To deny the need for her consent in this the most important aspect of a woman’s life is surely the moral equivalent of justifying rape. It reminds us once more of the profound contempt that has underpinned Catholic attitudes towards women and that has been responsible for so much suffering down the centuries. Millions of women in the poorest countries, who are the most vulnerable, continue to suffer because of it. The Church discourages governments in Catholic countries from developing family planning facilities, which are desperately needed where the population growth outstrips their economic development. In 1980, the Pope visited Brazil, the world’s most populous Catholic country. For years Brazil followed the Catholic doctrine and was opposed to family planning. Abortion was outlawed, with sentences ranging from six to twenty years for anyone convicted of carrying it out. As a result, millions of Brazilian women were forced to go to back street abortionists or to resort to knitting needles or coat hangers to terminate their unwanted pregnancies. It is estimated that about 50,000 women die each year there in botched efforts to end their pregnancies.374 However, two years after the Pope’s visit, the government reversed its previous position and asked for help from the United Nations Population Fund, which aims to expand family planning aid to the poor nations who need it most. But abortion is still outlawed in Brazil, and still kills more Brazilian women than anything else. Of course, it is the poorest women who suffer most. Brazil’s rich elite has access to abortion without fear of arrest or social stigma. ‘Our law serves only to punish the poor,’ commented Elsimar Coutinho, the head of the Brazilian Family Planning Association.375
The Catholic Church is not the only powerful, worldwide body or institution that is campaigning to curtail the access of the poorest and most vulnerable women to family planning facilities. In the 1980s, the United States government under President Ronald Reagan adopted a policy of denying funding to family planning groups that carry out abortion services or provide information about abortion. The policy was urged upon the government by lobbyists for fundamentalist Protestant organizations, which have grown in influence since the 1980s in US politics. They are part of a conservative and religious backlash against the gains that women made in the 1960s and 1970s (see below). By the congressional elections of 1994, two out of every five votes for the Republican Party came from the Christian right.376 President George W. Bush, whose core supporters are fundamentalists, revived the policy and declared ‘war’ on abortion before his ‘war’ against terrorism. On his very first day in office in 2001, he reinstated the ‘gag rule’ against funding going to groups that provide abortion services and information about them. Hundreds of women’s health organizations in some of the poorest countries in the world had to make the difficult choice of dropping their abortion services and counselling or lose their funding. One of those who refused to sign the gag rule was Amare Badada, of the Ethiopian Family Guidance Association. He said that because of his refusal forty-four of the fifty-four family planning clinics in his region would probably be closed by 2004. Each serves about five hundred women, some of whom have to walk six miles to reach them. The problems that his clinics deal with on a day-to-day basis include rape, forced marriage and genital mutilation. ‘Under the gag rule, I can treat a woman who comes bleeding after an illegal abortion but I am not allowed to warn her of the dangers before she goes,’ Mr Badada said. ‘We should not be told what to think and say.’ He concluded: ‘The US is driving women into the hands of back-street abortionists.’377
As of 1999, abortion was illegal in most Central and South American nations, except in cases of rape or incest or where the woman’s life was at stake. The same restrictions apply in a majority of African states, and in a large number of Middle Eastern and South Asian nations. In the mainly Catholic Irish republic in 1983 an anti-abortion clause was put into the country’s constitution.378 As a result of such restrictions, the World Health Organization estimates that around 70,000 women die every year because of having unsafe abortions, and many hundreds of thousands more suffer terrible infections or loss of fertility.379 This means that as many if not more women die each year because they are denied the right to choose than were murdered annually at the height of the European witch-hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As then, the misogyny of Christianity is directly responsible for the major part of this unnecessary suffering.
