Mind the Gap

Since I’m doing all these posts on the pitfalls of the pro-choice position, and want to avoid getting any feedback along the lines of “I can’t believe I’m reading a defence of clubbing darling baby seals with cute little whiskers and beautiful puppy dog eyes on a feminist blog!!”, let me state my own position on the matter:

I’m pro-choice, I think safe, legal abortions should be available to any woman who wants one. If the time ever comes when men can get pregnant, they should be available for them too. I’m ignorant of medical facts, so can’t say when the cut-off point should be for abortions, but in any case, the decision on this should be based on the risk to the woman’s health. I think the father should have a say in planning for children in the context of their couple / marriage / polyamorous commune / whatever, but if an accident happens, I think it should be the mother’s decision – legally speaking. I definitely think the father’s feelings are relevant, especially if we consider that he is entirely responsible for whatever squirts out of his gentleman-bits (for a great fictional account of the conflicted feelings of a father-to-be, by the way, you could do worse than read The Age of Reason by Sartre) But ultimately, as Laura Woodhouse says in her post on the F-Word today:

“Women are biologically vulnerable because we are the ones that can be made pregnant. Access to contraception and abortion neutralises the biological advantage that men have over us, and this advantage has not been consigned to the history books: it never will be”

So, why am I making posts pointing out the faults in the pro-choice position? Because there’s no such thing as a no-brainer. Because people worked hard to get to the situation we are in now, imperfect as it is, and we need to acknowledge all of those people, and out of respect for them if anything, we should recognise every part of their political positions, and the reasons behind their work. Because knowing and acknowledging the failings of the feminist movement will ultimately strengthen us. And especially, for that reason and for many others, because history is one of the most valuable tools we have, and it is vital to keep it alive.

The pro-choice movement, like many movements, has its dodgy sides, both in its past, and still today. In fact, I’d been meaning to do a post on the 90s trend for safe-sex rap for quite a while now, and was reminded of this recently by a post by Blackamazon (which I found via A Womyn’s Ecdysis ), where she mentions the following:

“It’s not like Planned Parenthood isn’t formed on the basis of one of the most VIOLENTLY racist eugencists who literally compared Aboriginal peoples to apes, and flaunted this fact and EVERY DAMN TIME people damn near wet themselves over her little to no mention is made of it under the apallling guise and with real straight faces under BUT LOOK AT WHAT SHE’S DONE FOR WOMEN.”

The name Margaret Sanger seemed slightly familiar, and in fact I remember where I saw it before: Ms Sanger was a supporter and friend of another early birth control advocate, Emma Goldman. In fact, they were both arrested under the Comstock Act for disseminating obscene materials – since you can’t really talk about birth control without mentioning the Doing of the Nasty, and arresting Emma Goldman was quite a popular passtime in those days to start with.

(It might interest you to know, the actual quote about Aborigenes is as follows:

“It is said that a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.”)

In general, Margaret Sanger was in favour of ‘race hygiene’ through ‘negative eugenics’:

“A stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”

However, it should be noted in the interests of fairness that she was strongly opposed to actually gassing the children of suboptimal people. That’s kind of her!
Hew views differed from Emma Goldman’s in one key respect: Emma Goldman supported birth control partly in the interests of free love, whereas Margaret Sanger definitely thought sexuality was a weakness, and sexual thoughts in general were undesirable in the extreme, and in fact wrote a book entitled What Every Girl Should Know, which echoes the work of dietary evangelist John Harvey “yoghurt enemas” Kellog in many aspects:

“In the boy or girl past puberty, we find one of the most dangerous forms of masturbation, i.e., mental masturbation, which consists of forming mental pictures, or thinking obscene or voluptuous pictures. This form is considered especially harmful to the brain, for the habit becomes so fixed that it is almost impossible to free the thoughts from lustful pictures.”

I haven’t made a detailed comparison, and I’m sure they differ in many ways, but you can find some of her work on Project Gutenberg if you’re interested.

On the positive side, she did enable the setting up of family planning clinics in disadvantaged areas (although on the minus side, er, see above), and Planned Parenthood have gone on to do some fine work since then.

