The fetus, once legally a “person, ” would have all the protections guaranteed by this amendment but not in practice extended to women. TheEqual Rights Amendment was in large part an effort to extend the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to women.
available in
women, and 8 times as many black women die of the consequences
of illegal abortions as do white women. . . In New York C ity, 80
percent of the women who die from abortions are black and
brown. ”9 And on the nonviolent Left, abortion was increasingly
considered m urder— murder in the most grandiose terms. “Abortion is the domestic side of the nuclear arms race, ” 10 wrote one male pacifist in a 1980 tract not at all singular in the scale and
tone of its denunciation. Without the easy fuck, things sure had
changed on the Left.
The Democratic Party, establishment home of many Left
groups, especially since the end of the 1960s ferment, had conceded abortion rights as early as 1972, when George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon and refused to take a stand for abortion
so that he could fight against the Viet Nam War and for the presidency without distraction. When the H yde Amendment cutting off Medicaid funding for abortions was passed in 1976, * it had
Jesse Jackson’s support: he had sent telegrams to all members of
Congress supporting the cutoff of funds. Court challenges delayed
the implementation of the H yde Amendment, but Jim m y Carter,
elected with the help of feminist and leftist groups in the Democratic Party, had his man, Joseph A. Califano, J r ., head of the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, halt federal funding of abortion by administrative order. By 1977 the first documented death of a poor woman (Hispanic) from an illegal abortion had occurred: illegal abortion and death were again realities for
women in the United States. In the face of the so-called human-life
amendment and human-life statute— respectively a constitutional
amendment and a bill of law defining a fertilized egg as a human
being— the male Left has simply played dead.
The male Left abandoned abortion rights for genuinely awful
* Except when the mother’s life is at stake in the original version (Hyde’s
version); as amended in the Senate, also in cases o f rape and incest.
reasons: the boys were not getting laid; there was bitterness and
anger against feminists for ending a movement (by withdrawing
from it) that was both power and sex for the men; there was also
the familiar callous indifference of the sexual exploiter—if he
couldn’t screw her she wasn’t real.
The hope of the male Left is that the loss of abortion rights will
drive women back into the ranks—even fear of losing might do
that; and the male Left has done what it can to assure the loss. The
Left has created a vacuum that the Right has expanded to fill—this
the Left did by abandoning a just cause, by its decade of quietism,
by its decade of sulking. But the Left has not just been an absence;
it has been a presence, outraged at women’s controlling their own
bodies, outraged at women’s organizing against sexual exploitation,
which by definition means women also organizing against the sexual values of the Left. When feminist women have lost legal abortion altogether, leftist men expect them back—begging for help, properly chastened, ready to make a deal, ready to spread their
legs again. On the Left, women will have abortion on male terms,
as part of sexual liberation, or women will not have abortion except
at risk of death.
And the boys of the sixties did grow up too. They actually grew
older. They are now men in life, not just in the fuck. They want
babies. Compulsory pregnancy is about the only way they are sure
to get them.
*
Every mother is a judge who sentences the children
for the sins of the father.
Rebecca West,
