abortion and cultivation

8/2/2019 Abortion and Cultivation

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Population Control

& Ecofeminism:

The Abortion &Cultivation of LifE.

BY ALEXANDRIA BROWN


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INTRODUCTION.

Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what

it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside

your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you-- is to die soon.

--Silenius, via Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy

2011 was a landmark year for the pro-life agenda, with states passing 83 new laws aimed at

restricting access to abortion and 2012 is shaping up to be even worse. At a recent House Committee

discussing whether or not no-cost birth control coverage trampled on freedom of religion, Chairman

Rep. Darrell Issa refused to include even a single female witness, suggesting the hearing is not about

reproductive rights and contraception. The meeting went on with a panel consisting entirely of men. A

didactic pro-life horror film called The Life Zone recently premiered in the U.S., geared at terrifying

women into not getting abortions. The plot plays out Republican fantasies of kidnapping women from

abortion clinics, imprisoning them, and forcing them to give birth to unwanted children. This state of

affairs would already be a horror story for the basic dignity and quality of life of many women in the


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United States and abroad even if women's rights activists were thinking of it in the most selfish and

myopic way. But the moment we contextualize the special interest issue in terms of sustainability and

climate change, its urgency crystallizes to a new level.

Our excessive consumption of coal, natural gas and oil has led to a level of greenhouse gases

which is rapidly warming our planet to unprecedented levels. Most people know that. Fewer, however,

know the grisly details. As Bill McKibben explains in his bookEaarth: Making A Life on a Tough New

Planet: By early 2008 half of Australia was in drought, and forecasters were calling it the new

normal[...] 'We are trying to avoid the term 'drought' and saying this is the new reality.' They are trying

to avoid the term drought because it implies the condition may someday end. (E, 5) And this, in turn,

impacts our food production: Researchers calculate that the new aridity and heat have led to

reductions in wheat, corn and barley yields of about 40 million tons a year. (E, 6) This problem is not

limited to the outlying regions in Australia. Aridity leads to widespread fires, including those in Russia

which reduced the country's annual wheat exports, in turn generating a spike in food prices, arguably

were a contributing factor to the Arab Spring uprisings. By 2050, according to some recent models, as

many as 700 million of the world's 9 billion people will be climate change refugees. (E, 84). The US

military has explicitly begun to plan for the mobilization of its forces to cope with mass humanitarian

disasters that we can expect as a result of climate change. (E, 85)

According to James Howard Kunstler in The Long Emergency, a billion people is about the

limit that the planet can support when it is run on a nonindustrial basis.Our global population has long

since overshot this number. We are currently heading towards 9 billion. We are increasingly facing the

threat of peak oil, and almost all of our basic power sources are non-renewable, taking millions, if not

billions of years to replenish themselves. Given this clear association between overpopulation and

sustainability, then, family planning becomes not merely an issue to be battled out between those

concerned about religious freedom and those concerned about women's rights. Instead, it is an issue

for those concerned about the very viability of life on this planet. And not only do more people


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consume more resources, thus accelerating the pace of climate change for everyone, but on the

individual level, they also generate more lives which will merely be victimized and tortured when those

resources run out.

In Chinese medicine, there are not simple, linear cause and effect dynamics in psychological

and physical illnesses. Instead, it is taken for granted that one affects the other. And even though in

many Western traditions the psyche and physis are viewed as separate issues, scientific medical

research increasingly bears out the indication that one is wholly capable of impacting the other. So, too,

we can no longer to afford to delineate between the individual choices that we make, and the impact

they have on the global environment and economy. While population may not be the single determining

factor in our species' future success, families are not created in a vacuum either. Given the potential

loss of our ability to depend on the fossil fuels which run our industrialized world, the religious fervor

surrounding the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply may prove to be one of the single most

dangerous maxims determining how we will fare in the Long Emergency of the future. If population

is such a critical factor in sustainability, it means women are not merely being reduced to vessels whose

life has no inherent value when they are denied the right to choose. Instead, their fate is something

worse: their bodies become a stealth bomber vessel against the viability of humanity and ultimately

much of the biosphere. With the above data in mind, then, we must ask: which side is truly the one

defending the sanctity of life?

