OxBlog

# Posted 1:13 AM by Ariel David Adesnik

FEMINIST CAT FIGHT ON MEET THE PRESS: Let no one say that OxBlog objectifies women! Heck, I'm a feminist myself. I believe in straight-up equality before the law. I reject the incoherent nonsense of NARAL, NOW and other far-left organizations that claim to speak for the women of America.

Anyhow, Tim Russert decided to have some fun this morning by having Kate Michelman -- president of NARAL for 18 years -- on at the same time as the National Review's resident radical feminist-basher Kate O'Beirne. Sadly, it turned out to be a rather tame affair. However, it did produce this classic bit of Orwellian doubletalk from Michelman:

MR. RUSSERT: Can you be a pro-life, pro-anti-abortion rights feminist?

MS. MICHELMAN: You can be a feminist and oppose the act of abortion on moral and ethical, religious, on personal grounds; absolutely can be. And, in fact, many people who are pro-choice in terms of their beliefs that the policies of this nation should respect the diversity of views on these issues related to pregnancy and childbearing, abortion, and reproductive matters, that there is a diversity of views and they are informed by one’s values, as they are mine. My personal values informed my decision about abortion.

But you can be absolutely anti-abortion, if you will, and pro-choice; believing that women ultimately, not the government, not Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, but women themselves must determine the course of their lives, and central to that determining the course of their lives is determining when and under what circumstances they will become mothers. Because the thing that most women want is to be successful at mothering. And the first ingredient is being able to determine when that time is right and not being forced by the government and by politicians or by judges to bear a child under circumstances of one—not of one’s choosing. So I...

MS. O’BEIRNE: Well, as Kate just explained, you cannot believe that there ought to be legal protections for the unborn and not be read out of the modern women’s movement.

Michelman should just admit that NARAL won't let you be a feminist if you're against Roe v. Wade. All that spin won't convince anyone that she and her organization are even remotely centrist. But it may convince them that NARAL & co. can't be trusted.

(13) opinions -- Add your opinion

Comments:

Explain: you can, says Ms. M., opposed to abortion but a feminist as long as you support the right to have an abortion. How is this any different, in principle, from supporting drug legalization but personally find drug use and abhorrent?

I think she's wrong, i.e., that feminism doesn't require a pro-choice position, but that's an entirely different matter.

# posted by

Anonymous : 2:20 AM

Editorial note: should be "finding drug use abhorrent?"

# posted by

Anonymous : 2:21 AM

To be more blunt: when verbal inelegance becomes grounds for calling someone "Orwellian" than, well, we've pretty much torn up rendered that adjective meaningless.

# posted by

Anonymous : 2:23 AM

Hello David,

On the contrary, I fail to see how you can both be a feminist and also believe that all women should have to carry any pregnancy to term whether they want to or not. It's perfectly congruent to believe (as do many religious women of my acquaintance) that abortion is not an option they would choose for themselves, but that they believe that it should be available.

Michelman should just admit that NARAL won't let you be a feminist if you're against Roe v. Wade.
Well, yeah: they are the National Abortion Rights Action League, after all, of course supporting the right to access a legal safe abortion should be their criteria.

# posted by

Anonymous : 5:42 AM

It makes sense for NARAL to demand that its members support Roe v. Wade, but I don't think they can say that you're not a feminist if you don't share their support for legal abortion. It's precisely this sort of exclusionary approach that has helped feminism become a synonym for liberal politics rather than simple equality.

With regard to being Orwellian, Ms. Michelman obviously has nothing on Stalin, but my sense is that she deliberately sought to obscure the issue by insisting you can be anti-abortion and a feminist and then disingenuously taking that back by saying that a feminist can be opposed to everything about abortion...except the right to have one.

# posted by

Ariel David Adesnik : 9:39 AM

Why is there necessarily a virtue in being 'remotely centrist'???

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:40 AM

"It makes sense for NARAL to demand that its members support Roe v. Wade, but I don't think they can say that you're not a feminist if you don't share their support for legal abortion"

why wouldnt it make sense, rhetorically, for NARAL to say you need to agree with them to be feminist? Kinda like Norquist saying you need to be pro tax cuts to be conservative, Ledeen saying you need to be tough on the mideast, etc. Its the nature of special interests to claim their issue is definitive for the larger movement of which they are a part.