It may seem somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church finds itself advocating the same position against abortion as its severest Christian critics, the Protestant fundamentalists. In fact, it is no more surprising than finding the so-called pro-life movement keeping company with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, all of whom at one time or another banned abortions. What they have in common is their belief, rooted in misogyny, that the woman’s right to choose – a fundamental aspect of her autonomy – must be crushed in order to achieve what they have deemed a ‘higher’ religious, moral or social goal.
The campaign for the woman’s right to choose has been among the most bitter and controversial struggles in the United States in the twentieth century. It provoked the misogynistic backlash of the 1980s and 1990s, which at its most fanatical led to attacks on family planning clinics and the murders of doctors and health care workers.
The ideological justification for this campaign sprang from the traditional misogyny of Christianity and its basic tenet that woman’s subordination, her perceived inferiority, is God’s judgement on her for her guilt in bringing about the Fall of Man (see Chapters 3 and 4). However, even the Catholic Church has not always been as completely intolerant of abortion as it is currently. Until 1588, the Church followed Aristotle’s dictate that the foetus was not ‘ensouled’ until 40 days after conception if it was male, and 60 days if female. So abortion could under certain circumstances take place up until then. However, in that year Pope Sixtus V decreed that abortion at whatever stage of conception was murder. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception proclaimed in 1854 further strengthened the Church’s anti-abortion position because it assumed that Mary was ‘en-souled’ as the only human free from Original Sin from the very first moment of her conception, which means that from that second onwards she was fully human. Pius IX reiterated that teaching in 1869. Just to make sure that there was no argument to the contrary, the next year he proclaimed the dogma of Papal Infallibility. Undoubtedly, the curve of rising intensity with which the Church proclaimed that abortion was murder kept pace with the rise in demands from women for birth control and the right to choose. It became the battlefield where the fate of the family itself would be determined: ‘. . . from the standpoint of the union of husband and wife, statistics have been gathered which show that divorce is practically non-existent among parents of large families, and they multiply as the number of children decrease . . . nothing so develops the solidarity of husband and wife as the multitude of their children.’380 Learned theologians would argue that without a large family to look after, a wife would become selfish, devote herself to gossip, to reading dangerous books, and hanging around with bad company.381
With the death of Stalin, abortion was legalized again in the Soviet Union in 1955 (having been outlawed in 1936), and throughout the Soviet dependencies around the same time. Abortion was legalized in Britain in 1967, in the US six years later, in France in 1974, and in Italy in May 1978. However, it has mainly been in the US that the ruling in favour of choice has been met with such fierce, violent and fanatical resistance involving both Protestant fundamentalists and conservative Catholics. In the 1980s, when the number of abortions in the US peaked,382 an organization called Operation Rescue emerged to stage protests outside family planning clinics where abortion services were provided. Its members were mostly middle-aged or elderly men. Some protestors recited the Rosary as women made their way into the clinics; others waved models or pictures of mutilated foetuses. They chanted ‘abortion is murder’, ‘don’t kill your baby’, or screamed ‘baby killers’ at doctors and staff. They made frequent comparisons between abortion
and the Holocaust. The millions of aborted foetuses were compared to the mass murder of Jews under the Nazis. For many women already suffering stress because of the difficult decision they had made to end their pregnancy, to be exposed to this barrage of intimidation and abuse could be agonizing and traumatic.
Religious authorities from the pope down had for years been denouncing abortion as murder. Virtually every time a Catholic priest spoke from the pulpit about abortion the words ‘murder’ and ‘murderer’ were heard issuing from his mouth. Protestant preachers were not far behind in the race to see who could come up with the most sensational, obscene and cruel comparison between abortion and some real or imagined horror. Both Protestant and Catholic religious authorities frequently poisoned their rhetoric against a woman’s right to choose with allusions to the Holocaust. The hysterical rhetoric of the protestors merely followed the example set by their mentors, as their verbal attacks on women took on the intensity of hate speech. The logic of this is inescapable. If women exercising their right to end a pregnancy and the medical staff who aide them are the moral equivalent of murderers and concentration camp administrators, then it follows that they should be punished as such – at least it did in the minds of those who took the hate-speech literally.