Hence, there is currently an unprecedented need for a strategic alliance between those who work

for a right to abortion and those who are concerned about the prospect of climate change. But how do

we address the issue conceptually? When we return to the basic question of a right to abortion and

contraception, our question has been complicated: we no longer merely ask whether we ought to abort

but also whether we can afford not to. The goal is, as much as possible, to bring the reality of private

conduct and social policy in line with both what is ethically right and ecologically sustainable.

However, it will not be enough to provide an avalanche of data. To bring about these changes will


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require, for many, a massive philosophical and political reorientation. For those who believe in the

doctrine of the eternal soul, and that the end of the world has been willed by God, our conduct

regarding such issues in the short term is always going to be far more important than sustainability in

the medium to long term, because for most sects of Christianity such conduct determines an

individual's salvation. I will argue that to counter these doctrines requires reconceiving of the ego as

something which is achieved, and embodied, versus something that is eternal, immutable and

metaphysical. But again, we can no longer decontextualize the ethical issues of abortion away from

their concrete impact on sustainability and the environment. We need to be prepared to ask, of a

religious right which considers itself the 'steward' of the earth with an authority granted by God, what

exactly is humane about preserving life at its bare minimum in the form of children born to

unprepared families in ecologically unsustainable conditions, only to have them die off.

Life wants life: species do not get to the point of running themselves of a literal or metaphorical

cliff like lemmings easily. So ultimately, most traditional distinctions in this debate will be insufficient.

To have a conceptual framework for rigorously thinking about the ethical implications of abortion in an

age of overpopulation and climate change, we need to experimentally suspend our faith in the value of

mere life, as such, and ask how to cultivate such life into something which is both valuable (in terms of

quality of life) andsustainable. The question of how to justify the cultivation of a family in such

conditions invites renewed perspective on the nature of the self, the relation of woman to nature, the

question of an alliance between ecofeminists and animal rights activists, and, ultimately, the question of

what ethical issues are resolved through a strategic alliance between ecofeminists and Continental

thinkers: of the question of the value of bare life, as both schools of thought confront the religious right.

At base, we confront something new: the ethics of population.

I. WHATISKILLINGANDWHYISITWRONG?


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Thou Shalt Not Kill. On the surface, there is something counter-intuitive about the fact that this

is a Christian maxim. Why would as world-denying and socio-historically bloodthirsty religion as

Christianity, which considers embodiment and flesh to be the origin of sin and locates the ultimate form

of spiritual prestige in martyrdom, prize the sanctity of life? But before we ask that, we might benefit

from going more basic, and asking this: What is it to kill? The common law definition of murder is the

unlawful killing of a human by another human with malice aforethought. Proponents of the pro-life

stance generally define abortion and, in some cases, all contraception as murder by appealing to the

human part of this the fetus is defined as a human being and therefore guaranteed the protection of

the law.

Of course, historically, bloody crusades have been fought up to present day in the name of the

very same religious righteousness. And in the case of some Christian traditions, only Christian human

life of the appropriate sect is worth defending. Philosophically, we see that the very tradition of

Christianity is one that conceptually exalts death and the process of decay by raising up crucifixion as

the absolute in honor and prioritizing a metaphysical world above our finite, embodied world of flesh.

One of the major conceptual foundations of this stance is a disembodied, Cartesian worldview which

permits the position to suggest that life begins at conception. It is not, the story goes on the right, that

we evolved gradually from humans into animals, and it is not that humans are gradually born out of

their mothers' flesh; instead, there is a metaphysical plane which all-at-once intercepts into the inert

medium of the physical world, resembling, if anything, the moment of insemination where we take the

male body as a metaphor for the metaphysical realm and the female for the physical realm. God says

let there be light! and the soul is introduced into the flesh. As such, life begins at conception and

there is no way for abortion not to be murder.

Even somewhat stronger versions of this justification, including the tradition known as

traducianism, retain the same problems. According to traducianism, the fetus does not receive its soul

through a third spiritual party intervening at the moment of conception but rather, immanently and


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through the souls of its parents. Yet even proponents of such a tradition acknowledge that there is not

clear biblical justification for condemning abortion. In some places the Bible explicitly states that if a

man induces miscarriage in a woman, the only punishment is to be a small fine unless the woman

herself is harmed. (Erickson) Abortion is condemned in this text merely because of the idea that since it

is probably true that the fetus has a soul, we probably ought not to kill it. Therefore, in such traditions

killing involves the termination of the soul's interface with the physical world and the soul is taken as

an atomistic, eternal substance which engages in social interactions only incidentally. Ultimately the

primary relationship is to God. This distinction will become significant in the section that follows.

