first the political use of the issue and then, after legalization, the
actual use of the medical procedure. When abortion was legal, they
saw a massive social move to secure sexual access to all women on
male terms— the glut of pornography; and indeed, they link the
two issues, and not for reasons of hysteria. Abortion, they say,
flourishes in a pornographic society; pornography, they say, flourishes in what they call an abortion society. What they mean is that both reduce women to the fuck. T hey have seen that the Left only
champions women on its own sexual terms— as fucks; they find the
right-wing offer a tad more generous. T hey are not dazzled by the
promise of abortion as choice, as sexual self-determination, as
woman’s control of her own body, because they know that the
promise is crap: as long as men have power over women, men will
not allow abortion or anything else on those terms.
Right-wing women see in promiscuity, which legal abortion
makes easier, the generalizing of force. T hey see force in marriage
as essentially containable—contained within the marriage, limited
to one man at a time. T hey try to “handle” him. T hey see that
limitation—one man at a time— as necessary protection from the
many men who would do the same and to whom they would be
available on sexual-liberation terms— terms fortified and made genuinely possible by abortion rights. With all their new public talk, they continue the traditional silence of women in that they are silent about forced sex in marriage: but all they do is predicated on a knowledge of it, and they do not see how more force is better than
less force— and more men means more force to them.
Right-wing women accuse feminists of hypocrisy and cruelty in
advocating legal abortion because, as they see it, legal abortion
makes them accessible fucks without consequence to men. In their
view, pregnancy is the only consequence of sex that makes men
accountable to women for what men do to women. Deprived of
pregnancy as an inevitability, a woman is deprived of her strongest
reason not to have intercourse. Opposition to birth control is based
on this same principle.
Right-wing women saw the cynicism of the Left in using abortion to make women sexually available, and they also saw the male Left abandon women who said no. They know that men do not
have principles or political agendas not congruent with the sex they
want. They know that abortion on strictly self-actualizing terms
for women is an abomination to men—left-wing men and right-
wing men and gray men and green men. They know that every
woman has to make the best deal she can. They face reality and
what they see is that women get fucked whether they want it or
not; right-wing women get fucked by fewer men; abortion in the
open takes away pregnancy as a social and sexual control over men;
once a woman can terminate a pregnancy easily and openly and
without risk of death, she is bereft of her best way of saying no—
of refusing the intercourse the male wants to force her to accept.
The consequences of pregnancy to him may stop him, as the consequences of pregnancy to her never will. The right-wing woman makes what she considers the best deal. Her deal promises that she
has to be fucked only by him, not by all his buddies too; that he
will pay for the kids; that she can live in his house on his wages;
and she smiles and says she wants to be a mommy and play house.
