Collective defense
In association with International Women’s Day, it’s also Blog Against Sexism Day. Not such a happy International Women’s Day here in the US, though, with the recent South Dakota law banning abortion with only the narrowest exemption if the woman’s life is in danger.
Back when I was an undergraduate, there was a bit of a controversy about the student union’s attempt to affiliate to the National Abortion Campaign. I wrote for the student paper, which meant I went along to pro-life meetings to report on them. It was interesting (by which I mean disturbing) to get a first-hand view of the mindset of the pro-lifers. The mawkish religiousity was unpleasant, while the enthusiasm on the part of the male pro-lifers was downright creepy (not to mention the website of one of these fuckers, who supported his anti-abortion position with statistics about the changing racial composition of Europe).
So perhaps one sort-of good thing about this recent law is that this fucked-up mindset is crawling out of the woodwork where we can get a good look at it; witness this sexist asshat whose nonsense was brought to my attention by anthrochica. Anthrochica also gets annoyed with men who are able to casually dismiss the limited reformism of the Democrats because they don’t have to deal with the consequences of the Republicans’ slightly (but, in cases like this, crucially) more reactionary politics. This got me thinking: obviously, for supposed anarchists to treat individual non-voting as some kind of positive political action is to fetishize the vote in a precisely non-anarchist way. But there’s more than that. Simply moving from individual non-participation to collective non-participation is not enough; regrettably, a sufficient anarchist position is more difficult still. Non-participation remains the politics of the privileged if it is not at the same time collective action to defend those who are under attack by the system we refure to participate in.
What would such collective action look like in this case? I’m not sure; I was vaguely hoping that an organization like the AMA (the nearest thing I’m aware of to a Doctors’ Union) would have the guts to unambiguously say it would defend doctors who performed abortions, but this doesn’t look likely. Here we have one possibility, which largely, to me at least, serves to makes it clear how big a challenge we are actually facing.
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i agree with this post as a whole, and obviously with the point vis-a-vis abstract rejection of voting, etc. however, i can’t help but thinking that there’s something to the position that anthrochica is dismissing (the one about privilege), of course it depends why it’s being deployed. it’s a fact that the mainstream women’s/feminist movement has focused almost exclusively on reproductive rights, and has been somewhat lax when those rights seem to be safe. this comes, clearly, at the expense of alliances with those suffering other forms of oppression (racial, class) as well as in broader gender terms. granted, the political atmosphere is extraordinarily anti-feminist right now, but it’s little wonder that the reproductive rights movement is having a hard time rebuilding after essentially demobilizing in the aftermath of roe v wade.
also, the voting for democrats thing is doubly-problematic, as it entails either abandoning those who suffer oppressions that are unchanging under democrats, or convincing them that it’s in their best interests to vote for them. so i guess it runs the risk of cutting off those same alliances which are so crucial from the get-go.
Comment by geo @ 3/9/2006 8:08 am
Hi Tim,
I’m an agnostic about voting and not for any kind of principles, so far be it from me to attack anyone for it. That said, my gut feeling is that generally They follow Us, so they rollback abortion rights and labor rights etc when they’re able to, when we can’t or don’t stop them, and stand up for them when they’re required to. So the issue then is building strong movements, which if voting helps that then great. If not, then not.
I don’t in any way want to minimize the SD thing, but in a lot of the country stuff like Jane is needed regardless of legality, the last stat I saw was something like 80% of US counties not having access to abortion. In a sense, then, the problem’s even bigger.
NEFAC did a few articles on reproductive freedom that I liked, along the same lines of this discussion - the problem is big, the answer requires organizing. One piece is here, if you’re interested:
http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=334
best,
Nate
Comment by Nate @ 3/9/2006 5:39 pm
“The problem is big, the answer requires organizing.”
That’s definitely right. I don’t so much want to advocate voting - particularly as some sorts of engagement in formal politics are clearly just individualist non-participation which doesn’t even recognize itself as such (voting for Nader, for example). But when we’re not in a position to offer a concrete alternative to what is provided by the domain of formal politics, we need at least to recognize our weakness. Obviously, I know you guys are aware of that, but I hadn’t quite thought of it in those terms before, so I wanted to write the idea down somewhere before I forgot it.
I read somewhere that SD only has one abortion clinic in the whole state, which if it’s true, is probably as big a scandal as this recent formal prohibition of abortion.
Comment by Tim @ 3/9/2006 6:25 pm
it is in fact true that SD has only one abortion clinic - a Planned Parenthood clinic on the border of SD and whatever state is right next door. From what understand of the situation at the moment, PP has considered fighting the ruling, should the law change, although many in the feminist and pro-choice community think that it may make more sense politically to close the clinic, move it across the border into the next state where abortions remain legal, and wait until a law comes along that has more pores through which to sink a defense. The claim is that this law is too good, too all-encompassing - the potential for losing and setting precedent is too great.
That being said, I can’t quite get behind the idea of giving in and closing up shop. It seems to me to carry too great a potential of chain reactions - SD bans abortion and other Southern and Red states follow suit. Sometimes it seems better to nip these things in the bud, as it were, although its starting to look rather lose/lose lately.
As far as the argument mentioned above, regarding the feminist movement’s lackasdaisical engagement with other forms of oppression and reproductive rights when they “seem” safe: I would argue that this is patently false. Feminism in the “third wave” is heavily invested in issues of race, gender, colonisation, sexuality, transgenders and revolution. One look at recent calls for papers within the academy shows that current feminist trends are especially wrapped up in ideas of transgressing both gender and sex. And, as the binary structure of gender relations is the oldest human institution on earth, I don’t think many feminists would ever claim that reproductive rights have ever been, or seemed, “safe”. In fact, every email i receive from the Feminist Majority Foundation (which could arguably be considered one of the most mainstream of current feminist organisations) discusses, in some way, the issue of reproductive rights.
