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QueasySeptember 25, 2008 I know that feminism is continuously in process, that much has been lost from only 30 years ago and even more from 90 and 140 years ago so we have to keep doubling back to pick up the dropped stitches, but I still get exasperated with these 21st-century "eureka!" discoveries of stuff that was "feminism as usual" for many of us in the 1970s and 1980s. I just read an interview with Jennifer Baumgardner, whose new book, Abortion & Life, goes back to basics: the first-person stories of women who have had abortions. As Muriel Rukeyser wrote in "The Speed of Darkness": "The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms." Stories were the essence of second wave feminism, and the further we've strayed from the stories, the more ossified feminism has become. When you're telling and, especially, listening to stories, it's so much harder to take refuge in labels and to draw political lines based on those labels. When Roe v. Wade came down, I was in college. I remember campaigning for some student government office or another and being asked what I thought of abortion. I said (something like) it makes me queasy, but I think it should be up to a woman whether she has one or not. The guy who asked the question grinned and said, "Right answer." My birth control method (misterectomy) proved 100% reliable and I've never been raped (knock on wood), so I never had to decide whether or not to have an abortion. Had I become pregnant, I'm almost certain I would have had an abortion: motherhood was never one of my aspirations, and whatever maternal instinct I've got manifests only in the presence of puppies. ;-) But the issue still makes me a little queasy, especially when some feminists act as if queasiness is a betrayal of the cause and should therefore not be acknowledged even in private. Can a woman be anti-abortion and a feminist at the same time? Yes. Can a woman be anti-choice and a feminist at the same time? No, I don't think so. I do understand the dilemma: If one holds strong moral/ethical convictions about a life-or-death issue (and this is a life-or-death issue), one may not be willing to take a relativist approach to it. But feminism is at its very essence about self-determination for women, and the right to make our own choices means we get to make our own mistakes, even on (perhaps especially on) issues of life-or-death importance -- and to live with and work out the consequences as best we can. To be anti-choice is to say that women aren't capable of making such choices; are incapable, in other words, of being entrusted with self-determination. And that, as I see it, is anti-feminist. The more I think about it, the more I think that queasiness is a good thing. Queasiness grows in the gray area between black and white. Queasiness is the mother of humility and tolerance and diversity. Plenty of people try to stomp on their own queasiness, and in the process they make terrible mistakes. (I'm thinking of the guys who killed Matthew Shepard.) Be good to your queasiness. Let it grow.
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