Last year, I argued that abortion was sexist, that “the possibility of abortion has allowed for a great “reaching in” of almost every form of prototypical male coercion, precisely at the moment in which a woman is most obviously powerful in her difference as mother—obliging, requiring, and enforcing the transformation of all men within her vicinity into servants.” This November, God’s Own Ohio decided—in its big cities, anyways—to beat Washington State for the superlative “Most Murderous State in the Union.” It seems like a good reason to double down on the point. For there is another sense in which abortion gives undue priority to men.
The mother is the truth of pregnancy—the father can only know of it. Mothers, in word and in body, herald the new child; fathers believe what they are told. Mothers have a secret; fathers hear it. Mothers experience the new child immediately; fathers experience it through a mediator.
The surprise of pregnancy reverses the male-female order of conception: the female receives the male seed and bears life within herself, but the male receives the knowledge of the new child through the female—through her “I’m pregnant” and her changing body—and ponders it within his heart.
The male receives his child, but only the mother knows, with certainty, that it belongs to him. The certainty that he is indeed a father is a gift of her fidelity and the fruit of his trust. He depends on her for the truth of his identity as father in a way that she does not depend on him for her identity as mother—for there is no doubt that the child is her own. Again, the procreative act reverses the typical relationship: here, the man depends on the woman for the security of his identity, and so becomes “the weaker sex.”
Tradition and ritual bear witness to a certain “choosing” of the child by the father, as in the Jewish ritual of circumcision, which only the father can perform; as in a naming ceremony; even as in that ceremony, still current, in which the father cuts the umbilical cord. She is nine months familiar—he is a stranger. She has nursed and will nurse her child into being—he is, for the moment, superfluous. She knows it is hers—he trusts it is his. All of this is distance, and distance requires the father to throw a bridge toward his child, to make a more definite act of will than the mother, who finds herself already in bodily and spiritual communion with the little one, going on without reference to any choice she made.
All fathers must adopt, choose, and acknowledge as their own those children already given to the mother. Gabriel Marcel described fatherhood as an “engagement and a decision.” But within abortion regimes, the maternal experience is sacrificed for an unchecked paternal experience of choice, even to the point of denying the reality of the child until it is chosen. In a forced imitation of male subjectivity, the mother is taken to experience her new child in the same mediated form that the male does—as “a pregnancy.” This pregnancy is transformed into a child, not, as for the male, as a result of birth, but by the choice not to “terminate the pregnancy.”
Within abortion regimes, babies are “just clumps of cells”—until they are willfully adopted. Like the naturally anxious father, the mother wills the child as her own, at which point the pregnancy “becomes” a boy, a girl, and a child worthy of congratulation and celebration all around.
Abortion makes of the child’s reality a sort of sliding scale: the more the child is experienced entirely in and through the female, who knows it, the less it is human and worthy of our respect; the more the child becomes available to the experience of the male, who knows of it, the more it is human—the more it gains a right to life. This is the sexist logic of partial as opposed to total abortion bans: when the baby is a secret, mediated to the outside world entirely by the woman, her feeling for her own body, and her willingness to share it in words—it is killable. When it is visible to the objective gaze, when the doctors can hear the heartbeat and the father can feel the kick—then we grow guilty, banning the act.
The legal possibility of abortion trains women and men to swat away the female experience of being in media res, already committed, already loving, already nourishing whether she would or no, and to take on an imitation of prototypically male anxieties: is it really mine? Do I really want it? The very possibility that, after all, I may kill it, may “terminate,” may become not-mother, negates the female into a perverse image of the male—who looks upon a pregnancy from the outside.
Abortion is thus a part of a much larger project of sexism inherent to industrial societies, all of which work to realize the classical, metaphysical description of “the female,” which describes her as a “deficient male.” A full argument of this will be in the forthcoming issue of New Polity Magazine, Issue 4.4., but most basically, it goes like this. Within industrial societies,
[i]nstead of living out a gendered role in the work of subsistence, women, like men, now subsist by engaging in the same sexless effort of working for a wage in order to purchase the commodities by which life is sustained. But because women, and not men, get pregnant, give birth, breastfeed, and otherwise care for very small children, women are by nature “deficient” vis-a-vis the male, worse than him at living, where living is done through accruing a wage and buying stuff with it. Like maternity leave, contraception and abortion have become “necessary” tools, developed and utilized at a mass scale by capitalist societies for realizing in the concrete life of the individual woman what for Aristotle was merely a metaphysical description of the female animal: that she was born defective, a failure to receive the full human form. Unlike the classical description of the female, these tools suggest that her deficient individual nature can and indeed should be healed, not for this or that disease, but for her very being female. The mystic word of the gnostics is common sense for a capitalist society: “Every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
Ultimately, abortion works its sexist logic, not merely in its practical application as a way for women to avoid children and thus compete within an industrial work-force, but in that it forces women to transition to a male form of subjectivity. Unless they successfully make this leap—viewing the baby as a pregnancy, viewing their responsibility as a product of choice, viewing the child “from without” rather than “from within,” etc.—abortion will appear as a tragedy, a loss, and a sin. Abortion says, as it were, “view the new baby like a man or suffer guilt.”
Of course, this is all an illusion. Women are not deficient males, and the attempt to produce an all-male experience of pregnancy is not just false to women, but to men. For a father’s “choice” is merely the reception of the child in love, not that which confirms the child as being a child at all. Abortion attempts to subordinate the female experience of procreation to the male experience only to lose the quintessential human experience: for only in God is a choice to create the actual source of the thing chosen.
The above is an updated excerpt from New Polity Magazine, Issue 3.1. Subscribe today for all our best work.