II. WHATKINDOFSUBJECTISWOMAN?

One of the arguments we will have to destabilize in order to destabilize the ethical grounds of

the 'sanctity of life' movement is the idea of the atomistic self, or the eternal, immortal soul. This could

be done through destabilizing anthropocentrism, or the idea that we should grant priority to human

lives over animals because then the idea of being pro-life while eating the meat of animals who have

been scientifically demonstrated to possess consciousness is hypocritical. Or it could be done through

destabilizing the very idea that atomistic, individual lives egos, or eternal souls can be said to exist

at all. While both arguments are ethically significant, for our purposes I will be looking at the latter

argument, and arguing that we can actually retain a modified concept of the ego while still destabilizing

the 'eternalism' and 'atomism' which makes it possible to conceive of the fetus as having serious

personhood while it is still in the womb.

If we were to try to oppose the traditional secular humanist worldview to the worldview of the

religious right, the traditions would basically be talking past one another. One has scientific rationalism

at is basis and one has, in many cases, a mandate to precisely believe in the absence of evidence as

proof of faith. But pragmatically, other approaches could appeal to those sects of Christianity which


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particularly in those species which are so fully social that individuals cannot survive long without other

members of their community being present, for example humans, or bees. Since the scientific,

organismic level of selfhood, then, is not useful for the question at hand, we have to turn to the politico-

philosophical realm.

April Flakne will re-evaluate the role of Aristotle's philosophy of friendship in providing this

model of selfhood, working against previous interpretations of his Nicomachean Ethics which have

simply suggested that the friend provides a mirror or mediator for self-construction. She does so by

appealing to the wordsunaisthesis -- and a famous line in the Nicomachean ethics in which Aristotle

enjoins us to share the friend's perception or consciousness. But how can we share in the consciousness

of another being? What is such a claim, which seems clearly absurd? We must try to get to the heart of

this ambivalent wish for identity and difference in relation to the friend. (42) Flakne argues that, for

Aristotle, it is not that the self-relation is extended as-if to the other person. Further, she dismisses

interpretations which would suggest that friendships occur when both subjectivities identify with the

same abstract, impersonal, nous. Flakne goes so far as to argue that subjectivity decidedly does not pre-

exist the activity of friendship and that shared consciousness actuallyprecedes self consciousness. It is

not to say that my friend merely mirrors myself or aids in my self-understanding; it is to say that she

plays a constitutive role in bringing this self into being. (42) This happens in the political and social

sphere. This activity is both necessary and normative insofar as excellent persons, recognizing the

origins of their ethical selfhood in the experience of sunaisthesis, will aim in their choice at reinvoking

the sunaisthetic experience... through choosing to engage in the activities of speaking and thinking

together. Again, the end result of this is not merely the brutely pragmatic recognition of discrete

organisms, the sense in which sunaisthesis occurs in all species. Rather than merely ensuring that we

feed in the same place, which even cattle can do, the ultimate goal of dialogical friendship is the

cultivation of the ethical self, which involves a recognition ofotherness or difference: this is done by

grasping a principle behind isolated acts of perception, grasping a principle of orientation that


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organizes individual acts of perception into a demarcated life. It is only after extrapolating regarding

the unity of the other, both empathizing with them and perceiving them as a discrete organism, that we

are able to retroactively attribute a similar type of unity to our own discontinous sensate experiences.

This narrative is, it should be said, borne out by neuro-cognitive scientific understanding of empathy

and childhood development.1

Now, in a sense, none of this thinking has gotten us any closer to the question of whether it is

ethical to terminate the life of a fetus, because all of this has happened on a political and social level

from which the fetus is excluded. Flakne's account of the construction of selfhood takes it for granted

that one has survived and left the womb. But if selfhood is cultivated through the political sphere, and

subjectivity does not precede social engagement, then in a certain way, this is already our answer. The

closest we will get to a soul in such a world is this self-consciousness, which certainly could not exist

unless someone is capable of participating in the social sphere. Indeed, as Adrienne Rich points out,

there is a biological resemblance to this ambivalent wish for identity and difference from the friend, in

the ambivalence of pregnancy, where the fetus is both me and not me. However, in depending

physically on the woman's body, the fetus potentially renders the wish for identity dangerous and

insofar as its difference is never absolute, but instead characterized by necessity, while the woman is in

no way in a necessary relationship to the fetus, there is an asymmetrical situation here. The woman

biologically constitutes the condition for possibility of the personhood of the fetus, but this decidedly

does not work the other way around.

