are not their sex; nor their sex plus some other little thing— a liberal additive of personality, for instance; but that each life— including each woman’s life— must be a person’s own, not predetermined before her birth by totalitarian ideas about her nature and her function, not subject to guardianship by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate but worked out by herself, for herself.
Frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean; the idea of
women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema or baffling. It is the simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and the most despised.
In the face of advancing reproductive technology, there w ill be
even fewer women who dare claim their right to human life, human dignity, and human struggle as unique and necessary individuals, fewer and fewer women who will fight against the categorical disposition of women. Instead, more and more women w ill see
protection for themselves as women in religious and devotional ideologies that formally honor the special sanctity of motherhood.
This is the only claim that women can make under the sex-class
system to a sacred nature; and religion is the best w ay to make that
claim— the best available w ay. Against the secular power of male
scientists women w ill try to pit the political power of misogynist
males in religion. Women w ill try to use male theology and religious tradition wherever and however it sanctifies the mother giving birth. Women w ill hide behind theology; women w ill hide behind orthodox religious men; women w ill use conservative religious ideas against the science that w ill make women less necessary than they have ever been.
The power of the reproductive scientists w ill be advanced, how
ever, precisely through the political and legislative initiatives of the
theocrats: prohibiting abortion and then mandating forced sterilization will establish absolute state control of the uterus. The clash between reproductive scientists and male theocrats in terms of absolute values—especially the orthodox formulation of what constitutes the family—only appears to be irresolvable. When these two schools of unconditional male power over women have to negotiate public policy to the mutual benefit of both, the men of theology, with that remarkable resourcefulness that allowed for the
burning of the witches, will find great virtue in any program in
which fertilized eggs truly do supersede women in importance.
They will also enjoy having both sex and reproduction on their
own terms: being God in the concrete rather than worshiping him
in the abstract. They will also enjoy— for its own sake—the extraordinary control they will have over women: more than Leviticus gives; more than Christ mandates; more than men have ever had, though no doubt still less than men deserve. Women will argue like the true believers they are for that old-time religion, but male theocrats will discover that God intended men to be the sole
creators of life all along: did not God himself create Adam without
female help and is not baptism the religious equivalent of being
born of a male God? This is not farfetched for those who justify
the subordination of women to men on the ground that God is a
boy.
Ironically, cruelly, so typical of history ineluctably moving on,
Right to Life groups are the only organized political opposition to
reproductive technology, especially in vitro fertilization, * and are
also the agents of its ascendancy in engineering legislation that
would give the uterus and the fertilized egg to the state to protect
and control. Even in giving the state the right to define when life
begins, which Right to Life groups insist on doing, Right to Life
*Each fertilized egg in a petri dish is regarded as a human life; each time
one is thrown away or “dies, ” murder has been done.
groups are taking that power from religion and transforming it into
a police power of the state. For the sake of religion, they are taking
from religion its moral authority to demand obedience from the
faithful and turning that authority over to a soulless state apparatus
incapable of moral discernment. They are taking from God what
no atheist would dare and giving to Caesar what he has never dared
claim for himself. The women in Right to Life groups want to
