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Abortion
Abortion is a general term for several different medical procedures that terminate a woman's pregnancy. From a political theory perspective, abortion connotes a dimension of a woman's right to control her own body and to exercise her right to autonomy.
Historical Context
Women from many different cultures have been using folk methods for contraceptive and abortion purposes for centuries. By the turn of the twentieth century, laws in effect throughout the United States made abortion illegal. Significant numbers of women nevertheless continued to seek abortions; it is estimated that as many as one million abortions were performed each year during the 1950s and 1960s. Although the rise of sexual permissiveness is sometimes narrowly associated with the 1960s counterculture, women from all walks of life placed a new emphasis on controlling their reproduction at this time as they entered the workforce and higher education in unprecedented numbers and asserted their right to satisfying intimate relationships.
As long as abortion remained illegal, however, only wealthy women with ready access to medical specialists were able to obtain a safe abortion; thousands of other women, who were desperately determined to terminate their pregnancies, risked humiliating treatment and unsafe conditions as they resorted to dangerous folk methods and unlicensed practitioners. With the decriminalization of abortion—in the United States, the landmark decision, Roe v. Wade, was handed down in 1973—abortion-related injuries and deaths became quite rare.
Abortion opponents from the religious right wing have successfully turned back these reproductive rights gains in some key respects; for example, they have outlawed some medically necessary abortion procedures, prohibited the use of federal funds for abortion services, and banned foreign aid contributions to any organization that is deemed to be “promoting” or performing abortions.
Feminist Positions on Abortion
The “second wave” of feminist activists of the 1960s to the 1990s made free abortion on demand a central plank of its social justice agenda. Liberal feminists tend to regard abortion within the framework of the individual's right to privacy and the right to autonomous self-determination without arbitrary interference from the state. They understand these rights as flowing from the individual's ownership of his or her own body. Where religious conservatives seek to limit abortion access, liberal feminists insist on the containment of religious morality within the private realm of individual self-determination.
Radical feminists support the liberal feminist demand for the right to privacy. However, they also hold that men as a class strive to control women as a class. They believe that male-dominated institutions, such as the patriarchal family, organized religions, the government, and the courts, seek to restrict women's autonomy to further larger efforts designed to relegate women to second-class citizenship. In this regard, radical feminists argue that abortion restrictions and violence against women (domestic violence, workplace sexual harassment, and rape) complement each other insofar as both impose gender-specific burdens. Both phenomena are so widespread and impose such severe obstacles that they constitute a systemic obstacle to gender justice. Consequently, radical feminists do not accept the liberal feminist idea that reproductive justice merely requires the removal of the legal barriers to abortion. They contend that genuine reproductive justice requires the dismantling of the entire gender privilege system and a complete revolution in men's attitudes toward women.
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