not stopped yet. Especially significant has been their change of
heart and politics on abortion. The right to abortion defined as an
intrinsic part of the sexual revolution was essential to them: who
could bear the horror and cruelty and stupidity of illegal abortion?
The right to abortion defined as an intrinsic part of a woman’s
right to control her own body, in sex too, was a matter of supreme
indifference.
Material resources dried up. Feminists fought the battle for decriminalized abortion— no laws governing abortion—on the streets and in the courts with severely diminished male support. In 1973,
the Supreme Court gave women legalized abortion: abortion regulated by the state.
If before the Supreme Court decision in 1973 leftist men expressed a fierce indifference to abortion rights on feminist terms, after 1973 indifference changed to overt hostility: feminists had the
right to abortion and were still saying no— no to sex on male terms
and no to politics dominated by these same men. Legalized abor
tion did not make these women more available for sex; on the contrary, the women’s movement was growing in size and importance and male sexual privilege was being challenged with more intensity, more commitment, more ambition. The leftist men turned from political activism: without the easy lay, they were not prepared to engage in radical politics. In therapy they discovered that they had had personalities in the womb, that they had suffered
traumas in the womb. Fetal psychology—tracing a grown man’s
life back into the womb, where, as a fetus, he had a whole human
self and psychology—developed on the therapeutic Left (the residue of the male counterculture Left) before any right-wing minister or lawmaker ever thought to make a political stand on the right of
fertilized eggs as persons to the protection of the Fourteenth
Amendment, which is in fact the goal of antiabortion activists. *
The argument that abortion was a form of genocide directed particularly at blacks gained political currency, even though feminists from the first based part of the feminist case on the real facts and
figures—black and Hispanic women died and were hurt disproportionately in illegal abortions. As early as 1970, these figures were
*The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, has five sections, the first
of which is crucial here, the second of which is interesting. Section 1: “All
persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State whereinthey reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge
the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process
of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws. ” The second section guarantees the vote to all males. It was
purposely written to exclude women. Even though women have subsequently been given the vote, laws in the United States routinely abridgethe privileges and immunities of women and deprive women of liberty and
property (there are still states in which married women cannot own property on their own)— and women do not have equal protection of the laws.
