Right-wing Women

economic conditions that mandate her prostitution, fixes her social place so that her sex is a commodity; and then, prostitution is seen to exist because the woman wills it and the political question is whether or not the state should

interfere with this expression of her will. What is seen as the eternal dimension of prostitution—why it must always exist—is that the will of women to prostitute themselves will always exist. This

means, simply, that men accept that the conditions that create

prostitution are acceptable, fixed, and appropriate because prostitution is a proper use of women, one congruent with what women are. The harm done is when she carries disease. Wherever prostitution is legal and regulated, it is usually to control disease, to protect men from disease; the woman is the instrument by which harm

comes to the man.

It is the social and economic construction of the woman’s will

that is the issue: both in that feminists assert that this w ill is constructed outside the individual and in that apologists for the sexual exploitation of women— again both religious and irreligious— insist

that the w ill is interior, individual, an individual assertion of a

female sexual nature.

The notion of female w ill always articulated in discussions of

prostitution (and currently pornography) also is central in a new

area of discourse on what women are for: surrogate motherhood. A

man, married to an infertile woman or on his own, wants a baby;

he buys the egg and the use of the womb of a surrogate mother— a

woman who w ill accept the introjection of his sperm through artificial insemination, gestate and give birth to what is contractually established as his child. In vitro fertilization— in which the egg is

extracted from a woman surgically, fertilized in a petri dish, then

vaginally introjected into the female— expands the possibilities

of surrogate motherhood. The uterus is exempt from the immune

response. Scientists already are able to remove the egg of one

woman, fertilize it outside her body, then introduce it into a second woman’s uterus, where it will gestate. * T hey have not done so, but there is no technological barrier to doing so. These two

reproductive technologies— artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization— enable women to sell their wombs within the terms of the brothel model. Motherhood is becoming a new branch of

female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to

the womb for experimentation and for power. A doctor can be the

agent of fertilization; he can dominate and control conception and

* According to Gena Corea, an expert in these technologies and their

effects on women, “men are hoping to fertilize an egg inside a woman’s

body (in vivo), flush it out and then transfer that embryo to another

woman. That has not yet been done. ” Letter to the author, February 12,

1982. The pure sadism of this seems outstanding.

reproduction. Women can sell reproductive capacities the same

way old-time prostitutes sold sexual ones but without the stigma of

whoring because there is no penile intrusion. It is the womb, not

the vagina, that is being bought; this is not sex, it is reproduction.

The arguments as to the social and moral appropriateness of this

new kind of sale simply reiterate the view of female will found in

discussions of prostitution: does the state have a right to interfere

with this exercise of individual female will (in selling use of the

womb)? if a woman wants to sell the use of her womb in an explicit

commercial transaction, what right has the state to deny her this

proper exercise of femininity in the marketplace? Again, the state