[This] political economy of death is the precondition for the emergence of “choice” as the holy grail of our moral culture. It’s neither coincidental nor unironical that the word so decisive in the legitimation of corporate hegemony is also pivotal to the defense of abortion. First, both abortion and corporate capitalism are justified in the liberal individualist language of self-ownership and autonomous will. Second, the language of choice obscures and even nullifies the moral substance of the choices made. And third, the alacrity with which “choice” is now invoked is, I suspect, an indication of how meaningless — and therefore how few –our choices have really become. Abortion becomes more conceivable as a practice, not only when sex is utterly divorced from pregnancy, but when the organization of work hampers or precludes the reproductive practices of sex, birth, and child-rearing. If we are going to combat abortion, then I would suggest that we appropriate and transform the language of choice, and argue that abortion is the hallmark of a culture that forces everything to pivot around the accumulation of capital. We must tie abortion to a political economy that controls our work, warps our practices of love, and compensates with the perverse but beguiling enchantments of commodified freedom.
From “Mammon’s Deadly Grin: The New Gospel of Wealth and the Old Gospel of Life,” presented at the Culture of Life Conference, Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, Nov. 30, 2001
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