Feminism on the offensive — A ‘pro-life’ manifesto

Scan page 6

BARCELONA—The debate in political circles and in the media in recent decades around the question of abortion has been accompanied by a growing monop­ oly ownership of the defense of the right to life by the Right, in a way that skillfully counter-poses it to the feminist demand of the right to choose.

Although we as feminists have defended ourselves against these Sibylline accusations of egoism and/ or infanticide, coming from the propaganda machine of the Catholic Church and its secular followers, we should recognize that our attempts at questioning the defense of life as the exclusive instrument of the Right have so far produced very few results. As “anti-choice” as they may be, the anti- choice activists are known by everyone as “pro-life,” and as pro-life as it may be, the feminist movement is still identified as “pro-abortion”.

However, apart from its calculated polarization, this logic is wrong. Feminism defends life. And it always has done. And that is why at a time when the paragons of traditional morality come out of their burrows to attack once again freedom and the right to decide, in a context where the cuts and the caverns combine to resurrect the vision of women as submissive and full of abnegation, it is more than ever necessary from a strategic perspective to assert feminism as being pro­ foundly pro-life and to get rid of the semantic corset that is being imposed on us from outside.

A feminist pro-life manifesto does not only strength­ en the demand for women’s freedom and autonomy as key elements of women’s struggle: it also allows us, at a time when the Right is back on the offensive, crimi­ nalizing us and robbing us of our rights, to assert and substantiate our re-appropriation of life as emancipa­ tory path and guiding principle. Here is a first draft: A question of rights...

1) Feminism defends the right of women to termi­ nate their pregnancies in a safe manner. As the World Health Organization stresses, the prohibition of abor­ tion only serves to increase maternal mortality; today, on a world scale, 47,000 women die each year because they terminate their pregnancy in a clandestine way. Thirteen percent of maternal deaths are due to unsafe abortions, and the majority of cases occur in countries with restrictive legislation on abortion.

The number of voluntary terminations of pregnancy does not diminish when legislation is harsh; on the other hand, the number of dangerous abortions in­ creases. It is out of respect for the memory of all those women who, while trying to exercise their right not to have a child, have found themselves in unsanitary situations, have risked their lives or indeed died, that feminism is pro-life.

2) According to the UN, the term “clandestine and 6 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2013 the right of women to terminate pregnancies in (Left) Marcher in an anti-austerity protest in Barcelona.

been born or are “about to be born” with any kind of disability must have the same rights as other citizens.

As feminists, we can already wonder how the right-wing forces at the head of and in the shad­ ow of the government have the impudence to proclaim themselves heroic saviors of a section of society to which they deny any kind of dignified existence through their measures of austerity and privatization in the services, programs and other forms of support to people with limited autono­ my.

Is the Popular Party not rather seeking to cre­ ate a situation where it is families, and women in particular, who take sole responsibility for those that the PP forces to be born, but in whom it loses interest from the very first minute of their lives? The same families and the same women that they drive into poverty because of their fraudulent rescue of the banks and their destruction of the Welfare State?

It is by its firm denunciation of this imposture, which pretends to defend social rights from Mon­ day to Thursday while destroying them by their decrees just before the weekend, that feminism asserts itself, today more than ever, as pro-life. 5) The Popular Party not only forces women to become mothers against their will, it also pre­ vents many other women, who want to be mothers and feel prepared for it, to actually become mothers. It does this through the defense of forced sterilization of people with psychic disabilities, despite the opposi­ tion of social organizations and the recommendations of the UN. It does so by opposing before the Constitu­ tional Tribunal marriage between people of the same sex, because it considers that only the heterosexual family is the “natural” framework for raising children.

And it does so by preventing women living alone and lesbians from having access to public services of med­ ically assisted reproduction in order to have a child without the direct intervention of a man.

The government thus divides women into “good” and “bad” mothers, good and bad women, and it decides who can start a family and who cannot. Gallardón says that motherhood makes women really women, but he forgets to make it clear (such forgetfulness!) that he is only talking about those women who have an ad­ equate sexual orientation, who want to form the cor­ rect type of family (nuclear, heterosexual, etc...), and who do not have any kind of mental disability.

Only the God of Rouco Varela (Archbishop of Madrid and president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference) knows what might happen if we allow children to be brought up among “queers” and “dykes” or if we guar­ antee that persons with physical handicaps will have full autonomy in decisions concerning their bodies and their sexuality. It is, finally, in its determination to defend the rights and freedoms of all people, and to do so from Monday to Sunday, that feminism is pro-life. A more just and a freer society Feminism is pro-life because its raison d’être is to build a more just and a freer society, one which places welfare and common good at the centre of everything; a society which does not condemn its poorest, young­ est and most vulnerable women to bleed to death be­ cause of a clandestine abortion; a society which does not aspire to domesticate people’s bodies and their lives and to force them into moralistic little pigeonholes; a society that educates its young people in prin­ ciples of reason, responsibility and truth, so that their actions will not have negative impacts on themselves or on other people; a society that integrates, cares for and genuinely respects people with functional diversi­ ty: that accepts freedom for all human beings to make decisions concerning their feelings and their desires and that does not say one thing and are do another.

Nevertheless, it is the prohibitive and anti-choice discourse that has the advantage today. We do not have much time: new attacks are being prepared. Let us take to the streets, let us take back possession of what is ours and go on the offensive. Feminism, today and always, is pro-life. n