Abstract
Ironic freedom critique RC, the subject of this chapter, includes familiar feminist responses to liberal positions on reproductive choice and fertility control. RC1 predicts that guaranteeing women’s reproductive choice will deprive them of sexual choice. This argument has been made by liberals, conservatives, radicals, and people at every point on the reproductive choice spectrum. Supporters of RC1 include radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon and self-styled “prolife feminists.”1 The latter oppose abortion on demand; the former do not. RC2 predicts that if means of fertility control are legal and available, women will have to use them. RC3 makes a similar argument with respect to surrogate motherhood.2
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Notes
See Catharine A. MacKinnon. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 184–94;
Judith A. Baer, Our Lives before the Law: Constructing a Feminist Jurisprudence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 135–39;
Rachel MacNair, Mary Krane Derr, and Linda Naranjo-Huebl, Pro-Life Feminism: Yesterday and Today, 2nd expanded ed. (Kansas City, MO: Feminism and Nonviolence Studies Association, 2005).
Sandra G. Boardman and Glenn Frankel, “Over 7,500 Sterilized in Virginia,” Washington Post, February 23, 1980, A1, A20;
Frank Bowe, Rehabilitating America: Toward Independence for Disabled and Elderly People (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 65–70.
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927). See also William B. Gould, “Some Reflections on Fifty Years of the National Labor Relations Act: The Need for Labor Board and Labor Law Reform,” Stanford Law Review 38 (1985): 937.
Dick Grosboll, “Sterilization Abuse: Current State of the Law and Remedies for Abuse,” Golden Gate University Law Review 10 (1980): 1147; Roberts, Killing.
Judith A. Baer, ed., A Historical and Multicultural Encyclopedia of Female Reproductive Rights in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002b), 173–85. My students in Women and the Law don’t believe me, either. Check it out.
Marge Piercy, Small Changes (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1973), 412.
Claudia Dreifus, Woman’s Fate: Raps from a Feminist Consciousness-Raising Group (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), 196. Consciousness-raising is a practice similar to the “Speak Bitterness” sessions in post-Revolutionary China. Second-wave feminists formed discussion groups in which they discussed the ways in which they were oppressed. Dreifus’s group used the original version developed by Kathie Sarachild, a member of Redstockings, a New York–based radical feminist organization. The National Organization for women developed a second model in the 1980s.
Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 164, 168; emphasis supplied.
Talmud, Ketubot 61b, Eruvin 100b. These texts articulate the theory; they are silent about how these reciprocal rights and duties have worked out in practice. A newspaper article quoted an Orthodox Jewish woman who was told before her marriage in 2006 that intercourse was “horrible” and “painful.” Debra Nussbaum Cohen, “Among Orthodox Jews, More Openness about Sexuality,” New York Times, May 3, 2008.
Linda Gordon, “Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists Did Not Support Birth Control and Twentieth-Century Feminists Do: Feminism, Reproduction, and the Family,” Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982), 40–53, 44. Nineteenth-century British feminists shared these concerns;
Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (New York: New Press, 1995), chap. 5.
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (New York: Dutton, 1869), 248.
See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1962);
Susan Lydon, “The Politics of Orgasm,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 197–205;
Naomi Weisstein, “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, 205–20;
Anne Koedt, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (Boston: New England Free Press, 1970);
Marie N. Robinson, The Power of Sexual Surrender (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).
Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 202.
Albert Ellis, Sex without Guilt for the 21st Century (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2008), 109. See also Sex without Guilt (New York: Hillman, 1958).
Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking (New York: Crown, 1972), and More Joy: A Lovemaking Companion to The Joy of Sex (New York: Crown, 1974). The latest edition of The Joy of Sex was published in 2009, almost twenty years after the author’s death. For examples of marriage manuals,
see Eustace Chesser, Love without Fear (New York: Signet, 1958);
John E. Eichenlaub, The Marriage Art (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961);
Albert Ellis, Sex without Guilt (New York: Hillman, 1958). For an alternative interpretation,
see Sheila Jeffreys, Anti-Climax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1990).
Alesha E. Doan and Jean Catherine Williams, The Politics of Virginity: Abstinence in Sex Education (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).
Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 3.
R. Z. Sheppard, “Peter Pantheism” (Review of Charles Reich, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef), Time, November 22, 1976. How many philosophers would be discredited by this criterion?
Robin Marantz Henig, “Not So Elementary, Dr. Watson” (Review of Brenda Maddox, The Dark Lady of DNA), New York Times Book Review, September 29, 2002.
Roni Caryn Rabin, “Condom Use Is Highest for Young, Study Finds,” New York Times, October 4, 2010.
