Buenos Aires, 31 july 2000

I must say that the abortion issue seems to me to be a quite old fashioned one in the 4^th European Conference framework. On one side, in almost all European countries, contraception access and sexual education have succeed in lowering abortion’s incidence, at the same time, legality and health system allows the use of better and more sure technologies. On the other side, the gap between reproductive and non-reproductive sexuality tends to increase up to infinite. Each time these parallel lines touch each other, the crash seems to remember us our forgotten sexual origin, including our parents’ sexuality.

It is not the same in Argentina and Latin America. In my country, there is no feminist confrontation with technoscience -as the leaflet of the Conference reads- in what regards to abortion. The access to technology seems roughly controlled by political mechanisms that ensure the traditional distribution of gender and class roles. For the majority of women, abortion pass in a pre-scientific space, since access to the simple scientific technology of abortion is banned for them, firstly by illegality, and secondly, by badly unjust social and economic conditions. That´s why I feel - in my re-reading- I should rather explore the huge cultural gap that divide us, and I am afraid I will not achieve this goal.

As the deadline to submit this paper gets closer, I feel a kind of uncomfortable sense of inopportunity. I could rather have chosen to write a paper about the political creativity of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo --on whom I have written before and with whom I have shared so many thursdays around the Plaza-- and be sure to find approval and respect for whatever I could say. Maybe my inconscious choice to deal with abortion, that follows a decade of activism in this field, carries out my acknowledgement to so many women that in the most secret way affirm --consciously or not-- their determination to give their lives the meaning of resistence to compulsory patterns of feminine identity contributing to subvert it in this somehow minimalistic style.

Plenty of them never thought to be able to defend our -their own- rights and expose themselves to make visible a hidden truth: that at present democratic State, the current economic, educational and health policies are deciding about if we and our children are worth keeping alive or not, as criminally as the military dictatorship did with the "desaparecidos".

However, there is another reason: my partners in abortion rights struggles tend to deny the conflicts and the seriousness implied in abortion decisions. Usually I have to face the fact that our advocacy is built on the basis of a rough simplification of women’s subjectivity. And this is the other side of the conventional assignment of a fixed meaning for abortion, whatever its cultural and individual circumstances.

The term that has prevailed as an outcome of emancipatory struggles for self determination is not that of reproductive freedom, paradigmatic of feminist politics, but that of reproductive rights. The struggle for rights is the expression of an emerging social subject seeking recognition, the concern on public health is a duty of governmets. So, we are speaking of two different subjects. Shifting from "reproductive rights", which are a matter of citizenship, to "reproductive health", which tends to a medical solution of the problems of reproduction and population. Given its linkages with public health policies, abortion rights have also made a transition from the field of feminist politics to the field of developmental policies. In today's world it is possible to have better reproductive health even when women's rights are worsening.

Though abortion is installed as a women’s (reproductive) rights issue, related issues of sexuality, desire and subjectivity are rarely considered explicitly in abortion rights speech. This can (may) be so because the "subject of rights" carries a heavy ideological weight for it is conceived as an universal and unidimensional subject that hardly admits to be examined under these approaches. However, all existing rights can be related to sexuality if there is a subject who includes her/his sexuality as a permanent dimension of her/his self (identity) and that is what Foucault pointed out as a major operation in the contemporary episteme.

So, it is sexuality as a main component of contemporary self-consciousness what is disrupting into the rights level and forcing a legitimating process. And sexuality means sexual difference, it means a singular process of body signification, whatever its outcome could be. This is what is human in human sexuality. The power and the need of signifying bodily relationships (that is to say relation to the other, within relation to the Other) as pleasure or unpleasure experiences.

The omission I have mentioned before has the potential to destroy the subjectivity involved in the act of abortion rather than affirming it as an actual dismissal of the gendered sexual patterns that stress the maternal as essential to women.

As feminists, we take the challenge to redefine the terms that are prevailing in the process of our own constitution as subjects. But at the same time, we rather tend to think that unwanted pregnancies happen only because contraceptive methods fail or because of ill power balance between heterosexual couples, than to unveil unconscious desires at work in our fertile sexual practices.

In animals, sexuality fills a (reproductive) function What is specific of human sexuality, is that the reproductive function is "de-functionalized" by being submitted to a signifying system within which everyone must build her own meaning in relation to significant others, and it is always a sexed one.

This construction takes its inputs (raw materials) from multiple sources among the experienced relationship with significant others. These are not infinite, but limited and hierarchized in every social group. In this scope, the mother-child bind is critic. The experienced body is not the anatomic body, it is internal to the psyche. It is not pre-established, it’s a construction on the basis of the perception of erogenic zones, their libidinal charge and the phantasies in which they are involved.

To signifie means first to be marked as what is pleasant or unpleasant for the other (M). Thereafter the body can be represented and a self image starts to be built in a complex process of differentiation motorized by desire. That is to say, by the absence (the loss) of the object, and the fluctuations of the libido.

