I know that you can feel like a voice crying(decrying)in the wilderness when you attempt to crack the shield of collective reality around most peoples heads. The white noise of the consumer society–directing the erotic and passionate drives into shopping and celebrity worship is powerful.
It requires a great deal of defensive energy to get to a silent enough place where you can begin to think–and then distance yourself enough to think about important and primary things.
And when the concept of “choice” has been denuded to mean that the results of all choices are equally valuable you have another barrier.
The way to begin to talk about this is continue to talk and have the psychological courage to absorb ridicule and attacks while “loving the struggle”, as my dear fried Flo Kennedy would always say.

For Gloria Pan;
It may be true that both younger and older women are more “committed” to the pro-choice issue as fundamental because of where they are in the chronology of their lives.
Older women remember and younger women can experience an unwanted pregnancy.

But those who “have no connection” are living their politics too personally.
Of course our lived experiences color and determine some of our politics, but in the case of womens freedom, our radicalization and compassion should have no generational or geograpahic boundaries.
When I think, speak or write about feminism-it is a vision and a force that transcends these biological and national lines.
My work in Russia setting up Choices East was inspired by a woman who came to Choices for her 36th abortion. She was only 35 years old. In Russia at that time (1992) it was “socially acceptable” for women to have muptiple abortions–there was no birth control and no concept of ‘choice’.
For Russian women–abortion was a fact of life. and very “socially accetable”.
This was not freedom–but coersion.
If you argue that women should not have an abortion because it is a personal and wrenching decision, are you saying that you want to to “protect” women by insuring that they do not have them?
If it is socially acceptable to go thru with a pregnancy-does that mean that all women should?
Abortion is not the fundamental issue–control over our reproductive lives is—
it is not the choice-but who makes and defines it that matters so profoundly.

I cannot think of something more fundamental then the control of ones being in the world–
There is a theory in psychology called “heirarchy of needs” created by Maslow in 1943.
He postulates a pyramid of five levels of human need in order of importance(once the first are met–the individual can move to the others)–with physiological being the first–safety,love, selft-esteem and self-actualization coming after.
I think of reproductive freedom as being the first of a pyramid of “feminist needs” witn reproductive freedom the base line. If we can’t determine when and whether or not to be mothers are our first priority,we will struggle harder to reach the others if at all.

I would like to get your take on something I’ve been mulling for a while. Today, the women most committed to pro-choice seem to be younger radical feminists, older woman who lived through or experienced the era of back-alley abortions when women died or were maimed in getting abortions to avoid the severe punishment meted out by a society intolerant of out-of-wedlock motherhood, and women who inherited feminism as a legacy, perhaps from their mothers. For other women, though, who have no connection to that era, who are living in a society increasingly accepting of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the memory of dead or maimed women is absent and the argument of control over one’s own body too removed or theoretical. If the decision to have an abortion is personal and wrenching, why not avoid it and go through with a pregnancy? And if it’s socially okay to go through with a pregnancy, doesn’t abortion as a right becomes less compelling an issue? Does insisting that it’s still THE issue undermine feminist efforts on other fronts?

What do you think of this line of reasoning?

But, the problem with being a visionary is that while you may influence the thinking of people who read you or listen to you, nobody really wants to put their life or their body on the line. They won’t do it until they have been thoroughly radicalized by injustice in their own life, against them, harmed irreparably by rape or incest or assault, or deprived of educations and opportunities that make them wish they they were dead. And even then they might not do it because coping is taking all of their intelligence and their energy. It takes a lot of will and a lot of energy to stay in denial.

Yeah, I hear you Merle. You are a strong voice. I get where you’re coming from. The women who had have it up to their eyeballs and would enforce, for instance, a sex boycott or a strike in the workplace are not in the majority in the U.S. They are trying to be Martha Stewart, or Rachel Ray, or the poor woman’s version of Oprah, or some other glamorous fantasy to shield them from the reality of misogyny. When I criticize friends on Facebook for wasting their lives taking dumb quizzes or listing their favorite TV programs, I am talking to myself.

We need to talk about why this is so. I’m not sure how to do that.