PART 5: FREEDOM FOR TRADE OR FREEDOM FOR SURVIVAL?
14. Self-Determination: The End of a Utopia?*
Maria Mies
Introduction
The demand for self-determination, for autonomy with regard to our bodies and our lives, is one of the fundamental demands of the women’s movement. It has been voiced during many campaigns: the campaign against violence against women; the campaign for autonomous and woman-sensitive health-care, and above all in the context of the struggle against restrictive abortion laws.
The political aim of self-determination for women, often designated as the right to self-determination, as autonomy and control of one’s body, has been consciously or unconsciously derived from the fundamental right of self-determination, the right to bodily intactness and integrity. This fundamental right stems, as we know, from the catalogue of human rights put forward in the course of the bourgeois revolutions. It was mainly upheld against the state and its invasions into the private sphere of the individual. What led the women of the old, and in part also of the new, women’s movement to the barricades, is the fact that this fundamental right, as written into all modern constitutions, does not apply to women. For women were not granted this right of determination over the self, and especially not over our bodies, which have been treated as the property of others, as a territory occupied by men: medicine-men, statesmen, churchmen and of course men in general. Female reproductive organs and female generative power especially suffered from this occupation. Thus, for women, self-determination meant first, the liberation from occupation, the end of the determination-by-others, by men and by patriarchal social powers. The demand for self-determination was, therefore, a defensive one, based on the right to resistance, the right to defend the self.
Yet this concept also include, and still includes an element of utopia, something that women saw as the goal of our struggles: the autonomous and self-determined woman.
Until recently this was my utopia also, but perhaps I did not reflect enough on its background and consequences. In the context of our struggle against the new genetic and reproductive technologies, however, I arrived at a different understanding, especially after having read papers by American feminists at Rutgers University, discussed in the last chapter.1
Before debating any further the dilemma concerning self-determination, revealed to us through new biomedical developments, I should like to name a second reason why we must reconsider the concept of self-determination.
In 1986, Farida Akhter in her article ‘Depopulating Bangladesh’ wrote that the most important strategy of Western radical feminists had been their distance, politically and intellectually, from the interventionists (the international establishment of population control). Yet this strategy had not been very successful in Bangladesh, where feminism was still considered a Western creed and also because Western women had not been the victims of such interventionist politics of reproduction. She continues:
It is difficult for a feminist of the West to understand that a notion like the reproductive rights of women or the control of women over their own bodies has no meaning for the majority of women in Bangladesh. The processes of poverty and underdevelopment have reduced their lives to a margin narrowly above death by chronic starvation. The instinct of survival predominates over the urge for emancipation. In the sterilization camps and clinics of Bangladesh, when a woman undergoes surgery for ligation, she submits her body to mutilation not because she wants to emancipate herself from reproductive responsibilities, but in most cases for money and an apparel known as sari, which are received as incentives. They add to her ability to survive as they can be exchanged for food. Nowhere do the rights of women become of any concern.2
Farida Akhter insists that the question of emancipation is as important for Bangladeshi women as it is for Western feminists. What she criticizes is that demands for ‘control over one’s own body’ or for ‘reproductive rights for women’ are voiced by Western feminists in such countries as Bangladesh, without any regard for the economic, political, or cultural impositions of international capitalism.
When feminists in the West demand reproductive self-determination for all women, without at the same time attacking the exploitative economic world order from which they themselves profit, then this demand is on the same level as was Ronald Reagan’s demand for human rights at a time when the US was supporting military dictatorships in the ‘Third World’.
‘Third World’ women criticize the demand for self-determination for still another reason. The utopia of the independent, isolated and autonomous female individual is not attractive to them. They oppose patriarchal exploitation and oppression, which, in their world as in ours, is often perpetuated by the institution of the family. But their concept of women’s liberation does not imply severing all communal relations, they cannot conceptualize the isolation of the individual woman as something positive. They know that for them there is no such safety net as the modern welfare state, and that they therefore need the net of relations provided by family, village and community. They do not wish to live free and alone in the anonymity of big cities, to die finally, as we shall, in a home for the old.
Thus, the demand for self-determination must be reconsidered from two perspectives. First, is self-determination of the individual woman still what we believe women’s liberation essentially to be? Secondly, must we not take seriously the critique of this utopia, offered by our sisters of the ‘Third World’?
