[Vision2020] Todd Akin and the Second Sex

[Art Deco]

*The New Yorker*

August 27, 2012
Todd Akin and the Second Sex
Posted by Judith
Thurman<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/judith_thurman/search?contributorName=Judith%20Thurman>

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 [image: akin-and-abortion.jpg]

Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational treatise on gender inequality, “The
Second Sex,” was published in France in 1949, a year after the author—a
thirty-eight-year-old public intellectual—was allowed to vote for the first
time. French women, so belatedly enfranchised, would not have access to
legal birth control until 1967, or to legal first-trimester abortions until
1975.

In 1971, Beauvoir took the lead in her countrywomen’s struggle for
reproductive rights. She wrote a declaration, “The Manifesto of 343,” that
exposed her and her fellow-signers—some of France’s leading female artists,
actors, writers, jurists, and filmmakers—to criminal prosecution. (It also
exposed them to degrading ridicule of a now-familiar sort. Forty years
before Rush Limbaugh aired his repulsive fantasies about Sandra Fluke, the
declaration was nicknamed “The Manifesto of the 343 Sluts.”)

“One million women in France have an abortion every year,” Beauvoir’s
declaration began. “Condemned to secrecy, they have them in dangerous
conditions…. These women are veiled in silence. I declare that I am one of
them. I have had an abortion.”

Not all of the women who signed Beauvoir’s manifesto had actually had an
abortion. Some of them, like Violette Leduc, the lesbian writer, may never
have had sex with a man. The point was to stand together on behalf of the
“veiled.” And in 1971, I was one of the veiled. I was a single woman just
out of college, far from home, living marginally, without a partner, who
found herself pregnant.

It is sometimes hard to remember that abortion has not been a crime in the
United States since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. If politicians like
Todd Akin and Paul Ryan prevail, it will be a crime again, under all
circumstances, along with some forms of contraception that can spare women
from a hard choice that they have to live with, one way or another, for the
rest of their lives.

Akin disgraced himself as a benighted zealot by blathering about
“legitimate rape,” but it’s a mistake, I think, to focus one’s outrage on
the trauma of rape and incest victims, on teen-age girls of severely
limited mental capacity who are conned by predators, or on patients who
have been told by their physicians that a full-term pregnancy may kill
them. Forcing such women to bear a child violates their integrity in a
barbaric fashion—it rapes them twice.

But most women who seek abortions do not fall into those categories. They
are our neighbors, daughters, sisters, granddaughters, and colleagues. They
come in every size and color. They are rich and poor. They are Republicans
and Democrats. They are churchgoers and atheists. They are married, single,
and divorced. Some ardently want a family—when the time is right. Some of
them have children already. But they have this in common: at some point
between the onset of puberty and the end of menopause—and one neither wants
nor needs to know the circumstances, it is none of our business—they had a
sexual encounter that resulted in an accidental conception, and they
couldn’t go through with it.

Here is where the Akin uproar leads us to perilous ground. “Legitimate
rape” (or “forcible rape,” as the Congressman put it in his apology for
having “misspoke”) is a coded expression that everyone in its target
audience understands. It conjures the image of a Victorian maiden ravished
by a villain in a cloak and a top hat, twirling his mustache as she flails
on the railroad tracks. It implies that there are “legitimate” victims—and
only certifiably “pure” women fall into that category. Everyone else had it
coming.

“The Second Sex” is an exhaustive study of the ways that misogyny has, from
time immemorial, been disguised as righteousness. Todd Akin and Paul Ryan
want to write a new chapter to the story. If you are saved, you need not
fear their policies. If you are fallen, you will pay the price. They would
lower the veil of shame and silence on a new generation. But if we let this
become a debate about female virtue, rather than about female
self-determination, we have lost it.

*Illustration by Richard McGuire.*


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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