Right-wing Women

really trusted again: if she will do that to herself—hurt herself, tear

up her own insides rather than have a child—she must be the

frenzied female, the female gone mad, the lunatic female, the

female in rebellion against her own body and therefore against man

and God, the female who is most feared and abhorred, the Medea

underneath the devoted wife and mother, the wild woman, the

woman enraged with the sorrow between her legs, the woman

grief-stricken by the way men use her uterus, the woman who has

finally refused to be forced and so she must be punished by the

pain and the blood, the tearing and the terror.

The law gives a married woman to her husband to be fucked at

w ill, his w ill; the law forced the woman to bear any child that

might result. Illegal abortion was a desperate, dangerous, last-

ditch, secret, awful w ay of saying no. It is no wonder that so m any

respectable, m arried, God-fearing women hate abortion.

*

A n estimated 20 million illegal abortions are performed in the world each year and are a leading cause o f death among women of child-bearing age, a

study issued today said.

The report by the Population Crisis Committee

also said that another 20 million abortions were selfinduced annually and that the number was growing.

The New York Times, April 30, 1979

Women cannot be responsible for pregnancy, in the sense of acting

to prevent it, because women do not control when, where, how,

and on what terms they have intercourse. Intercourse is forced on

women, both as a normal part of marriage and as the prim ary sex

act in virtually any sexual encounter with a man. No woman needs

intercourse; few women escape it.

In marriage a man has the sexual right to his wife: he can fuck

her at w ill by right of law. The law articulates and defends this

right. The state articulates and defends this right. This means that

the state defines the intimate uses of a woman’s body in marriage;

so that a man acts with the protection of the state when he fucks

his wife, regardless of the degree of force surrounding or intrinsic

to the act. In the United States only five states have entirely abrogated the so-called marital rape exemption— the legal proviso that a man cannot be crim inally charged for raping his wife because rape

by definition cannot exist in the context of marriage, since marriage

licenses the use of a woman’s body by her husband against her

will. Nearly three times that many states have extended the husband’s right to forced intercourse to cohabiting men or, in some cases, even to so-called voluntary social companions. But even

where marital rape is illegal, the husband has at his disposal the

ordinary means of sexual coercion, including threat of physical violence, punitive economic measures, sexual or verbal humiliation in private or in public, violence against inanimate objects, and threats

against children. In other words, eliminating the legal sanctioning

of rape does not in itself eliminate sexual coercion in marriage; but