Katha Pollitt

For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question “Are women human?” with a yes. It is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it’s certainly not about trading personal liberty – abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression—for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life feminists propose. It’s about justice, fairness and access to the broad range of human experience. It’s about women consulting their own well-being and being judged as individuals rather than as members of a class with one personality, one social function, one road to happiness. It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, “the family,” men.

We should not be surprised that motherhood does not produce uniform beliefs and behaviors: It is, after all, not a job; it has no standard of admission, and almost nobody gets fired. Motherhood is open to any woman who can have a baby or adopt one. Not to be a mother is a decision; becoming one requires merely that a woman accede, perhaps only for as long as it takes to get pregnant, to thousands of years of cumulative social pressure. After that, she’s on her own; she can soothe her child’s nightmares or let him cry in the dark. Nothing intrinsic to child-raising will tell her what is the better choice for her child…

I had two longish talks with Ramon, punctuated by his calling out “Abortion is murder!” every few minutes as another woman brushed past him on her way into the building. They were not very satisfying conversations. For one thing, Ramon is evasive about facts: his last name, for instance, and his nationality. When I asked him if he had voted in the last election, he told me he was not a U.S. citizen but would not tell me which country he was from, except that it was in Latin America, and he pulled out a plastic rosary. “The Blessed Mother sent me here.” What did his parents think of what he was doing? “The Blessed Mother and Jesus Christ are my parents.”