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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