredicted things can be
valuable. A woman who lost two children early in life to a rare genetic
defect makes the point: "I didn't plan my son, my third child, and only
because I was rather frightened that I might have a problem with another
child. But I was certainly delighted when I became pregnant and had him.
That's what I mean, I guess I feel that you can't plan everything in life.
Some of the nicest things that have happened to me have certainly been the
unplanned. " Another woman went further: "I think people are foolish to
worry about things in the future. The future takes care of itself."

Consequently, from the pro-life point of view, the contemporary movement
away from the religious stand, what they see as the "secularization" of
society, is at least one part of the troubles of contemporary society. By
this they mean at least two things. First, there is the decline in
religious commitment, which they feel keenly. But, second, they are also
talking about a decline of a common community, a collective sense of what
is right and wrong. From their viewpoint, once morality is no longer
codified in some central set of rules that all accept and that finds its
ultimate justification in the belief in a Supreme Being, then morality
becomes a variation of "do your own thing."

For pro-life people, once the belief in a Supreme Being (and by definition
a common sense of culture) is lost, a set of consequences emerge that not
only creates abortion per se but creates a climate where phenomena such as
abortion can flourish. For example, once one no longer believes in an
afterlife, then one becomes more this-worldly. As a consequence, one
becomes more interested in material goods and develops a world view that
evaluates things (and, more importantly, people) in terms of what Marxists
would call their "use value." Further, people come to live in the
"here-and-now" rather than thinking of this life-and in particular the pain
and disappointments of this life-as spiritual training for the next life.
When the belief in God (and in an afterlife) are lost, pro-life people feel
that human life becomes selfish, unbearably painful, and meaningless.

<block quotes>
I think basically a secular nature of our society, that we basically lost
our notion of God as being important in our lives ... it's hard at times to
see that suffering can make you a better person, so people don't want any
part of it.

I think there's a decline in our civilization. Bracken, Dr. Julius Bracken,
said that the problem used to be why does God allow suffering or pain or
things like that, and now the problem is man's own existence, you know, man
believes that he's in a circle of nothingness and therefore there is no
such thing as a moral or immoral act.
</block quotes>

One of the harshest criticisms pro-life people make about pro-choice
people, therefore, which encapsulates their feeling that pro-choice people
are too focused on a short-term pragmatic view of the present world rather
than on the long-term view of a transcendent world, is that pro-choice
people are "utilitarian."

In part, pro-life people are right: the pro-choice world view is not
centered around a Divine Being, but rather around a belief in the highest
abilities of human beings. For them, reason-the human capacity to use
intelligence, rather than faith, to understand and alter the environment -
is at the core of their world; for many of them, therefore, religious or
spiritual beliefs are restricted only to those areas over which humans have
not yet established either knowledge or control: the origin of the
universe, the meaning of life, etc. As one pro-choice activist, speaking of
her own spiritual beliefs, noted: "What should I call it? Destiny? A
Supreme Being? I don't know. I don't worship anything, I don't go anyplace
and do anything about it, it's just an awareness that there's a whole area
that might be arranging something for me, that I am not arranging
myself-though every day I do more about arranging things myself."

Whatever religious values pro-choice people have are subordinated to a
belief that individuals live in the here and now and must therefore make
decisions in the present about the present. Few pro-choice people expressed
clear beliefs in an afterlife so that their time frame includes only the
worldly dimension of life. Thus, the entire articulation of their world
view focuses them once again on human-rather than divinecapacities and, in
particular, on the capacity for reason.

There are important implications to the fact that reason is the centerpiece
of the pro-choice universe. First, they are, as their opponents claim,
"utilitarian." Without explicitly claiming the heritage of the Scottish
moralists, utilitarianism is consonant with many of the prochoice side's
vaguely Protestant beliefs and, more to the point, with their value of
rationality and its extensions: control, planning, and fairness. Second, as
this heritage implies, they are interventionists. From their point of view,
the fact of being the only animal gifted with intellect means that humans
should use that intellect to solve the problems of human existence. What
the pro-life people see as a humility in the face of a God whose ways are
unknowable to mere humans, pro-choice people see as a fatalistic reliance
upon a Creator whom humans wishfully endow with magical powers. These same
values lead pro-choice people to be skeptical of the claim that certain
areas are, or should be, sacrosanct, beyond the reach of human
intervention. Sacred to them is too close to sacred cow, and religion can
merge imperceptibly into dogma, where the church could persecute Galileo
because science was too threatening both to an old way of thinking of
things and an established power structure. Truth, for pro-choice people,
must always take precedence over faith.