Among them was Michael Griffin, who shot dead Dr David Gunn at an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida, in 1993. He inspired Paul Hill, a forty-year-old father of three and former Presbyterian minister, who was a frequent protester outside abortion clinics where he would scream through the window ‘Mommy don’t kill me!’ Hill appeared on television, arguing on programmes such as Nightline and Donahue where he compared killing an abortion doctor with killing Hitler.383 On 29 July 1994, as sixty-nine-year-old Dr John Bayard, his driver James H. Barrett, a retired Air Force lieutenant aged seventy-four, along with Mr Barrett’s wife, pulled into the parking lot of the other abortion clinic in Pensacola, Hill opened fire on them with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He killed Barrett first before shooting Dr Bayard in the head. Hill explained later that he deliberately took aim at Dr Bayard’s head, knowing that the doctor was probably wearing a bulletproof vest. He also wounded Mrs Barrett who was crouching in terror in their vehicle.
Hill surrendered, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. On the evening of his execution, 3 September 2003, a crowd of protesters gathered outside the prison in Starke, Florida. Some were opposed to the death penalty, some were there to support Hill, and others the right to choose. Some of the pro-Hill crowd’s placards were an incitement to murder, if not hatred. ‘Dead Doctors Can’t Kill’, said one. ‘Killing Baby Killers is Justifiable Homicide’, proclaimed another. A protester told the New York Times that Hill had ‘raised the standard’ for the anti-abortion movement. ‘Some day I hope I will have the courage to be as much of a man as he was,’ he said. At a news conference before he was executed, Hill spoke of his belief that the state ‘will be making me a martyr’. His last words were: ‘If you believe abortion is an evil force, you should oppose the force and do all you have to, to stop it.’384
Between 1993 and 1998, those who like Hill followed the logic of the anti-choice campaign’s violent rhetoric claimed the lives of seven abortion providers and employees of family planning clinics. In 2001, ‘pro-life’ terrorists in Australia emulated their attacks, and killed a security guard outside the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne. Of course, the Protestant and Catholic churches, as well as the mainstream anti-abortion organizations, were understandably quick to distance themselves from the killings. The paradox of an organization claiming to be pro-life yet being identified with murder was a bit too glaring for all but the most fanatical to ignore. However, the ‘pro-life’ movement cannot escape the moral consequences of the hate-speech they commonly employ against the staff of the clinics and the women who use them. Nor can the fundamentalist Protestant and conservative Catholic leaders whose rhetoric describing abortion in terms of the Holocaust was surely instrumental in sending the killers out to murder in the name of life. Hill compared killing a doctor to killing Hitler. James C. Kopp, a forty-eight-year-old convert to Catholicism, was convicted in May 2003 of the October 1998 murder of Dr Barnett A. Slepian at his home near Buffalo, New York. In his statement to the court, Kopp compared Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, to Hitler and said that abortion was ‘the continuation of the Holocaust. It didn’t end in 1945.’385 He went on: ‘I hope that my younger brothers and sisters in the movement know that we can still cut some holes in the fences of the death camps and let a few babies crawl to safety.’386
The image of babies (surely it should be foetuses) crawling through barbed-wire fences is as bizarre as it is ludicrous, but given the context, not a surprising fantasy. ‘Pro-life’ terrorism attracted an unsavoury collection of bigots and misfits that throws light on the links between misogyny and other forms of hatred. In June 2003, Eric Robert Rudolph was charged with four bombing attacks between 1996 and 1998. They include a pipe bombing in a park hosting the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, which killed a woman and injured a hundred people, and a bombing outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, which took the life of an off-duty police officer who was acting as a guard. He was also connected to the bombing of a gay bar in Atlanta. Rudolph was a member of a white supremacist organization, and an anti-Semite who complained that Jews had taken over the world. Rudolph remains something of a folk hero to the community of Murphy, North Carolina, where he was raised and where many people express support for his views. One resident of the town was quoted as asserting: ‘Rudolph’s a Christian and I’m a Christian and he dedicated his life to fighting abortion. Those are our values.’ 387 John A. Burt is a well-known anti-choice activist who has been charged on several occasions with organizing violent protests at birth control clinics in Florida. The family of Dr Gunn, murdered in 1993, won a civil action against Burt claiming that he prompted the man convicted of the murder, Michael Griffin, to carry out the killing. Burt is also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In 2003, he was charged with sexually abusing a teenage girl.