Demands made by the ‘Global Network on Reproductive Rights’ for reproductive rights for women, for instance, not only transform questions of reproduction and sexuality into legal problems, but maintain the idea of individual self-determination of each woman as the essence of our emancipatory hopes. It is tacitly understood that these reproductive rights would be furthered by reproductive technologies of an anti-natalistic as well as a pronatalistic character.3
The dilemma of self-determination
The dilemma concerning the right to self-determination which now confronts many of us, becomes evident in the following arguments: (a) if we oppose the new reproductive technologies, we should also oppose abortion. Thus we would come to the conservative position;4 and (b) if we demand the right of abortion in the name of self-determination and reproductive autonomy, we must concede the same right to the woman who decides in favour of one or the other new ‘reproductive alternatives’. Aside from coercion, any technology which enhances control over our bodies must be welcomed. This, for instance, is the argument of L.B. Andrews.5
What is wrong with this argument? Looking more closely, we notice that the original direction of the struggle for self-determination has changed. While we women strove originally for liberation from exploitative and oppressive male-female relations, we now deal with the question of ‘emancipation’ from the uncontrolled reproductive potential of the female body, of ‘emancipation’ from our female nature. This nature is more and more seen as a handicap from which bio-technical experts must liberate us, either through pro- or anti-natalist technology. Thus, women’s liberation becomes the result of technical progress and no longer means the transformation of patriarchal man-woman relations.
Instead of steering our efforts toward changing gender relations between the sexes, including sexual relations, we are encouraged to accept fast ‘technical fixes’. Male-female relations and their contextualizations remain unchanged; we can point to no major change in these relations in terms of greater autonomy for women. On the contrary, the quick ‘technical fixes’ have freed men more than ever from responsibility for the consequences of sexual intercourse and have imposed on women a new determination-by-others, a new heteronomy. This becomes domination by pharmaceutical concerns, medical experts, the state, as well as by men who now expect women to be always available to them.
The dilemma that women face with regard to self-determination is not at all recent. The old as well as the new women’s movements have at least partially overworked themselves in their attempt to bring about the French Revolution ‘aufeminin’, demanding for women the freedom, equality and autonomy which, according to the bourgeois revolutions, would apply to all human beings. And in these efforts we come up against, now as then, the barrier which our female anatomy, our female body, seemingly constitutes. To overcome this barrier and to constitute woman as a self-determined subject, too, was the aim of the old women’s liberation movement. As far as ‘body politics’ goes, the Movement for Birth Control, Sexual Reform, Self-determined Motherhood and Protection of Mothers started at the end of the nineteenth century. This movement demanded, as Susan Zimmermann has shown, that women take conscious possession of their body and its needs. This was a central element in establishing the right over the self, the right to determine the self. And, further,
the idea of such a right to self-determination over the body, a body which was analytically clearly seen as separated and apart from consciousness, has its roots, quite obviously, in the freedom of the individual from personal dependency and direct personal subjection. This freedom is a constitutive postulate of bourgeois society.6
Yet, it was already clear that this right of self-determination depends on whether or not a woman is the owner, the proprietor of her body. ‘Woman must become the owner, the mistress of herself… Knowledge, humanity’s only salvation, must empower woman to decide by herself whether she is to become a mother or not … That indeed will liberate woman.’7 This movement strove to allow woman to rise from the position of ‘object’ to that of the intelligent individual, ‘to being a self-steering subject, to rise from being a “thing” to being a person or personality — and thus, with the help of modern knowledge of the body, to acquire the ability to take possession of her materiality, to govern and steer it.’8
Susan Zimmermann points out that this attempt to become a self-determined subject meant not only that woman had to divide herself into an owning, governing, controlling part — the head — and controlled, possessed parts, but also that in the final analysis, this movement had to ask for the help of the state in guaranteeing the restructuring of woman as a civil subject. Thus, the state would gain control over the ‘product and the production process’.9 She concludes: ‘Where bourgeois individuality emerges, every direct and spontaneous self-organization of the holistic living connectedness including that of the own person, broadly speaking — gets lost.’10
The questions we ask ourselves today in our struggle against the new reproductive technologies, are not in fact that new. But perhaps this is the first time we are looking critically at an idea which, since the Enlightenment, has become the fundamental concept of emancipation and freedom: the concept of self-determination.
