Column: Women as Reason
January-February 1999

Review: NEGOTIATING REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: WOMEN'S PERSPECTIVES ACROSS COUNTRIES AND CULTURES

by Jennifer Pen

Reproductive freedom and women's reason

While they shed crocodile tears, pretending to care about sexual harassment in order to topple Bill Clinton, the Religious Right's real >agenda for women is to limit reproductive freedom. They work feverishly to ban abortion, limit child care, gut health care, impose marriage and >compulsory heterosexuality, and then have the gall to call women >selfish for wanting to regulate their own fertility! But while the Right tries to tighten the noose around women's bodies, women's minds are so deeply imbued with the idea of freedom that their resistance, time and again, creatively slips the knot.

Rosalind Petchesky and Karen Judd present substantial evidence of this in a new book, NEGOTIATING REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: WOMEN'S PERSPECTIVES ACROSS COUNTRIES AND CULTURES (Zed Books, 1998), which listens attentively to women from the Third World. The book comes out of the continuing work of the International Reproductive Rights Research Action Group (IRRRAG), in seven countries: the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Egypt, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Each country's report is written by women from that nation who lead the research team, but stresses the voices and decision-making powers of grassroots women.

The IRRRAG team was concerned to maintain the integrity of each country's distinctiveness; indeed, they heed the warnings of Third World feminists and postmodernists to stress local knowledges and situatedness as primary. But this makes them too cautious about the commonalities they uncover which suggest universal dimensions in women's experience.

One striking feature which emerged in every report was how capitalism blights the lives of women. The impact of "hegemonic capitalist markets" (4), especially in terms of the World Bank's imposed structural adjustment programs, has been devastating in the realm of funding for health care. Even more crucially, the book documents how government, religious institutions, fundamentalist movements, and traditionalism often collude to limit women's freedom on all fronts. Official government pronatalism in Nigeria includes a declaration that "(t)he patriarchal system...shall be recognized for stability of the home" (187). The link between pronatalism and capitalism is evident in the Malaysian government's demand for a population of 70 million to create "a larger consumer base with increasing purchasing power to generate and support industrial growth" (114). The U.S. team noted the coincidence of "family-values" rhetoric with "the eradication of social welfare programmes for the poor! " (267).

In all of the countries studied, abortion was neither safe nor easy to obtain; in addition, religious moralizing created an atmosphere of terror for women. This culminates in the ultimately murderous intent of capitalism and traditional religion against women: "In nearly all the >country settings where punitive or restrictive abortion laws prevail, >respondents' sense of entitlement to limit their childbearing was being forced underground....the three countries where abortion laws are the >most restrictive have significantly higher estimated maternal mortality rates" (301, 296). Those rates reach as high as 100 out of 100,000 in Nigeria, and hospitalization for one out of five women receiving illegal abortions in the Philippines (297, 225).

The positive force opposing these horrors manifests itself in women's resistance and opposition to capitalism and its related restrictive ideologies, including religious imperatives. "It is not the church that will go hungry and experience poverty," says one Filipina (248), who could easily find common ground with her Egyptian sister who self-induced an abortion, thinking "I was afraid of God's punishment, but at the same time I wonder, does God accept the suffering of the whole family if I have to stop work [to breastfeed another baby]?" (99).While such statements arise in personal situations, their scope condemns existing conditions, and so becomes revolutionary in range.

In each of these country studies, whether because of existing organizations, or due to the work of IRRRAG itself, women's self-development was sparked by meeting with each other, sharing their stories, and empowering each other to resist dehumanization. From the rural Black woman in South Carolina, who confessed that "No one ever asked us to tell our stories before" (270), to the Brazilian woman whose self-transformation went from being "Mary Nobody, who was not aware of anything" to a woman "conscious that we have to struggle for our rights, for our space, and to think about tomorrow" (44), the testimonies illustrate women in the process of becoming.

However earnestly IRRRAG members listened to and recorded women's voices, they abdicate part of their responsibility when they don't highlight the full revolutionary implications and contradictions of those voices. For instance, even though the researchers highlighted the distrust women have of government agencies, far from urging women to rise up against the government, the editors instead address their concerns to "governments, donors, and intergovernmental agencies" to fund future programs!

While rightly critiquing everyday resistance (which "by itself can work only at best to ameliorate oppression and at worst to distract women from engaging in collective, open, political actions"), the IRRRAG team did not fully comprehend the new openings in the voices they heard. These women do not let the government, or the economy, or religion, define them. While such institutions establish the material context within which these women struggle, their attempts to control their reproductive lives exemplify the will that Hegel saw as "self-instituted-an individuality, however, purified of all that interferes with its universalism."

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