7/23/2023 0 Comments Naomi wolf naked![]() What if we were to truly respectfully listen to this woman who began her political life as, in her words, just "some little old Texas girl who got in trouble." We would have to hear this: perhaps Norma McCorvey actually had a revelation that she could no longer live as the symbol of a belief system she increasingly repudiated. To me, the first commandment of real feminism is: when in doubt, listen to women. Low self-esteem, a history of substance abuse, ignorance-these and other personal weaknesses explained her turnaround. The old dear - first she was a chesspiece for the pro-choice movement ("just, some anonymous person who suddenly emerges," in the words of one NOW member) and then a codependent of the Bible-thumpers. This dismissive (and, not incidentally, sexist and classist) interpretation was so highly colored by subjective impressions offered up by the very institutions that define objectivity that it bore all the hallmarks of an exculpatory cultural myth: poor Norma - she just needed stroking. Her change of heart about abortion was relentlessly "explained away" as having everything to do with the girlish motivations of insecurity, fickleness and the need for attention, and little to do with any actual moral agency. What happened to Norma McCorvey? To judge by her characterization in the elite media and by some prominent pro-choice feminists, nothing very important. Henry Foster was brave enough to call it: "a failure."Īny doubt that our current pro-choice rhetoric leads to disaster should be dispelled by the famous recent defection of the woman who had been Jane Roe. In the following pages, I will argue for a radical shift in the pro-choice movement's rhetoric and consciousness about abortion: I still maintain that we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death that there are degrees of culpability, judgement and responsibility involved in the decision to abort a pregnancy that the best understanding of feminism involves holding women as well as men to the responsibilities that are inseparable from their rights and that we need to be strong enough to acknowledge that this country's high rate of abortion - which ends more than a quarter of all pregnancies - can only be rightly understood as what Dr. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life. Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. Their ethical allegiances are then addressed by the pro-life movement, which is willing to speak about good and evil.īut we are also in danger of losing something more important than votes we stand in jeopardy of losing what can only be called our souls. By refusing to look at abortion within a moral framework, we lose the millions of Americans who want to support abortion as a legal right but still need to condemn it as a moral iniquity. First of all, such a position causes us to lose political ground. The effects of this abandonment can be measured in two ways. The movement's abandonment of what Americans have always, and rightly demanded of their movements - an ethical core - and its reliance instead on a political rhetoric in which the fetus means nothing are proving fatal. It has ceded the language of right and wrong to abortion foes. But, to its own ethical and political detriment, the pro-choice movement has relinquished the moral frame around the issue of abortion. And yet: her words are exactly the words to which the pro-choice movement is not listening.Īt its best, feminism defends its moral high ground by being simply faithful to the truth: to women's real-life experiences. If there were a core constituent of the movement to secure abortion rights, Clare would be it. Clare is exactly the kind of person for whom being pro-choice is an unshakeable conviction. They are the words of a Cornell-educated, urban-dwelling Democratic-voting 40-year-old cardiologist. These are not the words of a benighted, superstition-ridden teenager lost in America's cultural backwaters. But you know the Greek myths when you kill a relative you are pursued by furies? For months, it was as if baby furies were pursuing me. I had an abortion when I was a single mother and my daughter was 2 years old. NAOMI WOLF is the author of Fire with Fire: The New, Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century (Ballantine).
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