This is why there is no 'slippery slope' regarding abortion and other kinds of killing. In all other

cases of killing, there is harm done to an arguably discrete and viable organism which has the ability to

live on its own and hence the potential to enter into other sustaining social relationships hypothetically.

Even if social relationship as such is necessary, any given individual social relationship is contingent. It

1RSA Animate The Empathic Civilization [Video]. (2010). Retrieved March 13, 2012, from

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g
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is only in the case of the fetus that both the question of the discrete organism and the question of the

ethical self are at stake the only self which remains is a future self, a possible self and conceptually,

if not biologically (i.e., because of the absence of sperm), even eggs shed during the menstrual cycle

each month possess this.

Flakne is not working alone in her model of the self as an achievement. Nietzsche had long

since begun to move in such a direction even if he did not provide us with the backing in Aristotle's

ethics. First, peoples were creators; and only in later times, individuals. Verily, the individual himself

is still the most recent creation. (Z, 59 On the Thousand and One Goals) But when we turn to

feminist theory we find that the abortion issue becomes even more conceptually complex. We have

established the partial selfhood of the fetus. But under patriarchy this is reversed: woman is considered

to possess an incomplete or deficient form of self due to the double destabilization of penetration and

pregnancy. Women are entirely relegated to the sphere of necessity, and hence similarly excluded from

the political sphere. Reproductive labor might be said to combine the functions of the architect and the

bee; like the architect, parturitive woman knows what she is doing; like the bee, she cannot help what

she is doing. (Hartsock, 224) Childbearing when combined with childrearing involves a unity of

mind and body more profound than is possible in workers instrumental activity. (Hartsock, 225)

Patriarchy however, has no room for such ambiguity or conceptual sophistication, for its concept of

atomistic and eternal selfhood is founded on exploiting (and rendering invisible) the necessary labor of

women and slaves in the domestic sphere which frees property-owning, white Christian males for the

godly work of the mind. Thus it must mischaracterize reproduction as brute, 'necessary' labor alone.

Psychoanalytically, women are viewed as deficient egos. Conceptually, they are considered somehow

less than people because the integrity of their ego boundary is in question. However, when we consider

the ramifications of the above analysis by Flakne, we can argue that we are allco-constituted by others

in this way aszoon politikon, metaphorically on the social level and physically, during pregnancy. The

ambiguity is there for everyone: men just are taught to repress this and overcome the bondage of the
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mother. Both socially and biologically, the ego does not precede or get broken by this penetration but

depends on it, whether we are speaking literally or metaphorically - through dialogue or sexual

intercourse. Ethical respect for alterity is necessary insofar as what I can know of the other is always

partial, the other always exceeds my grasp, just as what I can share of and participate in regarding

existence never exhausts the meaning of Being itself. Nonetheless, a certain 'opening' of the self to the

other and a certain union with the other always precedes the unity of self-consciousness with itself. To

measure this partiality of selfhood deficiently against the ego is to put the cart before the horse. The

ego is an achievement and activity. It is not taken for granted that all can be said to really have one

Nietzsche, Aristotle via Flakne have demonstrated this, and certain African philosophical traditions in

Ghana share this view, considering, for example a severe alcoholic as having lost his personhood and

being in need of rehabilitation on the very level of having a self. Due to her marginalization, woman

finds herself being perpetually in such a position. Since man wants to forget his mortality to transcend

the flesh, he learns to objectify and dominate nature and to dominate woman as the representative of

nature. (Mills, 171) Woman is made representative of nature through the necessity of her reproductive

labor, and demeaned as weak, or deficient on that basis. However, the ironic thing here is that this

alleged 'weakness' actually gives the natal woman a great locus of potential power the power to

determine whether and how to populate the world.