Historical and philosophical foundations of the concept of self-determination
Why was the entire effort of the old women’s movement focused upon finally giving woman the status of a citizen, of a subject? It was because this subject, this individual, this free, self-assured, autonomous person had been the goal of all attempts at emancipation, of all bourgeois revolutions. Yet when we look more closely at the history of these revolutions we notice that while freedom, equality, and autonomy were postulated as universal human rights for all, entire categories of human beings were de facto excluded from these human rights: the slaves who worked for European colonialists on the plantations in America; and workers without property. For only the owners of property could be subjects in the full societal sense.11
Thus, when we look at the totality of these processes, instead of narrowing our vision to an androcentric and eurocentric perspective, we can formulate the following thesis: the rise of man was based on the descent of woman. Europe’s progress was based on the regression of colonies. The development of productive forces (science, technology) was based on robbery, warfare and violence, at home as well as in the colonies. And self-determination of the social individual, the subject, was — and is — based on the definition of the Other’, the definition as object, of certain human beings. In other words: autonomy of the subject is based on heteronomy (being determined by others) of some Other (nature, other human beings, ‘lower’ parts of the self).
The relation between self-determination and determination-by-others is antagonistic, and necessarily so in this dualistic paradigm. We have been told that, since the eighteenth century, European citizenry had freed itself from being determined by others by its willingness for hard work — the protestant ethic, the progress of science and its new wealth. The fact is, however, that this new class, and civil society at large, would not have come into possession of these riches without the simultaneous colonization of the world, of nature, and of women.
The costs for the rise of the citizen, of the ‘free’ social subject, were borne by others. And these costs are usually justified — by liberals as well as Marxists — by reference to the teleology of history. They are said to have been necessary if humanity was to rise from barbarism to civilization, to culture, to freedom.12
Simone de Beauvoir’s enlightenment heritage
If I said: self-determination cannot exist without determination-by-others, and put this within a larger historical context, it would become necessary to prove that my statement applies to the individual woman and to women in general. I do not only mean to say that white middle-class women in the North can gain more self-determination through further subjection of nature and of the Third World,13 I mean this also with regard to the relation that the individual woman develops to herself, to her body. I have already mentioned that she had to learn, since the Age of Enlightenment, to perceive her own body — as well as nature — as something separate from the self, or even as her enemy. She had to split herself into this master-slave relationship or, to remind us of the supermarket of saleable body parts, to divide herself into several pieces, in order to become a social subject, the owner of her own person. This is the necessary consequence of the emancipatory utopia which began during the Enlightenment with the ‘white man’s’ domination of nature, of women, of colonies.
As Evelyn Fox Keller14 and others have argued, since the Enlightenment efforts have been made to erase from our concept of knowledge all that might remind us that humans are born from women and must die, that they have a body, senses, emotions, such as sympathy or antipathy, that furthermore they possess experience and, finally, that they are in a ‘living relationship’, with the environment: the earth, the water, the air, plants, animals, and other human beings.
The same process of self-alienation occurred with regard to the human body. Anatomy thus became the leading science that took power over the body and provided the methodological principles for the developing natural sciences: ‘To render visible, to dissect, to discover’ — the vivisection of the holistic, living interconnectedness and of the relationship between the human being and his/her body.15
Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of the ‘woman question’, as well as her utopia of women’s emancipation, has its philosophical roots in the Hegelian master-slave dialetics, as mediated by Sartre.16 According to Hegel, self-consciousness (the assuredness of the self) — and with it also self-determination, the so-called being-for-the-self — can develop only in opposition to life, in transcending the mere being immersed in life cycles. Yet this life, the organic world, the everyday world of particular experiences, is necessary because we are not purely mind. This being-immersed-in-life Sartre and de Beauvoir call immanence. Freedom, self-determination, higher values and culture can be reached only by transcending this immanence. According to Hegel, the self can only become conscious of itself in opposition to another consciousness, as external object. This object is at the same time the object of desire. The Ego (self-consciousness) tries to ‘incorporate’ the Other, the object, through overcoming its otherness. The satisfaction of desire implies overcoming the independent otherness. Through the destruction of the Other’s independence, the Ego realizes its own self-consciousness as being in the world.