Infant sexuality as described by Freud, has not a center neither a specific organ (it is not phallic) and is not conditioned by reproduction. Certainly, before sexual maturity, sexual activity has only subjective and intersubjective consequences. It doesn’t lead to biological reproduction. Nevertheless it does lead to reproducing sexual stereotypes, since it is inserted in the dynamics of identification within wich the child assumes the gendered subjectivity assigned to her/his bodily sex. This dynamics of identification could be called domestication of sexuality. Thus, infantile sexuality is placed within the cultural frames that make it socially acceptable and part of it is repressed.

Between subjection and transgression the relationship to the other is structured making the child an object of desire and of pleasure. In this way, what is desirable is transmitted along with the cultural injunctions and allows the child to imagine the ways in wich her/his body may connect to another to obtain pleasure. (phantasy)

But that reproductive function is not determinant to sexuality, doesn’t mean that it has no place in it and its imaginary deployment.

To play the subjective significance of abortion down in the current abortion rights discourse, trhows it into the realm of mere repetition instead of promoting the working-through of its fixed meanings as well as those of femininity and motherhood, seeking to build a gendered symbolic out of feminine embodied experience. I think that the only chance to achieve this goal is by "historizing" the personal experience of abortion within both its narrow and its wider context.

Subjectivity is double-edged : it implies both to acknowledge one's subjection to material conditions and cultural determinations and, nevertheless, to become the protagonist of one's own story and to tell it from our own point of view in our own words. This battle field for interpretation about the sense of words encompasses last decade international conferences in which some of us have been involved.

Every one must face her subjection to the imposed reproductive role of motherhood for every woman and every pregnancy, wanted or not, as women’s fate. This means to face the idealization of motherhood that justifie and perpetuates women’s social subordination. This is why right and access to legal and safe abortion as an essential component of women’s sexual and reproductive rights and health, is a central feature of women’s citizenship and a mighty pillar of subjectivity.

Abortion displays the conflict with exercising violence, a strong tabu for women and feminists. It transgredes as well the state monopoly of violence, the assigned feminine social role -every woman, a mother, every pregnanacy a child-, and the sexual role of passivity.

We can say that, as a troublesome issue, abortion arises whithin the attempt to regain the playful side of infantile sexuality, whithout reproductive consequences. That is to say, the eroticism ruled by the pleasure principle, not limited by the irruption of the real reproductive body.

To claim it as a right and to stop suffering it as victims, is critical to the structure of our own identity. Moreover, the right to legal abortion allows women to become the subjects of their own stories. It is the legitimation of saying "no" to the maternal destination. Not only to give or not biological life, but to give their own meaning both to the act of giving birth and to the signifier "woman". As Rosi Braidotti points, we are critical of the structure of identity we inhabit, we are something new, still lacking the proper schemes and narratives to represent ourselves.

In this scope, abortion can be seen as that what cannot be spoken. In its german ethimology Ab-ort means the place which must be avoided, the latrine. In latin, ab-ortus is something out of the origin. It is spoken as a "matter of public health", there are plenty of statistics, but the narratives of concrete women are lacking.

It is placed in the realm of tabu, which is not about prohibition, but about a dimension where the rules of ordinary world are suspended, as E.Pattis-Zoja writes.

It is excluded from social representations and dominated by the uncanny : what in spite of being the most familiar, is the most foreign and has to remain hidden. For the utilitarian conception that conceives women as natural resources, and therefore bound to be exploited in patriarchal marriage, it is an intrinsic failure of disciplinary order. It means women’s active resistance to the feminine patriarchal identity which is brought to crisis by the upholding of identitarian features that are not culturally validated. It is thus, an exercise of the "powers of the weak" refusing the definitions that powerful others make of oneself. A way of keeping one’s own force -reproductive capacity and sexuality- to put it in an optional gift regime instead of in one of forced sacrificial tribute.

Motherhood and abortion are different destinations of women's power and authority over their bodies and their ability to include or not to include a new member into their social group and their legitimacy to do so. That’s why they are socially established in different ways.

Pregnancy is a sign that resignifies a woman as a mother. Facing this event, there is a social interpellation before wich she has to decide (and to do it bringing into play her values and fantasies).

Mary O’Brien states that what distinguishes human life is not the attribute of rationality, as many abstract analysis stand for, but "The transformation from life in general to human life in particular (a child) comes.(....) in the historical labor of women. Marx defined labor as the creation of value, but he did not heed the value produced by women’s reproductive labor. This work is a unification of bodily labor with human consciousness, a unity of knowledge and experience which defines the human as the species which knows what is it doing in the act of giving birth : it is creating value, the value of human life, cultural and individual value which is assessed by the consciousness of the labouring reproducer." Giving birth puts this value in circulation into the public space.

As motherhood implies the gift of the child to society, it pays the prize for the personal sexual enjoyment. Abortion stops the circulation of this enjoyment in an act of mastery over our lives and the other’s. It reappropiates the body of sexual pleasure from its biological alienation to the other sex in reproduction.