III. IS ABORTION AGAINST NATURE?

How do we define nature? The concept is increasingly meaningless, but if we use it as a stand-

in for necessity and view technology as a way to overcome the conditions of necessity that define bare

life, then we begin to have an answer. Is abortion against nature? Initially it seems that the answer is

yes, but then again so is, at least in our species, the liberation of women. Simone de Beauvoir

illustrates to us that the 'natural' state is often the enslavement of the female to her species. Civil
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evolution would demand that we move past this, culturally, just as we move past an injunction to

reproduce just because. It is also, conveniently, required that we move past this if we want to thrive

as a species. Genuinely studying biology does not even corroborate a natural order which would give

man determining authority regarding reproductive rights over women. Instead it tells us that, preceding

the historical dominance of man, we actually find a natural dominance of the female over male.

Simone also points out that there are organisms in which the female is a shapeless sac, her organs

degenerated in favor of eggs... among which are found the minute males, both larval and adult.

Crucially, she argues, in all such cases of natural female dominance, the female is no less restricted

than the male; it is enslaved to the species. (SS, 17) She gains her dominance but does not achieve

individuation any potential for individual freedom is subordinated to the utility of her reproductive

organs for the species. This is a subtlety usually lost on the mainstream discourse, that female both

dominates man and is subservient, to the species. And even this narrative must be contested and

contested again, forlife is dynamic as Simone De Beauvoir herself said almost sixty years ago in The

Second Sex, there is no a priori doctrine of gender, and nothing warrants us in universalizing

specific life processes. (SS, 9)

But while we may not be able to universalize biology,patterns and analogy abound on the

cellular level, we can find metaphors which can work in favor of granting women the right to choose,

which suggest that selective pruning of possibilities of life is integral to the health of life. Pulitzer

prize-winning, and self-proclaimed Dionysian biologist Natalie Angier has described what she views

as the biological and mechanospiritual depiction of such a force in the phenomenon of apoptosis, or

the innate cell program of systematic death which exists in all known living beings. She describes

apoptosis as the destructive, sacrificial force which contributes to creation, long before egg meets

sperm. It comes with the vast sweeps of the apoptotic broom, the vigorous judgment of no, no, no. Not

you, not you, and most definitely not you. Through cell suicide, we at last get to yes a rare world, but

beautiful in its rarity. (WIG, 4) Angier locates this death-giving force as deeply allied with the basic
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principle of living organisms which she identifies as excess. Excess is the context in which life is

possible. Angier writes: Life is profligate; life is a spendthrift; life can persist only by living beyond its

means. You make things in extravagant abundance, and then you shave back, throw away, kill off the

excess. Through extensive cell death the brain is molded, transformed from a teeming pudding of

primitive, overpopulous neurons into an organized structure of convolutions and connections,

recognizable lobes and nuclei; by the time the human brain has finished developing, in infancy, 90

percent of its original cell number has died, leaving the privileged few to sustain the hard work of

dwelling on mortality. This is also how limbs are built. At some point in embryogenesis, the fingers and

toes must be relieved of their interdigital webbing, or we would emerge from our amniotic aquariums

with flippers and fins. And this too is how the future is laid down... The millions of eggs that we

women begin with are cleanly destroyed [through apoptosis]. Many birth defects are infinitely more

likely to result in miscarriages how different is this from a woman choosing to terminate a pregnancy

because of her medical knowledge of the child's condition?

IV. IS LIFE GOOD IN-ITSELF?

You are young and wish for a child and marriage. But I ask you: Are you a man entitledto

wish for a child? Are you the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the commander of your senses,

the master of your virtues? This I ask you. Or is it the animal and need that speak out of your

wish? Or loneliness? Or lack of peace with yourself? Let your victory and your freedom longfor a child. You shall build living monuments to your victory and your liberation. You shall

build over and beyond yourself, but first you must be built yourself, perpendicular in body and

soul. You shall not only reproduce yourself, but produce something higher.

--FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, ON CHILDAND MARRIAGE

The basic rhetoric in favor of a pro-life agenda is that life is precious. This is taken to be

unconditional. We actually require a certain form of this premise to be preserved to justify the

environmental ethics agenda. But at the same time, we need to realize that life is always a medium for

thegood life, and further it issomething that attributes value to itself. There is no view from nowhere
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or 'outside' of life as a vantage point from which we can stand and call life bad or good. There is a

certain ambiguity present, yes: There is much that life esteems more highly than life itself; but out of

the esteeming itself speaks the will to power. (Z, 116) We may not want to say that mere life is good,

given the miserable conditions with which we may be afflicted, and yet it is clear enough that this very

same mere life is the precondition for all experiences which we may later hypostatize into a conception

of the good life.

