Let us return to that wonderful yesterday when the United States Supreme Court ruled that Myra Bradwell couldn’t be two things at the same time: a lawyer and a woman.
On that occasion, Justice Joseph P. Bradley left a perfect entry for the Father Knows Best time capsule, circa 1873. “Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender,” he intoned. “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.”
Bradley went on to explain why this decision couldn’t be in the hands of the woman. “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” Mrs. Bradwell had to be protected from her own misguided and unwomanly ambitions — by men.
Justice Bradley did not put the pater in paternalism. But when you bring his 19th-century gem into the light of our 21st-century lives, it glistens like a genuine relic. Want to veto your wife’s decisions on the grounds that you know what’s best for her? Well, don’t try this at home, those days are over. Or are they?
There was a small relic hidden in the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. For the first time, Justice Anthony Kennedy justified banning an abortion procedure not only to protect the fetus but to protect the woman.
“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,” he admitted, “it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”
Reliable data or not, the “regrets” of these women became another reason to ban a procedure for all women. The state could protect her, the justice implied, from her own ill-informed, misguided decision.
For this argument, Kennedy reached down into the legal briefs of anti abortion activists who have been honing a political strategy based on the idea that abortion hurts women. They’ve tried to turn the pro choice position on its head, declaring that abortion opponents are the ones who truly care about women’s health.
The abortion-hurts-women argument had its first incarnation in repeatedly debunked attempts to link abortion to breast cancer. Now anti abortionists have fabricated an entire mental illness they name post-abortion syndrome, which has been debunked by study after study.
Nevertheless it reappears in testimonies from women whose stories about their trauma are spread throughout state legislatures considering all sorts of new restrictions.
Abortion is inherently harmful to women, their argument goes, because it violates a woman’s true “nature,” her role as a mother. This would be familiar stuff to Justice Bradley, but Justice Kennedy also wrote about “the bond of love the mother has for her child,” suggesting that any true woman would suffer.
I don’t deny that some women feel regret as well as relief after an abortion. More than 30 million American women have had abortions since Roe v. Wade. Each unwanted pregnancy comes with its own story of a failed contraceptive or failed relationship, of an economic or a health crisis.
Some women do indeed feel coerced by men or by parents. Surely thousands have suffered from the crisis they faced and the decision they had to make.
But to this range of individual dilemmas, the pro life argument offers only one solution: Criminalize abortion. To this range of life stories, it offers only one kind of “help”: Take the decision out of her hands. Now their argument has been folded into a Supreme Court decision. As Yale Law School’s Reva Siegel said, “The opinion imagines that the state knows better than women what they really want and need in matters of motherhood.”
It’s no wonder that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the only woman on the court and a lawyer who made her name overturning laws based on stereotypes, chided Kennedy for reverting to those stereotypes. She reminded him how far the court had come in defending a woman’s right to shape her own destiny.
I don’t believe that Justice Kennedy is the clone of Justice Bradley. In other abortion and gay rights cases, he’s agreed that the court’s obligation is “to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.” But this time he’s stuck his toe into some very treacherous waters.
As Siegel said, “If they regulate all women on the assumption that they don’t know their own interests, that they lack the ability to make their own decisions, we’re back in the 19th century.”
It’s amazing how quickly the current can shift and the waters flow — backward.
Ellen Goodman’s e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com. Â
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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young women don’t know the choices they would face if abortion were totally illegal. women who are old enough to know are beyond the age of pregnancy (except for the ones who want to bear their children’s fetuses). so let the young read history to learn what they are losing.
meanwhile, mexico city just legalized abortion for the first trimester.
i used to carry a sign that said KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY. i still feel that way.
Keep your misinformation out of my personal choices. Men aren’t the ones who have to be pregnant, they have no real concept of what being a woman is like. Therefore they have no right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body.
The Supreme Boy’s club distills the woman’s perspective on abortion down to a line from “Gone with the Wind.”