The abortion situation may be uttered as this: "the O/other, or me" There is an O/other that impedes me to continue being myself in an acceptable way. I use both the capital and the little "o" to signifie a double level of alterity : the inmediate one of the embryo as a biological thing, and the alterity of the (social) discourse within which the decision must take place, to end a dilematic situation threatening the ability to sustain the feminine subject’s identity.

Unwanted pregnancy and then abortion are the contemporary version of tragedy : the damnation of seeing how what actually happens is what we wanted the most to avoid. It is rather a matter of fate than of choice. It is the refusal to put (signifie) into the human order something that belongs to nature.

When Freud says "Wo es war, soll Ich werden" he echoes a mandate of humanizing what preexists the egoic operation that captures into one’s own image what is already there, existing in an unarticulated mood, outer and previous to me. This is feminine work (labor?) in pregnancy and motherhood.

In unwanted pregnancies, the self (identity) of a woman is threatened by the irruption of an Id (body, sexuality, gestation) in which she is not able to become an I. Subjective effects of working-through an unwanted or impossible pregnancy may not depend on the fact of deciding wether to abort or to go on whith it, and may give place either to psychic large reorganizations or to repetitive actings.

The idea of the mother-child relationship as a self sufficient functional unit is a social myth corresponding to a typical phantasy of daughters and sons. Many women abort when they realize its impossibility. The social order in which they get pregnant prevents them from carrying this process to term. They cannot adopt their pregnancy.

Women save the bridge between life and death. In motherhood, they make a (real and symbolic) path from non-life to life, as well as the other way round -symbolically represented- in funeral rites. Patriarchal culture attributes the passage from non-life to life to the seed’s efficiency. The fusional link, the continuous holding and nurturing lap offered by the mother’s body is denied as its origin and condition. In fact, this is what technology tries to substitute. The more she can be substituted, the more legitimatized the appropiation of her children by patriarchal lineage. The real passage from life (which is not yet of an individual) to non-life (it will never be) is made in abortion without ritualization, because of it’s illegality and consistent clandestinity in my country. The lack of ritualization -should it be that of a proper medical procedure- impedes this act to be incorporated to the subject’s history as a part of the process in which she takes charge of her life and decisions. Where this passage is socially acceptable and legalized, its inscription functions as mediation between this bi-polar power (life/death) of the woman and the social group that allows her to become or not a mother. If society protects the choice of motherhood, it is supposed to protect as well who doesn’t make this choice. Anyway, reproductive decisions of women are made in a place of irremediable loneliness, beyond any sustainable affective relationship. It is only one (feminine) body who takes in charge all the consequences of the union of two subjects. Only one body to perform the separation (labor) of two individuals at birth.

As J. Kristeva says, the project of the species asks for the sacrifice of the individual. And this tendency is considered as essentially feminine. Eva Pattis-Zoja suggests that voluntary abortion can be seen as an unconscious act of self-initiation that consists of the sacrifice of a form of life, and thus attempts to project a woman to a place beyond the confines of a feminine identity that finds its primary quality in maternal characteristics." This ritual thrusts her beyond such unidimensional identity. The sacrifice of a human life unveils a canibalistic feature of society: it is nourished with human life. When other forms of social fulfilment, differing or exceeding the model of managing the survival of the species, are legitimized for women, motherhood shows its indeniable sacrificial aspects.

EPZ asks: "Is it possible to think abortion, in all its violence, as an attempt to give life -quite litteral flesh and blood- to such alternative modes of femininity?" Maybe this cannibalistic feature can only be accepted if it is immediately subsumed, as this author does, into "an attempt to give life", thus preserving the life-giving image of femininity.

She points that "... if we speak of sacrifice in relation to abortion, we should not think automatically of the sacrifice of the embryo, but instead, of the sacrifice of something psychological and subjective, of part of the self, for example, of the original innocence from which this violent act forever removes us." It is the prize of being released of the sovereignity of the maternal ideal and develop her own story. The decision to abort is posed as sacrificing omnipotence, being aware of the limited power to achieve every fantasy, every new possibility, as choosing and accepting the guilt which derives from having closed some of our possibilities in order to turn to things within our reach. This is, undoubtedly, an exercise of responsibility, as demanded in the name of the programmes set in my country to deal with reproductive policies : Responsible Procreation Programme.

.Kristeva, distinguishing Zoe --biological life, phisiology-- from Bios --the story, the biography-- calls women not to be just "reproductive" (genitrices) but to give sense to the act of giving birth. Not to accept the division between she, who gives life and he, who gives sense, by bringing out the wishes and words of women. The sacred is put on by means of a sacrifice, that divide Zoé from Bios, setting a frontier. In jewish-christian tradition, it is prohibition that inscribes language on the body, "the sense of life", that is to say, the multiple meanings we are creating with our lives, in spite of this tradition.

Martha Rosenberg
Las Heras 4095 5°piso, dto.17
Buenos Aires (1425)
Argentina
e-mail : foroddrr@abaconet.com.ar
tel. : 5411 4804 9824
fax : 5411 4804 7722