I suppose this argument, though, hinges on what exactly you define as the mainstream feminist movement. Is there a mainstream at all?
Comment by elise @ 3/9/2006 8:31 pm
I hadn’t actually thought about this all that much before this post, Tim. Your formulation in your last comment is really nice - cogent and leading to people like us being really honest, which is only a good thing.
The thing about the SD clinic, only one clinic, that’s insane. Those evil fuckers, they needed a law for one clinic? Ugh. Armchair campaigner is a cheap role, but one that’s hard to resist - I wonder if the best way to fight the law isn’t the courts (for the reasons Elise cites, danger of precedent and such) but maybe civil disobedience of some sort, keep the clinic open anyway? Obviously Planned Parenthood probably can’t and shouldn’t do something like that, they’ve got too much at stake financially. Another option other than a rekindled Jane might be an underground railroad of sorts, to help fund outreach to, travel for, and abortions for women in SD who need them. It’d be more costly, probably, but might also allow some opportunities for building some things. I don’t know. The only other ideas I have are ones that one doesn’t post on websites. Bastards. This is one of the issues that makes me most angry, so I have a hard time thinking clearly on it. Anyway, thanks for this post and discussion.
Elise, I for one don’t know much about organized feminist politics anymore or about feminism in the academy. I was active in Take Back The Night stuff in the late 90s and read Dworkin and MacKinnon type stuff but haven’t done much in those arenas in a while. I’m willing to take your word on all of this. In general my personal view is that we have the rights we have the power to exercise, and rights (like contracts in the workplace), are codifications of balances of power. So aiming for rights (or for contracts) puts the cart before the horse, so to speak. I know in labor organizing this is the general trend, if you say it’s not so re: feminist organizing then I’ll agree with you. But in general I think this is something one needs to be careful regardless of the arena (a danger of rights talk and politics aimed at certain institutional codifications), the risk of demobilizing. Again, maybe this is a non sequitur re: organized feminism. I hope so.
Comment by Nate @ 3/10/2006 1:12 am
Hey Nate.
I wouldn’t want to speak for all of organised feminism, and know that some of it - alot of the liberal feminism which is, in my opinion, minsconstrued as mainstream feminism - does cohere around rights discourses. Its hard when dealing with real people and real concrete problems, to not first look to “rights” as an organisational tool, with the more radical stuff falling behind.
For me, I’m involved in another kind of feminism, and because its where I am situated, I tend to consider *it* the mainstream - as I said earlier, i think it depends on where your idea of the mainstream is. Anyway, my feminist politics is far more inclusive as those that focus exclusively on some outmoded idea of “equality” and “rights”.
As far as a sort of civil disobedience act, i think that is along the lines of what PP was considering - it would be the way to challenge the case legally, but would mean finding a doctor so committed to the cause as to risk the 5 years or so in jail if the doctor were convicted. From my understanding, the onus is put on the doctors and not so much on the unbrella organisation they work for. So, this civil disobedience may have a result not so different from a constitutional challenge. The whole thing puts activists in between a rock and a hard place.
Also - McKinnon and Dworkin are certainly *one* strand of feminist thinking, but not the only one nor the most adhered to!! :)
Comment by elise @ 3/10/2006 7:46 am
I agree entirely that the South Dakota law is apalling and sets things back many years but I was worried by the ‘abortion by numbers’ on the website. It’s not that easy, as real anatomy is never as straightforward as the pictures. Having seen the results of concealed and bungled abortions I had to write to urge caution.
Comment by J/R @ 3/10/2006 3:08 pm
Well, I don’t think that that site is suggesting people just go out and start performing abortions tomorrow; rather, it’s a reminder that it is possible for a cautious group which is prepared to spend time acquiring the necessary skills and equipment to provide medical services even where formal medical institutions are prevented from doing so. There’s a tendency among those of us who aren’t doctors to kind of mystify medicine and forget that doctors are just people who have been trained to do particular things, and hospitals just places that have particular equipment and procedures.
Comment by tim @ 3/10/2006 5:05 pm
I read a very interesting zine about JANE a while ago, which included an interview with one of the women involved. There are those in the feminist health movement who are regretting the dismantling of organisations after Roe v Wade, and this woman was one of them. The arguments of the feminist health movements are complicated, I don’t want to try and reduce them to a few sentences here, but the gist for this post is that by giving up knowledge of our bodies to the medical profession, by not knowing how we work, what’s going wrong when it is, what’s “normal” and what’s just not what the medical text books say is “normal”, we are powerless to the doctors (and some obviously say to male doctors in particular). Therefore we should all make more of an effort to learn how to understand, look after and heal our own bodies - which crucially means demystifying abortion and learning how to DIY. The women from JANE were, I think, charged with performing medical procedures without a license. Part of the argument is that people should be able to heal themselves if they have the knowledge, without having to go through the establishment. Obviously having access to knowledge is fundamental here. The witch hunting of midwives at the time when the medicine was becoming a (male, upper class) profession springs to mind. While safety is paramount, fear is a very useful tool to stopping people taking control – as we all know. This whole issue is about knowledge as empowerment, the right to be able to control your own body – rather than about the right to hand your body over to someone else.
Incidentally, if you ever see a copy of either “A New View of a Woman’s Body” or “Our Bodies, Our Selves” in a second hand store, snap them up because they are hard to find these days, but very interesting! And I am looking forward to the day when the “feminist” health movement starts taking its own criticism of the medical profession’s obsession with and control of women’s bodies seriously and brings out “A New View of a Man’s Body”. Men have bodies too, surely?
Comment by Moll @ 3/10/2006 6:25 pm