MOTHERHOOD VS. CITIZENSHIP? That was the dichotomy posed by a couple of speakers at the panel on what Roe v. Wade should have said. (Description of discussion here.) It was both the most interesting and the most troubling thing said by the panel. I’m not sure I fully understood it; as far as I could tell, the claim was that abortion restrictions violate the Constitution because motherhood makes it impossible for women to participate as citizens, thus unless women can choose to be or not be mothers via abortion, we can’t be considered full citizens. I think this argument–assuming I’m even close to getting its point–is deeply dangerous for a lot of reasons. One basic fact about rhetoric is that it generally escapes its intended purposes–just look at “All men are created equal.” And if this rhetoric ever escapes from its ivory cage, I think its crafters will regret the consequences.

First, the rhetoric requires motherhood to be cast in unrealistically negative terms. Mothers, we were told, don’t have time to read the newspaper or become informed about political life. (I would love to see the expression on my mom’s face if anyone tried that line on her!) We were not told about ways in which motherhood could make women more informed–about human nature, about the stakes of political arguments. Motherhood was all negative and no positive. This relegation of mothers to the domestic sphere is–need I remind anyone?–a basic claim against women’s suffrage, and against women’s participation in political and public life.

Second, as Mommentary noted when I spoke with her about this, if you ask most American women to choose between motherhood and citizenship it is unlikely that citizenship will win. So perhaps it’s better not to force the choice, no?

The motherhood vs. citizenship dichotomy is ultimately a more pungent way of framing the claim that abortion is necessary to make women equal to men. To this claim I’ll give three overly-brief responses, three ways of making the same point; that’s all I have time for. 1) Until men can get pregnant, women and men will not be equal in the way that this framing assumes. The emotional, spiritual, and physical consequences of deciding between abortion and birth will fall upon the woman, still, often in ways that deeply hurt her. The kind of equality that this framing of the issue desires is impossible. (And has been, in my view aptly, described as making women equal by making us men–adapting women to a man-made world rather than adapting that world to women.)

2) “Sure, you can be equal! All you have to do is agree to kill your children.” Um, right. This would seem to avoid some fairly basic questions about the nature and relative value of equality–is this equality? If so, is it worth it?

3) Even if you don’t believe that abortion kills a child (and since it takes an individual human life, I’m not sure how you get around that, but whatever), I think Frederica Mathewes-Green sums up the problem with the abortion-for-equality argument by asking, “Is any other oppressed or marginalized group required to have surgery in order to participate in American life?”