This is also how Simone de Beauvoir refers to the male-female relationship: man reaches his freedom and transcendence by separating himself from immanence and by making woman his Other, that is, by annihilating her autonomous being. De Beauvoir’s problem then is: how can woman reach transcendence? For transcendence represents for de Beauvoir, as well as for Hegel and Sartre, freedom and self-determination. This cannot be attained through being immersed in everyday life. Women’s emancipation means to achieve transcendence which is self-determination through freely chosen actions and projects, such as careers and social and cultural activity, rather than housework and childcare.
The dilemma of self-determination within the dualism of transcendence (self-determination/freedom, the universal) and immanence (life/nature, the organic/the animal, the particular) is clearly revealed. We as women must, according to de Beauvoir, face the problems of the conflict between our conscious being as autonomous subject and our physical being, our female body.
Even if we agree with de Beauvoir that it was men’s doing to lock women into immanence (into life, into dailiness, kitchen, the mere life cycles, biology), we must ask how self-determination can be possible within this framework. According to de Beauvoir, what women ‘demand today is to be recognized as existents by the same right as men and not to subordinate existence to life, the human being to its animality.’17 She maintains the dualistic and hierarchical split between life and freedom/self-determination, between nature and culture, between spirit and matter. She maintains alienation from the body, especially from the female body which, according to her, hinders self-determination (transcendence). Our body is our enemy. Thus, she does not question this split, European man’s project, particularly since the Enlightenment, as the prerequisite for freedom and emancipation. She wants to be like man, like the master, and sees no other possibility but to establish dominance of the head (master) within the female body (slave).
Although de Beauvoir states quite clearly that male self-determination is based on the subjection and determination-by-others of women and nature, she hopes to reach female self-determination by following exactly the same logic, which must however mean to subject some other Other. For, according to this paradigm, without object there is no subject, without immanence there is no transcendence, without slavery there is no freedom. Who then is the Other for women? That is de Beauvoir’s question. It is, consequently, the female body perceived as enemy, particularly its ‘wild’ generative capacities.
In my view, here is the explanation of the fact that many feminists perceive the new reproductive technologies as a contribution to women’s emancipation, for these technologies will seemingly make us more independent of this animal body. No wonder, then, that some French feminists declared that having rationalized production through technology, it is now logical to rationalize reproduction. Those who define autonomy, self-determination, transcendence, and freedom in Simone de Beauvoir’s terms, cannot but agree to self-mutilation, or to the mutilation of others.
Re-creation of a ‘living relation’18
As I said earlier, the position of so-called liberals and progressives, and of so-called conservatives, with regard to a pregnant woman’s relation to the being growing within her, are not as different as loud polemics may infer.19 In both cases the symbiosis between embryo and woman is analytically being dissected. The so-called liberals and progressives say that the embryo is nothing but a cluster of cells, a thing, a piece of property. The conservatives say that the embryo is a fully-fledged legal person who must above all be protected from the woman.
Both regard the embryo as something alien to and separate from the pregnant woman. As can be seen in this example as soon as this symbiosis, this living relation, is technically dissected, these parts enter into an antagonistic relation. One part will combat the other: there is a subject-object relationship. As the embryo does not yet have self-determination, the state, as the highest social subject, becomes a stand-in during the struggle against the mother. The same happens when the embryo is considered a thing, a piece of property, which then needs protection. Here also, in the final analysis, the state must guarantee that the interests of the given property-owners (of eggs, embryos, sperm, etc.) be respected against misuse and damages. In order to protect the interests of the concerned parties (as we must now call them) from damages and damage suits, detailed contracts must be concluded between clinic and woman, physician and woman, woman and man, and so forth. The state must guarantee the fulfilment of such contracts. More liberalization, therefore, leads necessarily to more state intervention. All demands for self-determination are addressed to the state: it should either provide more liberal laws or abolish limiting ones. What most women do not want to know, however, is that the state will do this only if we give it more control over all reproductive processes — pre-natal care, hospital births — and that it is technology that makes this increasing control possible.
