Right-wing Women

tubes tied? And doesn’t this combination of illegal abortion—prohibited in a way never existing before, prohibited from conception—and forced sterilization finally meet the not-so-hidden agenda of welfare: doesn’t it finally provide the state with a way to

control—absolutely and effectively—the fertility of poor women?

Enough poor women can be kept having enough babies to provide

whatever cheap labor is essential; but the rest are expendable.

And what is going to happen to women, these women and all

women, when the tools of reproductive control of women are no

longer technologically (medically) crude? when the technology

catches up with the political and legal leap into the Orwellian future? What is going to happen to women when life can be made in the laboratory and men can control reproduction not just socially

but also biologically with real efficiency?

The value of a female life is determined by its reproductive

value. What will happen to all the women who are not altogether

necessary because their children in particular are not altogether desirable? The old women starving in poverty are starving because their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The

old women incarcerated in cruel nursing homes are there because

their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The

women who are too poor or too black or brown and who have too

many children are starved and threatened and degraded and slowly

killed through state-sponsored neglect because they are having children, because they reproduce too much, because the value put on their reproducing is negative and characterized by annihilating

disregard. The women who are kept in line now, millions upon

millions of them each year, through the judicious application of

mood-altering drugs, are kept chem ically happy, calm, tranquil, or

energetic so that they w ill hang in there, have and raise the children and keep house for their husbands even though their lives fill them with distress and addiction is what keeps them conforming.

T hey too are part of a throwaway population of females: because

their own well-being is viciously subordinated to a predetermined

standard of what a woman is and what a woman does and what a

woman needs to be a woman (she needs to keep doing female

things, whether she wants to or not). What are the lives of all these

women worth? Is there anything in the w ay they are viewed or

valued that upholds their human dignity as individuals? T hey already matter very little. T hey are treated with cruelty or callous indifference. T hey have already been thrown aw ay. It is public

policy to throw them aw ay. What is going to happen to women

when reproduction— the only capacity that women have that men

really need (Portnoy’s piece of liver can substitute for the rest in

hard times)— is no longer the exclusive province of the class

women? W hat is going to happen to women who have only one

argument for the importance of their existence— that their reproductive capacities are worth a little something (shelter, food, solace, minimal respect)— when men can make babies?

*

And yet, there is a solitude which each and every

one o f us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner

being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch o f man

or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the

caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum o f the oracle;

the hidden chamber o f Eleusinian m ystery, for to it