Writing is like any other creative endeavor. Time is unpredictable. Sometimes you knock it out in one draft. Sometimes the deadline shows up on draft eight so you have to publish. My review of The Icon and the Idealist is in the latter category.
I think that the book provides an excellent example of one of my core messages: history is new. Conventional wisdom on what represents eternal verities of human life, and what is a new and fresh problem is often incorrect. The former is particularly important. It is the bit of David Graeber‘s message that causes me to keep pulling his work out of the ideological slag heap.
The history of the abortion debate re-frames the abortion debate. Neither when a life is subject to the laws of the state’s protection or how much the laws of the state influence bodily autonomy matter, or are even considered. Rather, it assumes that the purpose of women is to create children, and anything that frustrates that purpose is ipso facto harmful. It’d be like using a screwdriver as a can opener: it’ll do the job, but it takes a lot more effort and someone is likely to get hurt.
The best argument in defense here is that the argument was that, but has moved on to other things. I disagree with that for two reasons. First, what would be the cultural or legal shift? It cannot be women’s rights itself. It could be women’s rights in an Overton Window sense of shifting what sorts of arguments are acceptable. The only possibility is more technological, i.e. the basis of Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe, and what medicine can or cannot do. But that suggests a much more science-savvy populace than the one we have, and it is not the crux of any argument.
The second is informed by the trans debate. Because you do see this sort of teleology of femininity in the split between the Right and Left anti-trans factions. The Left anti-trans looks at transgender rights as an attack on hard fought women’s rights. The Right anti-trans platform is about restoring…well, enforcing, a set of gender roles where the one for women looks the same as the early anti-abortion argument and the frustration of womenly purpose. It is not specifically anti-women’s rights…well, usually not, but in establishing women as for having children it posits an axiom that limits possible solutions. You can have any car you want, so long as it is a mini-van.
Of course, this is not what the book is about in a real sense. It is a dual biography. And it would be of limited use to someone looking for a review on it. Necessary context within the book, yet also something where the book then does a much better explanation of than I could. So, really, just read the thing.
I know that this feeling is wrong, but I do feel about some facts that if you could get them to be better established, the argument would be productive. I do not know if this line of thinking settles the abortion argument in any meaningful way, but I suggest that the argument is incapable of being settled without a better address of it.
CITATION HEEDED 