Margaret Atwood: ‘Enforced Childbirth Is Slavery

I’m enjoying writing about the abortion issue.

There are few issues which so exemplify the modernist vs. traditionalist divide. God and nature are on one side of the divide. The human will and its darkest impulses are on the other side of the divide.

The Guardian:

“Nobody likes abortion, even when safe and legal. It’s not what any woman would choose for a happy time on Saturday night. But nobody likes women bleeding to death on the bathroom floor from illegal abortions either. What to do?

Perhaps a different way of approaching the question would be to ask: What kind of country do you want to live in? One in which every individual is free to make decisions concerning his or her health and body, or one in which half the population is free and the other half is enslaved?

Women who cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have babies are enslaved because the state claims ownership of their bodies and the right to dictate the use to which their bodies must be put. The only similar circumstance for men is conscription into an army. In both cases there is risk to the individual’s life, but an army conscript is at least provided with food, clothing, and lodging. Even criminals in prisons have a right to those things. If the state is mandating enforced childbirth, why should it not pay for prenatal care, for the birth itself, for postnatal care, and – for babies who are not sold off to richer families – for the cost of bringing up the child …

No one is forcing women to have abortions. No one either should force them to undergo childbirth. Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is. It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.”

What kind of country do you want to live in?

That’s an easy one. I want to live a country where liberalism and modernism and the tidal wave of cultural degeneration that this ideology and its accompanying aesthetic has unleashed has been rolled back. I want to live in a country that is based on organic bonds, not liberal abstractions. I want to live in a country that is at peace with nature and natural roles, not in a perpetual revolt against it. I want to live in a country where the Self has been knocked off its pedestal and a culture that is no longer sick and atomized.

I’m sorry, but sexual dimorphism isn’t fair. Men and women are not biologically the same. The sexes are complementary. Human reproduction isn’t based on some absurd notion of equality. Motherhood isn’t slavery, but a natural biological process in our species. Society has a stake in the matter because its entire future is based on reproduction. The fact that men are unable to get pregnant is not an injustice. Women who kill their own offspring or who feel enslaved by pregnancy are mentally disturbed. A pregnant women is by definition not “autonomous.”