# posted by

Anonymous : 3:29 PM

Sounds like a typical politician/activist/political operative to me. She gets asked a question that she doesn't want to answer, so she talks around it, trying to make her side sound good while including a couple talking points. In this case, she doesn't want to say whether her organization could consider a person who is against abortion rights to be a feminist in good standing. If she says "no" then that sounds exclusionary and leaves her open to attack, and if she says "yes" then she's minimizing the importance of her organization's cause and potentially underming the feminist defense of legal abortion (and alienating the adherents to that position). So she just says that a person who is against abortion can be a feminist in good standing, and that being against abortion is not the same as being against abortion rights, both of which are true. "Against abortion" is an issue of what you would do in your own life or what you would advise other people to do; "against abortion rights" means changing the law to make abortion a crime.

# posted by

Blar : 6:07 PM

Even by your (somewhat narrow) definition of feminism as equality before the law it's illogical to assume that you can be a feminist and be against the right to have an abortion. Compelling a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will presumes that the presense of a fetus automatically takes away the woman’s right to control what’s happening in her own body, or to put it in a different way, takes away her right to consent - or not - to the use of her body as life support for another organism. If men were compelled to, say, donate their bone marrow to someone who would die without a transplant against their will then men and women would be equal before the law because by that law your right to own your body can be overriden by someone else’s right to live if their ability to survive depends on using your body (or organs, or bodily functions) in some way. If only women are subject to this approach, where’s the equality?

Sure, biologically only women can become pregnant so there can’t be an exact equivalent for men, but it doesn’t change the fact that you can’t be forced to even donate blood against your will; why is it ok to force a woman to be an incubator?

# posted by

Anonymous : 7:54 PM

Yo, you're begging the question, cs. If you have rights before you're born, then it's no less libertarian to be anti-abortion than it is to be anti-whatever else takes away someone else's rights. It's not un-libertarian to support laws against abuse, or theft, or murder, etc., is it? Same thing for feminists -- there's that old poster, an ultrasound image, saying: "Supporting all women's rights, including hers." Only if you proceed from the position that there are no rights before birth does it become completely obvious that it's un-libertarian and un-feminist to oppose abortion.

# posted by

Anonymous : 8:50 PM

I just got an e-mail from a fellow blogger who objected to the term "cat fight" as an outdated and ridiculous vestige of the bad old days. I responded as follows:

"i had hoped that my ostentatiously gratuitious use of the phrase would be taken as ironic. combined with my self-identification as a feminist, the use of the term cat fight was subtly intended as a signal that I have little patience for speech codes."

# posted by

Ariel David Adesnik : 9:41 AM

No, Charlie Szrom, it’s you who obscures the argument when you say that pro-life individuals don’t wish to force women to become incubators. Do you lose your right to medical help for your broken leg if you break your leg as a result of a car accident? After all, by engaging in driving you accepted the (relatively high) risk of having an accident, didn’t you? The fact that a condition was caused by your action normally doesn’t deprive you of your right to affect the outcome of that condition. By taking away a woman’s option to terminate the pregnancy, if that’s what she wants to do, you effectively force her to become an incubator against her will.

For those who believe in rights for fetuses: the problem is, you accord more rights to preborn than to postborn. Does an infant have a right to a sliver of his father’s liver if that infant has a life-threatening condition that can only be treated by a liver transplant and the father is the only match? Is it acceptable to force said father by law to donate a piece of his liver if he refuses? After all, the infant has the right to live and it surely is more important than the “inconvenience” of having an operation for the father. Nobody seriously believes that already-born individuals have the right to life that overrides other people’s bodily autonomy. Why should preborn individuals be accorded such absolute right?

# posted by

Anonymous : 12:34 PM

anonymous, by your logic, post-natal child abandonment, abuse, and neglect would be okay. So, I'm not going to bother with the first part of your post.

"Does an infant have a right to a sliver of his father’s liver if that infant has a life-threatening condition that can only be treated by a liver transplant and the father is the only match?"

Yes, since the father brought that infant into the world vulnerable - he is required to take care of his infant until the age of majority.

Come on, give me something harder!

" Is it acceptable to force said father by law to donate a piece of his liver if he refuses?"

In the same way as it is acceptable to force fathers by law to pay child support, yes.

"Nobody seriously believes that already-born individuals have the right to life that overrides other people’s bodily autonomy."

Bodily autonomy is a fancy way of saying property rights over one's body. I find that a disingenuous argument from leftists personally (not assuming you're one) since they - on principle - don't believe in private property rights at all (and even if they do, only when the state dictates it).

But...I believe that if you put somebody in a position of physical vulnerability (say, hitting a pedestrian while drunk driving, or somehow placing somebody in a position where they would die without support), that you should take responsibility for it. Drunk driver should pay the medical bills until the person gets better, rescue somebody that you put in harm's way, etc.

So along the same lines, yes, a parent's 'bodily autonomy' should be sacrificed for a child that they choose to place under their care, whether born or unborn.

*yawn*

# posted by

Anonymous : 12:28 AM