Furthermore, women’s demands for self-determination are directed to science and technology which are supposed to bring us either safer means of contraception or safe motherhood. In this many overlook that they put themselves more and more into the hands of multinational, profit-oriented pharmaceutical corporations that do worldwide business with fertility as well as with infertility. And what of ‘self-determination’ then? Women have the ‘self-determined’ choice between several pills, spirals, intrauterine devices, pessaries, abortions. They can choose between different firms that produce these means, as they can choose between ‘Tide’ and ‘All’. The politics of population control within the ‘Third World’ is increasingly carried on according to methods of ‘social marketing’. Here, women can maintain the illusion of ‘self-determination’ and ‘freedom of choice’ by having permission to choose between pink, green, and gold pills. Yet we women know that there is no contraceptive device that does not harm the female body. Self-determination has in fact been reduced to ‘freedom of choice in the supermarket’. Self-determination still means then simultaneous determination-by-others of a part of ourselves, or else the harming of the symbioses we ourselves represent.
Since these connections have become clear to me, I cannot use the concept of self-determination in this naive way as an expression for a feminist utopia. Of course, that does not provide us with a different concept. But for me, the example of reproductive technologies has clarified one thing: we must oppose further vivisection by the techno-patriarchs in the name of our ‘self-determination’ of the living relations, the symbioses. For it is this technological split which renders possible the antagonism between parts, their marketing and use. The female body as provider of raw materials for the bio-future-industry of Mr All Powerful!
I am aware that the concept of symbiosis has negative connotations within the women’s movement. In psychoanalysis, the separation of the individual from the symbiosis with the mother is considered the premise for adulthood, for autonomy. It is always implied that symbiosis, ‘the living together’ — for that is what symbiosis means — cannot but mean a parasitical, dominative relationship, supposedly glued to our female anatomy. Yet we know that this relationship of domination between mother and child is not simply ‘nature’, but rather the result of societal shaping of women within patriarchal societies, a result of violence. The problem does not lie with our anatomy which enables us to bring forth children, but rather with the destruction of living relations and patriarchal dominance. Technological strategies of contraception have not eliminated this dominance nor led to the preservation and rebuilding of these living connections, but rather to further degrade and atomize women.20
The re-creation of living relations does not only mean that we must refuse the technodocs further access to our bodies, but also that other human beings, women, men and children stand in a living social relation to the pregnant or to the infertile woman. The re-creation of living relations also means that the relation between the generations, above all between mothers and daughters, will be freed from patriarchal chains. Women’s liberation cannot mean that each daughter-generation must first of all see itself in enmity to the mother-generation and that freedom must be exercised first as ‘separation from the mothers’. From where should the support, knowledge, and, yes, love also, come, that a woman needs when she realizes that she is pregnant or that she is infertile? Without a supportive environment, a loving or living relation with, above all the mother-generation, the individual woman has nothing with which to oppose the technodocs, or the state.
Re-creating living relations also means that men, too, accept responsibility for life, including responsibility for the consequences of sexual intercourse, unlike the old saying: ‘Lust for us, burden for women’. I see no prospect for the liberation of women in the removal, by technology, of the burden that our female corporality attaches to our lust, so that we, like men, could then enjoy ‘pure lust’. In my opinion, women’s liberation cannot mean Separation from this corporality, a ‘rise’ into men’s realm of transcendence; on the contrary, it must mean the attachment of men to these living connections, this dailiness, this burden, this immanence. For that, there is no need for new technologies but rather new relations between the sexes, where lust and burden will be shared equally. It is time that both women and men begin to understand that nature is not our enemy, that our body is not our enemy, that our mothers are not our enemies.
Notes
1. See Chapter 13.
2. Farida Akhter, Depopulating Bangladesh. Dhaka, UBINIG, 1986, pp. 2-3.
3. The position of the Global Network on Reproductive Rights is fundamentally the same as that of liberal feminism.
4. This argument was put forward after our first congress: ‘Women Against Reproductive and Genetic Engineering’ in Bonn, April 1985, by Arnim v. Gleich. (See Arnim v. Gleich, ‘Gentechnologie und Feminismus.’ Kommune, Vol. 3, No. 12, 1985, pp. 51-54.) This position was discussed in Kommune Vol. 3, No. 12, 1985, by Heidemarie Dann, Maria Mies and Regine Walch.
