that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired,
sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not
make them independent of men and that they will still have to play
the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no
way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in
the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better
to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value
whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not
wrong. T hey fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and
promiscuity as values, w ill make them more vulnerable to male
sexual aggression, and that they w ill be despised for not liking it.
They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. T hey know that they are valued for their sex—
their sex organs and their reproductive capacity— and so they try
to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity;
through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through
submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“fem ininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” T heir desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. T hey see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence
realized in a woman is a crime. T hey see the world they live in and
they are not wrong. T hey use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. T hey use the traditional intelligence of the female— animal, not human: they do what they
have to to survive.
3
Abortion
I have never regretted the abortion. I
both my marriage and having children.
A witness on forced motherhood,
International Tribunal on Crimes Against
Women, * March 1976
Before the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the
United States, abortion was a crime. Some abortions were medically licensed, but they were a minute percentage of the abortions actually undergone by women. This meant that there were no records of the illegal abortions performed (each abortion was a crime, each abortion was clandestine), no medical histories or records, no
statistics. Information on illegal abortions came from these sources:
(1) the testimonies of women who had had such abortions and survived; (2) the physical evidence of the botched abortions, evidence that showed up in hospital emergency rooms all over the country
every single d ay— perforated uteruses, infections including gangrene, severe hemorrhaging, incomplete abortions (in which fetal tissue is left in the womb, always fatal if not removed); (3) the
physical evidence of the dead bodies (for instance, nearly one half
*See testimony on forced motherhood, forced sterilization, and forced sex
in
E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Femmes,
1976).
of the maternal deaths in New York State resulted from illegal
abortions); (4) the anecdotal reminiscences of doctors who were
asked for “help” by desperate women. These sources provide a
profile of the average woman who wanted and got an illegal abortion. Indisputably, she was married and had children: “. . . it has been repeatedly demonstrated that most criminal abortions today
are obtained by married women with children, ” 1 wrote Jerome E.
Bates and Edward S. Zawadzki in
1964. An estimated two thirds of the women who got criminal
abortions were married. * This means that up to two thirds of the
botched abortions were done on married women; up to two thirds of
the dead were married women; perhaps two thirds of the survivors
are married women. This means that most of the women who risked