Marlo Thomas, Growing up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (New York: Hyperion, 2010), 38.
See, for example, Patricia A. Cain, “Feminist Jurisprudence: Grounding the Theories,” in Feminist Legal Theory, ed. Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 263–80.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 103.
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009), 114.
Barbara Seaman, Free and Female (New York: Coward-McCann and Geoghegan, 1972), 256–63.
Barbara Seaman, The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth (New York: Hyperion, 2003). See also Seaman, Free and Female, 241–63;
Lucinda Cisler, “Unfinished Business: Birth Control and Women’s Liberation,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 245–82;
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 308–18.
Gina Kolata, “The Sad Legacy of the Dalkon Shield.” New York Times, December 6, 1987.
Barbara Seaman, The Doctors’ Case against the Pill, rev. ed. (New York: Dell, 1979), 11.
J. F. Annegers, “Patterns of Oral Contraceptive Use in the United States,” British Journal of Rheumatology 28, Supp. I (1989): 48–50;
Department of Health and Human Services, Health, United States, 2009 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2009), Table 15;
Linda J. Piccinino and William D. Mosher, “Trends in Contraceptive Use in the United States: 1982–1995,” Family Planning Perspectives 30 (1998): 4–10, 46. DHS reported that 12 percent of women used condoms in 1982; Piccinino and Mosher’s figure was 15 percent. Both studies arrived at 24 percent for 2002.
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A New Edition for a New Era (New York: Touchstone, 2003), 326.
Anne Finger, “Claiming All of Our Bodies: Reproductive Rights and Disability,” in With the Power of Each Breath: A Disabled Women’s Anthology, ed. Susan E. Browne, Debra Connors, and Nanci Stern (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1985), 301.
Lisa Blumberg, “Eugenics and Reproductive Choice,” in The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fifteen Years of The Disability Rag, ed. Barrett Shaw (Louisville: Advocado Press, 1994), 222.
Martha Beck, Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic (New York: Times Books, 1999), 206. See also 125–36, 217–19.
Rachel Adams, “Narrative’s Medicine,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 2011, B20.
Bauer, Patricia E., “The Abortion Debate No One Wants to Have,” Washington Post, October 18, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/17/AR2005101701311.html, accessed March 16, 2011.
EUROCAT, “Surveillance of Congenital Abnormalities in Europe, 1980–1999,” 2002, http://www.eurocat-network.eu/content/EUROCAT-Report-8-Part-1.pdf, accessed April 4, 2013; Britt et al., “Determinants of Parental Decisions after the Prenatal Diagnosis of Down Syndrome: Bringing in Context,” American Journal of Medical Genetics 93 (1999): 410–16;
Mansfield et al., “Termination Rates after Prenatal Diagnosis of Down Syndrome, Spina Bifida, Anencephaly, and Turner and Klinefelter Syndromes: A Systematic Literature Review,” Prenatal Diagnosis 19 (1999): 808–12. These reports are meta-analyses of studies based on aggregate data. They are not as recent as I would wish. However, they have been widely cited and are accepted as accurate.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1985).
In re Baby M, 217 N.J. Super. 313 (1987); In the Matter of Baby M, 109 N.J. 396, 537 A.2d 1227 (N.J. 1988); Munoz v. Haro, 572834 San Diego Superior Court (1986); Johnson v. Calvert, 5 Cal. 4th 84, 851 P.2d 776 (1993); Judith A. Baer, Women in American Law: The Struggle toward Equality from the New Deal to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2002).
Gina Barton, “Surrogacy Laws Vary by State,” Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, August 7, 2012, http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/surrogacy-laws-vary-by-state-co65rvg-165348756.html, accessed February 8, 2013.
Katha Pollitt, “The Strange Case of Baby M,” The Nation, January 1, 1998, http://www.thenation.com/doc/19870523/19870523 pollitt, accessed November 11, 2012.
I encourage readers to do their own searches. I recommend five sites: http://www.surromomsonline.com; http://www.fertilitystories.com/surrogacy.htm; http://www.parenting.com/gallery/surrogate-mother; http://www.conceiveabilities.com/surrogate_story.htm; and http://www.babble.com/pregnancy/be-a-surrogate-mother-surrogacy-story, all accessed February 25, 2013. For excerpts from surromomsonline, see Judith A. Baer and Leslie Friedman Goldstein, eds., The Constitutional and Legal Rights of Women, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 487. Since we were unable to contact any of the people quoted for permission to reprint, the quotations were truncated to comply with copyright regulations. The more recent websites do not include contact information, so I have quoted cautiously.
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Baer, J.A. (2013). Whose Right? Whose Duty?. In: Ironic Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031006_5
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