ARTICLES

Rhetoric and Reality

By Marjorie Reiley Maguire

Editor: The following excerpt is from an article in the Winter 1996 Human Life Review.

My husband, who was also a pro-choice activist, left me in 1990 for another woman. Before I knew about the other woman, I pleaded with my husband to return to the marriage. I expected our pro-choice friends to rally to my aid. I thought they would confront my husband with the dissonance between his divorce action and his pro-woman rhetoric. Instead, I got a cold shoulder from most of my pro-choice, feminist friends. In effect I was aborted from their field of concern. They had a man on their side whom they did not want to lose, but I was expendable. I was even asked why I was making a fuss that could hurt "the cause." When I answered that my "cause" was women, not abortion per se, I was told that I was mixing up my personal life with public concerns.

When I reminded them that the feminist doctrine is that "the personal is the political," their answer was to drop me entirely. A few even aided my husband in some of his divorce actions against me. So much for the liberationist, feminist rhetoric about the "hermeneutical privilege" of women's experience and the "preferential option" for women as oppressed persons in society!

...When the actions of my feminist friends revealed to me the consequences of the pro-choice rhetoric, my eyes were opened to aspects of the pro-choice movement that I had not previously considered. I began to see the abortion movement as not so much a pro-woman movement as a pro-sexual-liberation movement. I saw how advocacy for the legality of abortion subtly shifts to moral justification for abortion. That, in turn, promotes a moral neutrality toward the irresponsible sexual behavior which too often is the cause of abortion-"irresponsibility" is a word that is rarely mentioned in pro-choice circles -- "contraceptive failure" is presented as the cause of most abortions, rather than sexuality without moral constraints. In this way, abortion rhetoric plays into a degenerate male sexual agenda, rather than promoting the moral agency of women.

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