In order to fully destabilize the conceptual basis for the 'sanctity of life' regime, then, we need to

call into question the idea that mere life is good in-itself. We have one line of attack here through the

earlier argument for the cultivation of ethical selfhood we found through Flakne. But we would do well

to look at the philosophical giant Immanuel Kant for further ammunition. What is it to be good? For

philosopher Immanuel Kant, the moral law is that through which we should be directedto act

although our every propensity, inclination and natural bent were opposed to it (PW, 383). This ability

to cut through sentiment is what Kant thinks happiness, as a ground for action, lacks. Kant will argue

further that we have a logical reason to believe that the end of rational contemplation cannot possibly

be human happiness. On p. 367, he explains that the organs in our bodies are there because they are the

ones best suited for their jobs. Similarly, he claims, instinct is actually better suited for happiness than

is rationality, which sometimes acts against happiness, or even requires unhappiness. So life and

rationality may be more closely-linked than happiness -- and hence the unhappiness of certain types of

death may be closely allied with life. All-too-many live, and all-too-long they hang on their branches.

Would that a storm came to shake all this worm-eaten rot from the tree! (Z) It should be noted that

one can still claim against Kant that happiness is an end of rationality, and believe this. It is just that

there may be types of happiness which are more rational the simple desire for reproduction may be

supplanted by a higher-grade, ethical concern for what is truly best for the life of the species, only the

latter being determined by rationality per se. In the hands of patriarchy, this kind of thinking can

become fascistic, demanding Christ-like martyrdom and war it is considered noble that people
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sacrifice their lives for the sake of others. But violence begets violence. When power of reproduction is

put into the hands of women, who are educated and offered a chance at a life other than raising ten

children in poverty then ethical concern for what is truly best for the life of the species falls,

overwhelmingly, into line with the desires of the private individual fewer children, which rather than

resulting in increasedmisery, only ensures that it is more likely that those who are born will be loved.

Christian defenders of the pro-life movement make the assumption that their morality, their

Thou Shalt Not Kill, is somehow in tune with what is best and healthiest for life.But if we look coldlyand scientifically at the conditions under which biological life thrives, we see that the the conditions of

life actually include falsehood: all great deeds require a false sense of one's own significance relative to

the rest of the universe without which we would never have dared to begin. Further, it now seems life

may even require death to thrive. Obviously as humans, if we don't killsomething, even if some plants,

rice, broccoli and beans, we die. And certain forms of life -- carnivores for example -- must kill living

animals in order to stay alive. There is an analogy to this at the cellular level through the phenomenon

of apoptosis. We can find patterns, but no hard-and-fast, universalizable rules it seems that the

universalization of an injunction not to kill is actually antitheticalto life; the pro-life contingency is

exposed as a deeply diseased and nihilistic style of thought.

V. DO PRO-CHOICE ECOFEMINISTS HAVEAN INVESTMENTIN ANIMAL RIGHTS?

While we argued that abortion was, in a way, against 'nature,' we nonetheless found that it was

good for life. We will now pursue the question of a strategic link between choice advocates and those

who oppose, for example, factory farming of dairy cows. It is a useful link both because it is belief by a

shared attitude toward quality of life issues (rather than viewing mere life as absolutely good in itself).

Yet this foray into animals rights is also proof that nature vs. technology arguments are, actually,

irrelevant to the question of choice. For what do we find in factory farms, which keep dairy cows

forcibly impregnated in order to harvest their milk, other than pro-life machines -- just as abortion is
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a pro-death technology? And even in making such a distinction, we have to remember that what calls

itself pro-life is actually hindering sustainability, and what might look like pro-death through

killing a potentially viable fetus is actually both improving the sustainability of the population as a

whole and improving the quality of life for an individual. Indeed, keeping in mind what we have

learned about dynamism in the subject, it appears that seeking an abortion as route to, for example, a

woman's education, might constitute a concreteprecondition for the development of the political self.

