Thanks, SMS, for your extensive respose; it's helping me think through this hypothesis of mine, which I'm only just starting to work out here.
The fetus in this case is the object, and the mother is the supernatural being. Actually, you use the word child, so perhaps it is not just the unborn that we hold dear, but even the children after birth. From this sense, it is not at all a new phenomenon that we consider children sacred.
Actually, the quasi-supernatural power as I was conceiving it, is the power of life, and its flip side death which are always two sides of the same coin. The cultish quality of the kind of "child as innocent" that arose in the 19th century--which lives on in many ways, particularly the aesthetic of "Precious Moments" figurines and books like "Children are from Heaven"--seeks to deny the tight relationship between life/death. And this is related in a deep way, I believe in my gut (and now I'm trying to translate that gut feeling into logic and words), to the fact that women have always possessed such a close relationship to this life-giving/death-giving possibility. Patriarchal systems are deeply suspicious of that power/relationship.
Beyond that, the relation of the "sacred" and the child is an issue that is complex; for starters, check out Vivianna Zelizer's "Pricing the Priceless Child" (ca. 1986? or so?).
So, while to a certain degree you are right that children have "always" been sacred, the picture is quite complex, especially when you examine the ways, for instance, various legal traditions have categorized/ treated children. As I understand it (and I'm a bit outside my field, here, so corrections are expected!) under Roman law fathers had almost sovereign rights within their household including rights over the lives of their children, which were codified as property; English common law did not assert that children were property (although that claim is sometimes made), but did give all rights to their care, custody, and labor value to the fathers, and it was extremely difficult to prosecute a father for neglect or abuse of a child.
So I don't believe on can talk about the law without recognizing the deep implications of this patriarchal context of the law and the asymmetrical powers it has granted to adult men and women before it, which I believe is a critical absence from the discussion you offer here:
If we want to say that treating the child and the fetus as sacred is also a result of our desire to hold power over women, then we should admit that it only holds power over women to this end. Most women who become pregnant do not abort their child. So those who claim that abortion is should be illegal should have no qualms at all about saying that they wish for the law to have this specific power over women. Every law is an exercise of power over some person or persons.
First, women have never been treated equally before the law, so the law has always had more powerful effects on them than it has on men.
While it is arguable that over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries male heads of households (in the US and also in most European countries) lost power over women and the domestic sphere, their power was by and large handed over to social institutions, which were sanctioned by various instutional state apparati authorized by patriarchal strucutres. Thus a "judicial patriarchy" was created. So the State gained power within the family at the expense of men and did almost nothing to change the legal power and position of women within that sphere.
Thus it doesn't hold power "only to this end": most women have also been compelled to give their children the name of its father. Most women have been and still are legally and socially compelled to give birth to children only in the context of heterosexual, marital relations sanctioned by church / state.
The anti-abortion movement works within this context, and seeks to retain and give over the exclusive right to determine life/death issues to patriarchal legal structures. Most anti-choice activists recognize that decisions involving abortion are inevitable (at the very least, when the mother's life is at risk), but they reject women's having the right to decide the meanings of "life" and "risk" in a way that men never have to face, but are willing to allow outside entities, working under the name/authority of "the father" to determine those vital issues.
at least that's what I think I think. any help out there?
alas. |
