The politics of womanhood: from abstinence to abortion Premium

Exploring the intersection of literature and women's rights, highlighting the importance of bodily agency and access to safe abortion

A woman’s body is a political playground; it always has been. Like all politics, womanhood, with its morality and many mandates, manifests into literature and unveils the inconspicuous prejudice that grows underneath the grace and tenderness of femininity. Across the world, the issue of women’s rights — or rather, women’s access to basic human rights — has emerged and evolved constantly; first and foremost, the right to bodily agency and by extension, the right to (safe and legal) abortion. Between France becoming the first country to grant constitutional freedom to women to have an abortion and the U.S taking a step backwards by overturning Roe vs Wade two years ago, the carousel keeps turning. A closer look at literature suggests that women’s experiences of unsafe, backstreet abortions are tied more intricately than they seem.

French writer Annie Ernaux, in her first book, Cleaned Out (1974/1990), chose the comfort of fiction to confront her own horrid experience of an illicit abortion in the 1960s — she wrote about it after it had been decriminalised in France.

It was only after almost 40 years that she chose to write on the topic upfront, in her memoir Happening (2000/2001) and later again, in The Years (2008/2017). Denise, the 20-year-old protagonist of Cleaned Out, finds herself pregnant and loses faith in religion and literature, much like Ernaux who briefly lost interest in academics and the socio-political momentum of the time, occupied by the humiliation and desperation of finding a backstreet abortionist — “angel-makers” as they were popularly called. Unsupervised medication, expensive and dodgy tools, and precarious set-ups eventually lead her to a hospital, nearly dead, where the hard-hitting reality of her working-class background awaited her. “The law was everywhere,” she writes. Even when seen through the distance of time, Ernaux’s reflections hold true. In hindsight, one wonders along with her: “whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned.” Nonetheless, she felt it her duty to translate her pain into writing, for her own relief and of those like her, isolated by the laws. The question stands, much to the plight of American women today (or German women being harassed by pro-life protestors, or Irish women a few years ago).

Simone de Beauvoir, the literary beacon of women rights, especially in France, went a step further by arguing that how women are treated depends on how they are seen by society, in The Second Sex (1949/1953). She observes the role of social, religious and political agents in determining a woman’s worth as a potential carrier of future life — a vessel — as opposed to an independent entity, seen in the light of “the sexual and the reproductive” function of the body. All understanding boils down to one simple truth: anything a woman chooses to do with her body — from procreation to recreation — is a threat to society and its pecking order, which is why women are primarily placed in a position of subordination, where eliminating woman’s right to choose for herself is the safest way to minimise the very threat.

Literature has more to offer on the subject but more often than not, writings on abortion go unnoticed; they remain hidden from mainstream reading, perhaps owing to the stigma it evokes, irrespective of what the law says. The word abortion itself was often left unsaid in the rooms it was performed in; “[t]his thing had no place in language,” as Ernaux noted. Like Ernaux, other literary figures also underwent painful, silent and secret abortions, including Susan Sontag, Alice Walker (who elaborated on racial discrimination as a component of medical treatment) and Audre Lorde. They too, as writers, used the currency of their gender and their art, to materialise their experiences. All four writers went on to have children later in life, which speaks all the more for the need to have progressive laws on abortion. Their abortion was an exercise in reason, an exercise of choice, an act of desperation, and not, by any means, a protest against social order. Making such a choice inaccessible, by denying safe medical procedures, only worsens the condition; raising the risk of avoidable maternal deaths or perhaps even an increased number of abandoned, unwanted, infants.

A pro-choice attitude is often seen as a form of radical feminism by those who are pro-life. Two recent anthologies — Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (2020) edited by Annie Finch and Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not to Have Kids edited by Meghan Daum (2015) — debunk this assumption by humanising the debate of a ‘childless’ woman (by design) from a ‘childfree’ woman (by choice). “People who want kids will always outnumber people who don’t,” notes Finch. However, such writings not only help others who undergo similar experiences feel seen, but also establish reproductive freedom as a matter of social justice.

As for where India stands, legally and historically, it can be claimed that both, the ideals of motherhood and the choice of remaining childfree, have been viable in the country, as Amrita Nandy notes, in Motherhood and Choice (2017). In her academic pursuit, she cites mythology and history. Her work complements de Beauvoir’s philosophy that in society, marriage certifies a woman’s sexuality, thereby “completing” her; and that in the absence of marriage, the threat magnifies. Both writers acknowledge and deconstruct the “woman-as-womb” argument which seems to favour only the female sex and not the gender, in its fluid form; a distinction that needs more discussion.