MIM Notes 36                   March 3 1989

Sterilize all men

Having accepted the scientific truth that human life starts at 
birth and having accepted that ending that life is 
unacceptable morally-speaking as the New Right proclaims, MC5 
proposes the sterilization of all men. This is the only way to 
ensure that abortion does not occur, even in cases of rape or 
incest.

Sterilize all men: we have the technology. It is a simple 
office operation.  Every male upon reaching a certain age will 
put a lifetime's supply of sperm in a sperm bank and then have 
his tubes tied for the good of humanity.

Sterilize all men: the Ten Commandments outlaw murder, not 
artificial insemination.

Sterilize all men: this would be a much less controversial way 
to resolve the abortion issue once and for all -- no back 
alley abortions, no court fights and no lengthy political 
mobilization pitting feminists against born-again Christians.

Sterilize all men: murder in the womb will never happen again 
under any morally difficult circumstances.

Sterilize all men: the anti-abortionists who do not support 
this solution reveal their hypocrisy and the truth of every 
leftist and feminist criticism about the real motives for 
opposing choice -- namely to put women in their place by 
keeping them home raising kids and not risking too much sex.

Sterilize all men: in a few years it may be too late. Already 
France has a birth control pill that automatically aborts the 
fetus or non-fetus every month in a way that makes it 
impossible to tell if an abortion happened.

Comrade anti-abortionists: the time is now! Sterilize all men 
before it is too late!

MC5 is the pseudonym of a communist in the Maoist 
Internationalist Movement.

Well folks, Bush is president and it seems very possible that 
the Supreme Court will overturn Roe vs. Wade in the not-too-
distant future. Roe vs. Wade made it impossible for states to 
restrict the woman's right to choose abortion.

What will probably happen is that some states will then 
proceed to outlaw abortion. Others will not.

Public opinion in the United States is mildly pro-choice, 
depending heavily on how the question is phrased. Clearly the 
population is not up-in-arms over abortion because it elected 
Bush and is not rioting in the streets over the impending 
criminalization of millions of women.

This is too bad because abortion is an issue that has the 
potential to uncover many political truths about the United 
States. The untapped potential of the issue has been lost, 
however, by the terms of the discourse on abortion. By this 
the author means that the question is not murder versus 
choice. The question is not whether or not the fetus is a 
human life. The question is not whether or not that fetus has 
a "right to life" and the mother a "right to control her 
body." The whole language of rights muddies the issue.

Abortion is an issue of power and fundamentally one of 
liberation. The Amerikan public is correct in acting in a 
lukewarm fashion when the issue is the right to control one's 
body versus the right to murder someone.

Catherine MacKinnon points this out in an essay in her book 
titled Unmodified Feminism. She criticizes hinging abortion on 
the so-called right to privacy. It is not surprising that Roe 
vs. Wade came under attack with such a flimsy argument backing 
it up. Certainly no communist should be caught dead arguing 
that something is OK because of someone's private interests.

To engage in the real world practice of having abortions when 
necessary, women need a real world analysis. The whole 
political philosophy of so-called rights comes from 18th 
century men who literally believed that God placed himself in 
each person in the form of inviolable rights.

Marxists have long criticized those who would start a 
political argument from the point of view of God-given rights 
or rights established on a piece of paper backed up by God. 
There are no rights, only power struggles.

When activists act as if abortion is a God-given right or a 
right sanctified in the Constitution, it is no wonder that 
they find themselves losing in the power struggle.

What needs further and passionate examination is the social 
implications of banning abortion.  What sticks out in this is 
that banning abortion is really a move to put the woman back 
in her place in a broad scheme of social relations.

This shows when one considers that the anti-abortionists have 
never proposed sterilizing all men, which would be a more 
effective solution to the problem than attempting to control 
women's decisions regarding a pregnancy already in progress. 
Many have also pointed out that rarely do the same people who 
oppose abortion oppose the death penalty, U.S. sponsored wars 
abroad or occupational hazards that cause more deaths than all 
other kinds of homocide put together each year.  Certainly the 
lives of workers killed by occupational hazards or residents 
killed by toxic wastes are as innocent as those of the fetus?

No, the energy for the anti-abortion movement largely comes 
from religion or religious inspired tradition. In this 
tradition, the male is the God-backed authority of the 
household. He does not want his wife to work because she is 
supposed to be his dependent caring for him and his children. 
He does not want her to have too much sex either because she 
is made solely for his pleasure. If sex were easy to have, the 
woman might have sex with someone else without the 
complications of being pregnant with another man's child.

