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women consistently denounce abortion because they see it as inextricably linked to the sexual degradation of women. The sixties did not simply pass them by. They learned from what they saw. They

saw the cynical male use of abortion to make women easier fucks—

first the political use of the issue and then, after legalization, the

actual use of the medical procedure. When abortion was legal, they

saw a massive social move to secure sexual access to all women on

male terms— the glut of pornography; and indeed, they link the

two issues, and not for reasons of hysteria. Abortion, they say,

flourishes in a pornographic society; pornography, they say, flourishes in what they call an abortion society. What they mean is that both reduce women to the fuck. T hey have seen that the Left only

champions women on its own sexual terms— as fucks; they find the

right-wing offer a tad more generous. T hey are not dazzled by the

promise of abortion as choice, as sexual self-determination, as

woman’s control of her own body, because they know that the

promise is crap: as long as men have power over women, men will

not allow abortion or anything else on those terms.

Right-wing women see in promiscuity, which legal abortion

makes easier, the generalizing of force. T hey see force in marriage

as essentially containable—contained within the marriage, limited

to one man at a time. T hey try to “handle” him. T hey see that

limitation—one man at a time— as necessary protection from the

many men who would do the same and to whom they would be

available on sexual-liberation terms— terms fortified and made genuinely possible by abortion rights. With all their new public talk, they continue the traditional silence of women in that they are silent about forced sex in marriage: but all they do is predicated on a knowledge of it, and they do not see how more force is better than

less force— and more men means more force to them.

Right-wing women accuse feminists of hypocrisy and cruelty in

advocating legal abortion because, as they see it, legal abortion

makes them accessible fucks without consequence to men. In their

view, pregnancy is the only consequence of sex that makes men

accountable to women for what men do to women. Deprived of

pregnancy as an inevitability, a woman is deprived of her strongest

reason not to have intercourse. Opposition to birth control is based

on this same principle.

Right-wing women saw the cynicism of the Left in using abortion to make women sexually available, and they also saw the male Left abandon women who said no. They know that men do not

have principles or political agendas not congruent with the sex they

want. They know that abortion on strictly self-actualizing terms

for women is an abomination to men—left-wing men and right-

wing men and gray men and green men. They know that every

woman has to make the best deal she can. They face reality and

what they see is that women get fucked whether they want it or

not; right-wing women get fucked by fewer men; abortion in the

open takes away pregnancy as a social and sexual control over men;

once a woman can terminate a pregnancy easily and openly and

without risk of death, she is bereft of her best way of saying no—

of refusing the intercourse the male wants to force her to accept.

The consequences of pregnancy to him may stop him, as the consequences of pregnancy to her never will. The right-wing woman makes what she considers the best deal. Her deal promises that she

has to be fucked only by him, not by all his buddies too; that he

will pay for the kids; that she can live in his house on his wages;

and she smiles and says she wants to be a mommy and play house.

If in order to keep pregnancy as a weapon of survival she has to

accept illegal abortion and risk death, she will do it—alone, in silence, isolated, the only reproach for her rebellion against actual pregnancy being death or maiming. In this mess of illegal abortion,

she will have confirmed what she has been taught about her own

nature as a woman and about all women. She deserves punishment; illegal abortion is punishment for sex. She feels shame: she may consider it the shame of sex but it is in part the shame that

any human in captivity feels in being used—women being used in

sex feel shame inseparable from sex. The shame will confirm that

she deserves suffering; suffering in sex and birth and aborted birth