“I don’t know nuthing ’bout birthin’ no babies, miz Scarlet”
The government nor the courts should be allowed in my bedroom, in my womb, in my doctor’s office, or on my deathbed. Get out of my personal life!!! What I do or decide in any of those places is none of their damn business!!!
I wish these guys cared as much for people who are already born as they do for fetuses.
I think a lot of them just hate women. They think all women secretly want to murder their children. That having kids is a nuisance to them, and that they just want to screw around with reckless abandon and have as many abortions as possible.
Making abortion illegal is a failure to give women credit.
They also want to keep women barefoot and pregnant. They know that abstinence programs don’t work against preventing unplanned pregancies, but they push for them anyway. At the same time, people like this want sex to be mystified. It’s all just a plan to set women back. They’re hoping that all of these young girls will get pregnant and birth children. What better way to hinder the upward mobility of women? They want everyone born into poverty to die in poverty.
I think if we could impregnate the supreme court, the decision would be reversed. I mean, I just imagine being pregnant (and i’m a man btw), and no way am I letting anyone decide for me what i’m gonna do about it!
The only reason why regulation of any abortion procedure would be acceptable is if women (and girls) were not human beings, but unstable or immoral creatures who had to be controlled by another gender entirely. When even the health of the woman is deemed irrelevant, it becomes truly disturbing.
Abortion should be allowed in all cases. Women must be unapologetic about abortion rights. Instead, they hesitate when they see an image of a fetus or an infant. No government should be able to force a person to become a parent against their will.
“I think if we could impregnate the supreme court, the decision would be reversed. I mean, I just imagine being pregnant (and i’m a man btw), and no way am I letting anyone decide for me what i’m gonna do about it!”
As a man that ALREADY IS the case in that you are legally held responsible for the pregnancy and subsequent child, whether you wanted it or not.
S
Every time abortion comes up I remember a “framing the argument quote”
” If you don’t approve of abortion, don’t have one ”
I would grant the right to make a decision on any abortion to anyone that would take personal and financial responsibility for the Mother and child for their lifetime. Personally I have always felt that if you make the choice you carry the responsibility.
I simply can’t understand how anyone can feel they should make a personal decision for other people based on their own prejudice or beliefs.
lf the embryo is considered a life before birth then why is it not considered a dependent for tax puposes until after birth.
I have three children and there are days when I regret my decision to become a mother.
God bless you Judy, l had two moms a birth mother and my wife´s mom and miss them both, but l am sure they had days when they had thier doubts, hang in there.
First, marylou must be of “a certain age” as am I, because her point is well taken.
Just as the word “feminism” is no longer used because, I have heard, “feminism” is no longer necessary, it means that the memories of “pre-feminism” are being lost. I came of age during that revolution, and as a male, a liberal, and a logical person was proud to be a “feminist”. My belief that women should not be paid 70 cents to every dollar a man makes is unshakable, that wmone do not belong in management, that women cannot make the “hard choices” do the “tough negotiating” that men can. The paternalistic view that only men can make decisions of a magnitude such as abortion is an abomination. One, we don’t carry babies and the responsibility that goes with bringing new life into the world and two, what makes us better able to make decisions, a penis?
I shudder as I watch girls/women outwardly revert to the “pre” days. I cringe when I read the studies showing that early on girls in school show more acumen than boys, until about puberty, and then decide to become “dumb”. (My wife, a teacher in middle school says these articles are true, horrors!)
Why? Has the feminist message been so lost and seen as such a threat that we are culturally inventing a dumbed down version of females so that alpha males can run the world?
I daresay that if these paternalistic men had to raise the children that they are trying to deny women of decision not to bring the child into the world, if they were FORCED to NO MATTER WHAT-WITHOUT EXCEPTION, you would see the paternalistic man disappear.
I have watched my wife as we have raised our grown sons, and it is a harder job than any I have ever had.