Thirty years after the Supreme Court’s Roe vs Wade ruling secured the right to choose for US women, the so-called ‘pro-life’ movement is still active in trying to roll back that victory and force women to return to the days of the coat hanger and the knitting needle. That some in that movement have at times resorted to terrorism is a reminder that misogyny like any hatred or prejudice can result in extreme violence. It is tempting to dismiss those who murder in the name of the ‘pro-life’ movement as insane extremists. But comparing a desperate woman in need of an abortion to a genocidal Nazi as Church leaders have done does not pass the test of sanity either. Yet such invidious comparisons remain essential to the dehumanizing rhetoric of right-wing religious and conservative spokespersons determined to keep women in their subordinate position.
The politics of the body had even more deadly consequences in those areas of Africa, Asia and the Middle East where the influence of the West had been felt since the nineteenth century. But paradoxically, it was frequently because of the West’s attempt to impose more progressive and liberal values that challenged indigenous practices. In the wake of the Second World War, opposition to colonialism began to mount. Often, that opposition took the form of defending customs and traditions that the colonialists attacked. Unfortunately, these were frequently customs that were injurious to women or that expressed indigenous misogynistic beliefs. Britain’s efforts to prohibit sati, or widow burning, in India had created intense hostility to its rule (see Chapter 6). In the 1950s, in Kenya, the British government’s attempt to ban the tribal practice of clitoridectomy led to a rise in support for the anti-colonial movement known as the Mau Mau. Independence was achieved in 1962, and the practice of female genital mutilation continues.
It does so too in Egypt where it was condemned at a UN conference on Population Control held in Cairo in September 1994 as a violation of the basic human right to bodily integrity. After two little girls bl
ed to death following botched clitoridectomies in 1996, President Mubarak’s government banned it. But popular support for mutilating girls remains strong. ‘Am I supposed to stand around while my daughter chases men?’ Said Ibrahim, a farmer, was quoted as saying. ‘So what if some infidel doctor says it is unhealthy? Does that make it true? I would have circumcised my daughter even if they passed a death sentence against it. You know what honour is in Egypt. If a woman is more passive it is in her interest, it is in her father’s interest, and in her husband’s interest.’388 A seventeen-year-old teenager agreed. ‘Banning it would make women wild like those in America,’ he was reported as saying.389 It is estimated that between 80 per cent and 97 per cent of girls have undergone some form of genital mutilation in Egypt. About 100,000,000 women worldwide have suffered the procedure, and 2,000,000 more undergo it each year, including 40,000 in immigrant communities in the United States, according to the Egyptian feminist Nawal Assaad.390 However, the most momentous opposition to Western influence manifested itself in the Middle East in opposition to governmental efforts to outlaw the Islamic practice of veiling women.
Misogyny is rarely noticed as a historical catalyst, yet it has played a sometimes profound role in helping to determine the course human affairs would take. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the long and bloody sequence of events that led to the September 11 attacks on the United States began forty years earlier in a college in Afghanistan when an angry male student hurled acid in the face of a young woman student because she was not wearing the veil. His name was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and he would go on to help foment a rebellion against Afghanistan’s reforming government that would first draw the Soviets and eventually the Americans into a brutal war against Moslem fundamentalists in which the US is engaged to this day.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 25