Ignoring these subtleties sets the stage for the absurdity that would delineate a zygote as an

individual deserving human rights while a fully-sentient bonobo capable of speaking with humans is

not worthy of moral consideration. Personhood is usually defined as the ability to feel pain or have

consciousness yet animals can clearly feel pain and some even have been demonstrated to possess

consciousness. Experiments currently being performed allowing macaque monkeys to control machines

with their thoughts immediately discredit a reductionistic and inhumane view of animals as mere

automata organisms lacking what we, in our hubris, tend to think of as consciousness.

And regardless of where you fall on this debate, it is still clear that both women and animals

have been historically relegated to the sphere of necessity. As such the conceptual strata which provides

the bedrock for both hierarchies is intertwined. Furthermore, both issues of overpopulation (as

controlled by family planning) and sustainable food sources (as controlled by humane, small-scale

organic farming and an emphasis on plant-based diets) find their pragmatic intersection in

environmental ethics.

VI. WHAT CAN ABORTION RIGHTSAND ANIMAL RIGHTS TEACH EVERYONE

ABOUT POPULATION/LIFE MANAGEMENT?

As we address this issue, it is important to remain wary -- and to keep in mind that few social

problems have generated more ethically disgusting solutions than the problem of overpopulation.
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Eugenics is a historical specter which has popped up over and over again, attempting to eliminate

everything from rape survivors to the intersexed to homosexuals to the Jews to imbeciles from our

population in its quasi-genocidal or openly genocidal agenda. It is clear enough that despite the massive

superstition surrounding what happens when we give women religious, political or social authority, that

enabling women to have the education and resources to participate in family planning which includes

abortion and birth control are providing the single most humane route out of the Judeo-Christian

injunction to overshoot our sustainable living conditions -- even if we women have a terrible track

record when it comes to our ability to implement genocide.

At the same time, such social policy needs to be paired with education for everyone, and with a

broader environmental ethics approach which calls entire population to accountability. For the

economic system which was founded on exploiting women as child-bearers in the home also supported

men's careers as capitalist workers. We are now in a situation where, when we remove women from the

home, we merely have a huge amount of workers, both male and female, who no longer have the

source of support which the woman in the domestic sphere was supposed to provide. None of this is

sustainable and it is all intertwined; if we only treat a single symptom or remove a single part, the rest

of the structure will regenerate itself like a hydra.

Bare, biological life cannot be said to be a moral good in itself even if spectacular and

beautiful. It is especially not ethically pure if murder is a significant evil and the conditions of life

involve killing. Nonetheless, as we learned in our explorations on the sunaisthetic construction of

ethical selfhood, it is the precondition for eudaimonia and excellence. We may cultivate our lives and

make them beautiful -- and transvaluate whatever intolerable conditions of life we cannot prevent. It

would take an atrophied ethical sense indeed to conclude cynically from the fact that life requires death

that we don't need to render the conditions of life as humane and ethical as possible. And indeed, at this

point we don't even need to consider the feminist questions as handmaiden to the ecological ones,

because the questions being raised are not merely properly feminist or properly ecological but, simply,
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ethical. Huge populations would still fall prey to this risk, the risk of cultural degeneration and the

enslavement of women to the species, even in a world where we had infinite resources.

Michel Foucault describes the new functioning of power as the power to 'make live and let die,'

as opposed to the sovereign power to 'make die and let live.' This new power, which Foucault calls

biopower, is clearly at play in the religious right's strategy. Hence it ought be clear enough that

exponential population growth, in-itself, is a sick thing for those who truly value life.Because it isdifficult to manage a huge population, overpopulation encourages the possibility of human rights abuse

the economy demands masses of people who work for next to nothing in factories. People get

funneled into privatized prisons, or exploited throughout the global South. This disproportionately

affects women think for example of the problem of the feminization of poverty. Furthermore, it

generates environmental pressure because the more mouths there are to feed, the more resources are

consumed particularly when such policies are implemented in countries like the United States where

people vastly overconsume the resources available, relative to what is actually required for a good,

healthy life.

