Ironically, cruelly, so typical of history ineluctably moving on,
Right to Life groups are the only organized political opposition to
reproductive technology, especially in vitro fertilization, * and are
also the agents of its ascendancy in engineering legislation that
would give the uterus and the fertilized egg to the state to protect
and control. Even in giving the state the right to define when life
begins, which Right to Life groups insist on doing, Right to Life
*Each fertilized egg in a petri dish is regarded as a human life; each time
one is thrown away or “dies, ” murder has been done.
groups are taking that power from religion and transforming it into
a police power of the state. For the sake of religion, they are taking
from religion its moral authority to demand obedience from the
faithful and turning that authority over to a soulless state apparatus
incapable of moral discernment. They are taking from God what
no atheist would dare and giving to Caesar what he has never dared
claim for himself. The women in Right to Life groups want to
protect not fertilized eggs but motherhood and their own worth as
women in God’s eyes as well as man’s. They will learn the crudest
lesson of history: “Every decent End consumes itself. You kill
yourself trying to reach it, and by the time you get there it’s been
turned inside out. ” 14 The words were written by Soviet dissident
Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), but every passionate political activist of conscience—whatever the “decent End”—has had occasion to say them, in trouble and in grief. What one means to do goes
wrong, it becomes what one abhors. Right to Life women will see
it too late: they will stay mesmerized by the small tributes men pay
to the idea—not the reality—of women as mothers. The power the
Right to Life women are fighting so hard to put into the hands of
the state will eventually and inevitably be used (1) to redefine when
life begins and what life is so that the male becomes its sole creator
and (2) to determine and enforce which women reproduce, when,
and how. The women not needed will have no claim to civil dignity or civil protection. The reason for female submission finally will be very simple and overwhelmingly clear: for women submission will be a matter of life or death, with the right of appeal to the sacredness of women as mothers no longer in the vocabulary of
male supremacy.
When women cease to be altogether necessary, politically dissident women become altogether unnecessary. Once women are biologically expendable on a grand scale, political women need no longer be tolerated on any scale. Politically dissident women are
considered unnecessary now: this is the mood toward feminists and
other women who rebel; someday it will be policy, not a mood.
The criteria for politically dissident women—troublemakers—will
be extended to include any women not domestics, sex prostitutes,
or reproductive prostitutes. The religiously orthodox women will
find themselves characterized as politically dissident women one
day too: there they will be, advocating and upholding old laws,
customs, and ideas that are no longer in the best interests of men.
They will be demanding more than men want them to have and
there will be no concessions from men: because men will be able to