Because of their faith in the human ability to discover truth, prochoice
people are on the whole optimistic about "human nature." While in their
more despairing moments they can agree with the prolife diagnosis of
malaise in contemporary American life-that "things fall apart and the
center does not hold" in Yeats' terms-they emphatically disagree upon the
solution. Rather than advocate what they see as a retreat from the present,
an attempt to recreate idealized images of the past, they would argue that
"the Lord helps those who help themselves" and that people should rally to
the task of applying human ingenuity to the problems that surround us.

In consequence, pro-choice people do not see suffering as either ennobling
or as spiritual discipline. In fact, they see it as stupid, as a waste, and
as a failure, particularly when technology exists to eliminate it. While
some problems are not at present amenable to human control, pro-choice
people will admit, they are sure to fall to the march of human progress.
Thus, not only can humans "play God," it is, in an ironic sort of way, what
they owe their Creator, if they have one: given the ability to alter
Nature, it is immoral not to do so, especially when those activities will
diminish human pain.

All of these values come home for pro-choice people when they talk about
the quality of life. By this term they mean a number of things. In part
they use this phrase as a short-hand way of indicating that they think of
life as consisting of social as well as biological dimensions. The embryo,
for example, is only a potential person to them in large part because it
has not yet begun to have a social dimension to its life, only a physical
one. In corollary, a pregnant woman's rights, being both social and
physical, transcend those of the embryo. This view is rooted in their
values about reason: biological life is physical and of the body. Humans
share physical life with all other living beings, but reason is the gift of
humans alone. Thus social life, which exists only by virtue of the human
capacity for reason, is the more valuable dimension of life for pro-choice
people. (This viewpoint explains in part why many pro-choice people find
unfathomable the question of "when does life begin?" For them it is
obvious: physical life began only once, most probably when the "cosmic
soup" yielded its first complex amino acids, the forerunners of DNA; social
life begins at "viability" when the embryo can live-and begin to form
social relation ships-outside of the womb.)

But for pro-life people, this line of reasoning is ominous. If social life
is more important than physical life, it then follows that people may be
ranked by the value of their social contributions, thus making invidious
distinctions among individuals. In contrast, if physical life is valued
because it is a gift from the Creator, then no mere human can make claim to
evaluate among the gifts with which various individuals are born. A view
that the physical or genetic dimension of life is paramount - that all who
are born genetically human are, a priori, persons-means that at some level
all are equal. A hopelessly damaged newborn is, on this level, as equally
deserving of social resources as anyone else. What pro-life people fear is
that if the pro-choice view of the world is adopted, then those who are
less socially productive may be deemed less socially valuable. For pro-life
people, many of whom have situational reasons to fear how pro-choice people
would assign them a social price tag, such a prospect is a nightmare.

The phrase quality of life evokes for pro-choice people a pleasing vista of
the human intellect directed to resolving the complicated problems of
life-the urge for knowledge used to tame sickness, poverty, inequality, and
other ills of humankind. To pro-life people, in contrast, precisely because
it is focused on the here and now and actively rejects the sacred and the
transcendent, it evokes the image of Nazi Germany where the "devalued" weak
are sacrificed to enlarge the comfort of the powerful.

Thus, in similar ways, both pro-life and pro-choice world views founder on
the same rock, that of assuming that others do (or must or should) share
the same values. Pro-life people assume that all good people should follow
God's teachings, and moreover they assume that most good-minded people
would agree in the main as to what God's teachings actually are. (This
conveniently overlooks such things as wars of religion, which are usually
caused by differences of opinion on just such matters.) Pro-choice people,
in their turn, because they value reason, assume that most reasonable
people will come to similar solutions when confronted with similar
problems. The paradox of utilitarianism, that one person's good may be
another person's evil, as in the case of the pro-life belief that a
too-effective contraceptive is a bad thing, is not something they can
easily envisage, much less confront.,,

What neither of these points of view fully appreciates is that neither
religion nor reason is static, self-evident, or "out there." Reasonable
people who are located in very different parts of the social world find
themselves differentially exposed to diverse realities, and this
differential exposure leads each of them to come up with different-but
often equally reasonable -constructions of the world. Similarly, even
deeply devout religious people, because they too are located in different
parts of the social world and, furthermore, come from different religious
and cultural traditions, can disagree about what God's will is in any
particular situation. When combined with the fact that attitudes toward
abortion rest on these deep, rarely examined notions about the world, it is
unambiguously clear why the abortion debate is so heated and why the
chances for rational discussion, reasoned arguments, and mutual
accommodation are so slim.