Perhaps it would help to think of the world population as a human body and the elites who

encourage endless growth at the expense of sustainability as cancer cells. In this case we bypass the

issue of identity politics entirely, and the answer for those seeking to address both issues of social

justice and ecological justice is decidedly not, as Karen Warren argues, to centralize the voices of the

oppressed. Instead we have to take a surgically precise eye to the situation at hand, and we know that

there is more than one type of disease in the world. The identity of the disease matters, but what

matters more is thatit inflames the body: and the most radical revolutionary will be a conservative on

the day after the revolution. The point is for us to organize by as many different means to excise the

offending material, and fast.

Further, our goal should not be to achieve a kind of peace where everyone can happily be said to

achieve ethical selfhood with no struggle and hence become truly deserving of having a family with no
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struggle. The mere fact of being alive does not provide ethical quality to life. Here a certain level of

competition and struggle which is good for life. So long as civilization is capable of generating a

ground floor of basic human rights below which we cannot fall (something which it has become clear

capitalism is thoroughly inadequate for protecting), we should keep a level ofhealthy inequality alive

not in the distribution of basic necessities but in terms of those things which determine our excellence.

And this is something to which forcing women to be enslaved to even the weakest and most

undeserving of men is clearly antithetical. There is nothing manly about requiring legions of

enslaved women and enslaved dairy cows to be exploited in order to keep oneself alive instead it

indicates a deep cowardice regarding the risk factors of life, a deep failure of autonomy, and an

unwillingness to leverage the fact of life against the quality of life. Such men would, perhaps, do well

not to reproduce at all, and it is perhaps symptomatic of an anxious awareness of this that they want to

force women to reproduce.

Whatever stance we take we have to be sure that we are not merely ensuring life in the sense

of recognizably living human organisms, but that people are granted a certain quality of life, to fulfill

their fully human capacity. This involves a healthy anthropocentrism, a willingness to incorporate both

the benefits of abortion technology as well as the ethical injunction to minimize both the incidence of

abortion and the medicalization of birth itself, for the sake of a body-centered ethos. Conceptually we

justify this ethos through overturning atomistic individualism in favor of an embodied, embedded,

sunaisthetic self.

One interesting consequence of this line of thinking might seem anti-feminist on its surface: if

the self is an achievement in the political sphere, and women have historically been excluded from that

sphere, then in some real sense it can be said that the historical category 'woman' possesses a deficient

sense of self. But this is actually not anti-feminist: it indicates the need for women to cultivate

personhood (i.e., ego which education and family planning are prerequisites for) both for their own

sake, and for the sake of global community and this is not just the so-called Girl Effect where
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women are considered 'liberated' when they have been injected into working-class labor economies to

further stimulate capitalist growth. We need to bring a profoundly cynical eye to mainstream feminism,

but we cannot grow cynical about the power of friendship and education, when working in tandem, to

generate possibilities foreudaimonia even in dark cities and dark times. Despite the fact that these

miserable facts face us, perhaps because of them, we need to learn to view selfhood not as a given but

as an art if we are to summon the emotional and psychological reserves which will be necessary to face

the future: for as Nietzsche tells us, all life is based on appearance, art, deception, point of view, the

necessity of perspective and error. (BT, 8)

It may seem strange, even dangerous, to emphasize the necessity of error and partial

perspectives in an era where failing to account for scientific data regarding climate change could

literally cost us our lives. It may seem strange to advocate for vitalism, which we encounter in Deleuze

and Nietzsche, when overpopulation threatens the very conditions of life. Nonetheless, these lenses

remain relevant to the extent that they provide us with the principle of selection which allowed for the

sunaisthetic concept of the ethical self to be birthed.Abortion, then, is less a negation of a life than an

affirmation of all the children currently living. We select because we are concerned with quality: we

want something to fight for. If we are to mobilize people to fight climate change we must do more than

coldly and scientifically describe the necessary conditions of biological life; we must, overcoming

Silenius' warning, find the power to define the type of life for which we are willing to risk the endless

propogation of mere life itself. In short, we must find new values for the sake of which we are willing

to live or die.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Flakne, April. Embodied and Embedded: Friendship and the Sunaisthetic Self

Mills, Patricia Jagentowicz. Feminism and Ecology: On the Domination of Nature

Hartsock, Nancy.

Angier, Natalie.

Nietzsche, Friedrich.

Erickson

Kunstler, James Howard.

Deleuze, Gilles

McKibben, Bill
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abortion and cultivation

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