5. See Mies, Chapter 3. Several feminists have already addressed this argument which puts feminists and foetalists on an equal footing. Janice Raymond has pointed out that from a woman-centred position one could never say that feminists and foetalists are the same. (See Janice G. Raymond, ‘Fetalists and Feminists: They are not the Same.’ In Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress, Patricia Spallone and Deborah L. Steinberg, (eds), London, Pergamon (1987). In West Germany, Renate Sadrozinski again discussed this point in the context of the debate on a new Embryo Protection Law proposed to the Parliament. (See Renate Sadrozinski, ‘Kinder oder keine-entscheiden wir alleine’ — On the Abolition of the Law Against Abortion and the Patriarchal Need to Protect Embryos. Reproductive and Genetic Engineering, Journal of International Feminist Analysis Vol. 2, No. 1 (1989), pp. 1-10.) I agree with Janice Raymond that the status of motherhood cannot be raised (as the foetalists would have it) until the status of women generally is raised (as the foetalists would not have it) (Raymond, p. 65), but I do not share her belief that an appeal to give women the same human rights as men will solve this dilemma.
6. Susan Zimmermann, ‘Sexualreform und neue Konzepte von Mutterschaft und Mutterschutz Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts.’ Diploma dissertation, University of Vienna, 1985/86, p. 11.
7. Ibid., p. 12.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 120.
11. Nevertheless this was not strictly observed for women. In the US and the UK, for instance, rich women property owners had the vote, but in the course of the nineteenth century the suffrage was taken away from them. Thus, woman, even if she owned property, could no longer be a political subject. Obviously, this was the consequence of her being ‘subject’ to a man through marriage. We must note that women were not left behind, they were returned to a less developed stage. Slaves suffered the same fate when, in the British colonies for instance, they were forbidden to become Christians; slave status was considered incompatible with the (Protestant) freedom of the Christian. It was said, therefore, that ‘negroes’ were of a different species, were not full human beings. Hegel explained this demotion of ‘negroes’ to the level of sub-humans and therefore slavehood, by saying they had not risen above the natural state. (See G. Wilhelm Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1970). Rhoda Reddock has shown that British settlers justified slavery by asserting, upon the findings of ethnologists, that ‘negroes’ belonged to another species. (See Rhoda Reddock, A History of Women and Labour in Trinidad and Tobago, Zed Books, London, 1993.) All these regressions from humanity to ‘nature,’ these ‘naturizations’ as I have called them, took place at the same time as bourgeois revolutions aimed at creating the free, self-determining individual.
12. Victims are being comforted by assurances that they also will at some time — through further development, and productive effort — reach the masters’ level. What is good for the rulers, said Engels, is good for all. (See F. Engels, The Family, Private Property and the State.) But regardless of whether or not this is so, we must come to understand that the logic of a ‘catching-up development’ or the politics of the rise of the oppressed to the status of ‘free and self-determining subjects’ cannot succeed, either politically, economically, or culturally. For when the oppressed have climbed one step, the rulers will again be two steps ahead on the ladder of this unending process.
13. Irene Stoehr and Angelika Birk, ‘Der Fortschritt entlasst seine Tochter.’ In Frauen und Ökologie, Gegen den Machbarkeitswahn, Die GRÜNEN im Bundestag (Köln, Volksblattverlag, 1987). Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London, Zed Books, 1991.
14. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985.
15. Hartmut Bohme and Gernot Bohme, Das Andere der Vernunft, Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitatsstrukturen am Biespiel Kants. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1985, p. 52.
16. See also the discussion of Sartre and de Beauvoir in Mary O’Brien ‘Sorry We Forgot Your Birthday,’ in The Politics of Reproduction. London, Rouüedge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Genevieve Lloyd has also discussed and criticized de Beauvoir’s conceptualization of women’s emancipation. Genevieve Lloyd, Male and Female in Western Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
17. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. New York, Vintage Books, Random House, 1974, p. 73.
18. I am not sure if ‘living relation’ is the best translation of the German expression ‘der lebendige Zusammenhang’, which signifies the necessary living and life-sustaining interrelatedness of life on earth, at the personal as well as the social or communal level. It implies materiality and reciprocity.
20. If a pregnant woman does not want to bring her pregnancy to term, this living symbiosis is also disrupted. But this is not, as Renate Sadrozinski has pointed out, an act of self-determination (see Sadrozinski, p. 4) but rather the choice to resist a situation which is basically determined by patriarchal structures.
*Revised version of an article first published in Resources for Feminist Research, Vol. 18, No. 3, September 1989.