In true Jonathan Swift terms, since women are incapable of making decisions (implicit in the “pro-life” recent Supreme Court decision) then I propose the following:
After a woman you have impregnated is forced to bear your child, then you will give up your career, the one you went to school for, the one your struggled to climb the ladder for and you, sir, will stay home with the baby. [This is not a voluntary thing, as with the current stay-at-home dads (I admire them), but a mandatory thing for EVERY MAN in the country.] No choice here: the law.
After all since we can’t trust women to make proper decisions during the period of “pre-birth” then it follows we men cannot allow women to make decisions once this new human being is here.
There you have it.
And what does this lead to: yep, a workforce made up…c’mon you know where this is going…mostly women, who will then tell men (as men have been telling them for years) that they are only worth 70 cents to every dollar she earns.
Is the argument so ridiculous? You decide
I believe in a simple phrase, “Your rights end at my nose.” In the case of anti-abortion legislation, the rights of the United States to make laws that affect a woman’s body violates this simple rule. The U.S. and I and everyone else, except the women involved in this, have no right to tell her, ultimately, what to do. In the end, responsible people, be they men or women, must take the responsibility for their own actions.
Billy Joel: “Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.”
OOPS I left a word out in paragraph Two:
My belief that women should not be paid 70 cents to every dollar a man makes is unshakable, that women do not belong in management, that women cannot make the “hard choices” do the “tough negotiating” that men can is bullshit.
The problem with “feminism” these days is that it has been redefined by the media. Young girls are being programmed by popular culture into believing that feminism just means sexual freedom. The most important thing is to be beautiful, and brains are unattractive. The consequences of making role models out of people like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton is that it distorts a young girl’s self awareness, when it appears that the only way to get ahead is through sex appeal.
Women have only been able to vote since 1920. Equal pay for equal work, and anti-discrimination laws have been passed. This country has come a long way in less than a century.
We’ve seen women become doctors, lawyers, CEOs. Both of my state’s Senators are female (ME). These are the kind of role models young women need.
But ever since Roe v. Wade, the entire movement has pretty much collapsed. Feminism’s only major issue anymore is abortion rights. And it’s been a constant battle just to beat back the hordes of Christo-Fascists with their fake morality and “family values,” whose idea of “family” begins with conception and ends at birth.
But winning the abortion argument is only a stepping stone to their real agenda, returning a woman’s status back to being a man’s property. Unless we can reframe this debate, we’ll never win the argument.
If abortion is finally made illegal (with 5 Catholic males on the Supreme court it probably will, sooner or later), it will be only the first right taken away from women. That could end up being a good thing, in the long run, because it might be the only way to revitalize the women’s movement again. Until then, it’s off to the mall.
I thought the problem with feminism is that it is equated with being a lesbian or unattractive or not interested with sex at all. If this view has been there all the way through or only is just reappearing now, I don’t know, as I’m too young to have been around since the start. Therefore, a whole different outlook would be needed to show feminism in a better light.
Jon0113 unfortuantely proves my point, and it is unfortuante. The Women’s Movement of the 60′ and 70’s from a male’s perspective had nothing to do with lesbians, per se, nor “unattractive” women, per se. It is unfortunate that the real meaning of the fight has been so distoretd.
What I saw women talking about and demanding had nothing to do with whom they slept or who stared back in the mirror. It was, and should continue to be, about being accepted as people with all equal rights and resposnsibilities as men. Period.
Those other issues have poisoned the new mind set as sure as the term “hippie” has been simplified to mean “sex, drugs and rock n roll”, and “liberal” is an epithet. All of these have come about because the “youngins” have not been educated by our generation. Shame on us! -
Jon0113, please read, if nothing else two books that come to this male mind immediatley, [and the women on this thread will add more]: “The Feminine Mystique” and “Our Bodies, Our Selves”, they may send you on your way to learn what your mothers, older aunts and cousins did for you.