In fact, Margaret Sanger wasn’t a lone crazy person with crazy ideas. She was one of many early self-identified feminists and proponents of birth control who more than dabbled in eugenics. Another was and Moses Harman, editor of the anarchist publication Lucifer the Lightbearer.

There’s a lot of good to be said of Moses Harman. He was a strong supporter of women’s rights, and strongly condemned marital rape when not many people did. To be honest, Emma Goldman obviously thought he was the Messiah combined with Father Christmas or something, so I find it hard to say anything against the man. However, Lucifer the Lightbearer did change its title to the American Journal of Eugenics, and he is credited as one of the founders of the Eugenics movement. And of course, when you’re reading Living My Life by Emma Goldman, nodding your head and going ‘right on’ at a lot of things, to do a bit of research and come up with the word ‘eugenics’ a few clicks away definitely makes you stop and think.

But all this is definitely outdated and a thing of the past, right? We’re all enlightened these days – or Bearers of Light indeed.

Well, you might wish to reconsider, for instance whenever you hear people talk about ‘overpopulation’. Why is it always ‘overpopulation’ in ‘those’ countries? How much of that kind of thinking comes from genuine concern for human beings, and how much is pure racial phobia, fear of being overrun by aliens? Why not just make sure everyone gets adequate shelter, food, education, and birth control or abortion as and when the need it or want it? Why does everything have to center around telling people either that they mustn’t use birth control, or else that they absolutely must? And that old question: why does it always involve telling people to abandon their histories and cultures because ours is supposedly best? Fundamentally, why does it involve telling them to stop reproducing at all costs? Why is it that women either have to be made to keep kids they don’t want, or be told not to have as many as they want? Is this really out of genuine concern for the people involved? Is it really because it’s unhealthy for women to have too many kids? Really? Are you sure? Positive? Because it looks like certain women get praised for the same thing. But I guess if you’re Fay Weldon or Baroness Sweats Molten Gold From Every Orifice And Cried Diamonds When Toddler Isidore Said His First Word Which Was Filthy Shortly Followed By Commoner, it’s no problem at all. In fact, you’re fantastic. Here’s a fucking medal! Only gold, sorry, couldn’t procure any blood of the poor at such short notice.

*pauses for breath* Yeah, come to think of it though, I didn’t think of it before, but isn’t there a bit of a sinister subtext around all these articles where we’re supposed to leap for joy because fantastic rich women have so many grandchildren?

All this brings me back, to when I was a teenager in the 90s, and just getting into pop music, you know, MTV stuff, like Dr Alban, Salt ‘n Peppa, and then there was stuff like Bon Jovi and Meatloaf. Remember how the white artists always had passionate (indeed, turgid) love songs? And the videos would involve them going ‘widdly widdly woooeee’ up and down their guitar necks, with fountains of fluid gushing everywhere – waterfalls, champagne, you name it. Whereas with the rap songs – I particularly remember with Salt’n Peppa – if they said anything sexual at all, they always ended on ‘Remember kids, always use a condom’. It should have struck me how all the Black artists were telling ‘the kids’ to use a condom and the white artists were like ‘come here virgin, let me impregnate you!’, but I just thought the rap artists were more conscientious for some reason. After all, rap was always political music, I just missed the part, through being too young, where it got co-opted by MTV, and where its political image was turned to other uses. A little frivolous, you might think, but when it comes to hiding racism and sexism in plain sight, it doesn’t get much better than the mass media.

All this to say, we shouldn’t assume that the pro-choice position has always been 100% right about everything, or that there are only two possible positions in the debate.

In particular, there’s a tendency to demonise religious people or assume they’re all brainwashed or something, when religion doesn’t have the monopoly on dodgy politics or oppressing people. We have secularism and the theory of evolution to thank for stuff like Social Darwinism and Eugenics, but this doesn’t mean we have to burn our copies of The Origin of the Species right this minute. Also, pretending there are only two positions and that they don’t have anything in common with each other is just plain, well, [insert violent imprecation here].

All I’m saying is, we should be aware of the ugly parts of our history, otherwise we can never confront them. We should be particularly aware of the history of causes which mean a lot to us. After all, how much do we really respect ourselves if we can’t be arsed to find out about our own history?