By Pat Brewer
"President George Bush has urged alternatives to abortion, such as adoption, and said that the easy availability of abortions in the United States challenged the basic value Americans placed on life. He urged Americans to turn to 'loving alternatives'."
This item was published in the January 15 Sydney Morning Herald. The next day George Bush unleashed a bombing attack of unprecedented violence against a Third World country. Five weeks later, when the possibility of a negotiated settlement was becoming a reality, Bush launched his ground offensive. So much for loving alternatives and the basic value he places on life!
It's no accident that Bush's sanctimonious mouthing should come in such close proximity to a wholesale slaughter. Both are expressions of the right to exploit, to control, to discriminate and to impose constraints on others, to guarantee and ensure the material advantage of a minority.
These material interests are not usually as nakedly expressed as they were over the US need to control the oil of the Gulf. Usually they're covered by the doublespeak of morality: justice, peace, democracy, the sanctity of life, the appeal to some abstract "right" which ignores the living reality for the majority.
Self-monitoring victims
The ideological thrust of this right-wing morality is to impose on the victims a self-monitoring justification of their victimisation. Struggles to achieve more autonomy, greater democratic control over social, economic and political processes, self-determination threaten to expose the ideological contradictions and the material reality of greed and exploitation that the doublespeak tries to obscure and confuse.
Nowhere is this more true than in gender oppression. Women's second-class status has been buttressed ideologically by church, state, pseudo-science and popular culture to mask the enormous material input that their labour in the home and in the workplace makes to the profits of a tiny elite.
Discrimination in production results in unequal rates of pay, under- and unemployment, high occupational gender segregation reinforced by bias in education, job training and promotional opportunities — all of which adds up to a massive undervaluation of women's work.
Add to this the free social labour that women perform in the home in maintaining the individual family unit and filling the gaps as government-funded social welfare and education services are slashed. If a real costing were made of the social reproduction predominantly based on women's labour, the obscene profits of the capitalist elite would be a lot slimmer and we'd see a variety of alternatives being established. Full economic independence and worth for women goes hand in hand with women's right to make their own choices about their fertility. Autonomy, independence and choice in production and reproduction are basic.
Suppressing real choice
This is the material context for the moralist doublespeak of the likes of Fred Nile and George Bush. When Bush says there are too many abortions, he's talking about too many legal abortions. He knows that outlawing abortions from safe, hygienic medical facilities has not and will not get rid of the need for abortion. It just means that many thousands of women will be driven to seek illegal abortion at the price of pain and suffering, humiliation, mutilation and death.
George's "loving alternatives" don't include full access to information about sexuality, contraception, venereal disease, AIDS in secondary schools and clinics. He doesn't promote a range of cheap or free contraceptive devices and methods and an ongoing financial commitment to research into safer and cheaper alternatives. Neither does he offer real financial security to women who do wish to bear children without material hardship.
What the morally righteous and religious fundamentalists obscure with their talk of human dignity and the sanctity of life is their dedication to maintaining discrimination against and exploitation of women — their control over women's life choices.
Because they express this repressive ideology as "rights" and because this echoes the class exploitation of working people in terms of "freedom of choice" and the right of capital to exploit and control, a strand of the feminist movement has begun to question the validity of the notion of rights and choices, seeing these as some form of ideological diversion. They therefore reject the struggle to extend choices and the fight for access to rights.
But such a position validates the reactionary content of the "rights" espoused by the right-wing absolutists. It allows them to get away with the doublespeak.
Choices and rights aren't abstract. They are located in a range of social, economic and political relationships. Real exercise of rights is based on access to information, services and alternatives within reasonable economic parameters. That's why the doublespeakers are so anxious to confuse the issue of women's rights, and why we can't allow them to succeed.