Banning abortion directly accomplishes the following at least 
some of the time: 

a. Women now forced to bear children no longer work.

b. Women at home are made dependent on their husbands.

c. Women who cannot have abortion do not risk having sex with 
people other than their husbands or people who will take care 
of the children.

Overall, banning abortion strengthens the traditional family 
by strengthening the power of the male.

  Often times, the same people who oppose abortion ironically 
also oppose birth control. Again the reason is that they 
support the traditional family and the easier it is to have 
sex, the more threats there are to the stability of that 
family.

Anti-abortion forces in France temporarily stalled the 
marketing of new technologically-advanced birth control pill 
that a woman takes once and causes a period or abortion in 
such a way that it would be impossible to tell whether 
conception had taken place or not. Still as technology like 
this advances, it is likely that the entire abortion issue 
will become obsolete. The mere possibility of storing sperm 
and artificial insemination, currently practiced by some Nobel 
laureates, indicates that social thinking is already behind 
technical possibility.

In addition to pointing to the increasing future irrelevance 
of the abortion issue -- the futility of the anti-abortion 
stance -- what needs to be pointed out right now is that the 
anti-abortion social agenda is extremely unrealistic and will 
cause nothing but human misery generally in addition to the 
oppression of women.

First of all, the majority of women now work. To send them 
back home would deal a death-blow to the economy. In addition, 
women would never agree to going back home without tremendous 
repression.

Secondly, the traditional family itself no longer fits 
economic reality. Couples in the United States work to make 
ends meet. The expansionary days of the Pax Americana -- '50s 
and '60s -- are no more. The average male cannot get a job to 
support his wife and make a downpayment on a home in suburbia 
anymore. Unemployment, inflation and interest rates since 1973 
have seen to that.

Thirdly, for a variety of reasons, extra-marital sex is the 
norm in the United States. According to a 1989 USA Today 
survey, two-thirds of all people in their first marriages (men 
and women equally) cheat on their spouses within the first 
seven years. All the religious bullshit in the world will not 
change this. It will only to serve to heighten the hypocrisy 
of the Amerikan people, a majority of whom still disapprove of 
extra-marital sex in the most dogmatic way. In addition, the 
religious movement will contribute to mental illness and 
homicide as fewer and fewer people are able to keep reality in 
line with backward moral expectations.

Fourthly, marriage itself is out-of-date for a variety of 
reasons. The average marriage in the United States lasts seven 
years. In actuality, at the current rate of divorces, there 
will come a time in the future (if the current rate is 
maintained) when the average marriage will last just barely 
over two years. Whether it is two years or seven years, the 
reality of marriage is much different than the increasingly 
hypocritical norms the New Right is trying to impose.

Banning abortion is an attempt to go back in time in a way 
that is impossible. The economic damage alone that it would 
cause would result in the deaths of many people through 
economically caused crime, mental illness, homelessness and 
starvation.

What is needed is a new socialist morality that is not 
impossibly out-of-line with reality. If monogamous and stable 
relations are desired, a socialist answer would be to require 
employers or governments to provide jobs for both husband and 
wife -- jobs commensurate with the goals of both marriage 
partners. This would remove many economic pressures to 
separate because changes in the nature of the labor market in 
the last 25 years are the single most important reason for the 
instability of the Amerikan family.

A socialist state would also assure child care that relieved 
the burden of working women. This again would uncomplicate 
marriage.

Another forward-looking solution to the instability of the 
family would be comparable worth laws that would eradicate the 
male/female income gap. As it stands now, men have financial 
incentives to divorce because their wives make much less money 
than they do on average. Of course, the reactionary solution 
is to make women 100% economically dependent on men again so 
that they will have no incentive to divorce and do everything 
humanly possible to prevent divorce, but that is not likely to 
happen as already mentioned.

Having stated these forward-looking possibilities -- and there 
are many more -- the author should point out that none of the 
above is a policy prescription for individuals who exist under 
the current capitalist patriarchy.  Being married or unmarried 
is neither inherently correct nor incorrect in the current 
context. Gender relations are so fundamentally warped by the 
system that there is no reformist answer for individuals. The 
only option is to work to change the entire structure of 
gender relations. Then the possibility for correct relations 
will start to exist. Until then individuals must grope their 
way through without set formulas.