Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

to die, they hoped they would not die, they made promises to God

begging him not to let them die, they were afraid of dying before

and during and after; they have never again been so afraid of death

or so alone; they had never before been so afraid of death or so

alone. And women hate remembering illegal abortions because

their husbands experienced none of this: which no woman forgives.

Women also keep quiet about illegal abortions precisely because

they had married sex: their husbands mounted them, fucked them,

impregnated them; their husbands determined the time and the

place and the act; desire, pleasure, or orgasm were not necessarily

experienced by the women, yet the women ended up on the

butcher’s block. The abortionist finished the job the husband had

started. No one wants to remember this.

Women also keep quiet about abortions they have had because

they wanted the child, but the man did not; because they wanted

other children and could not have them; because they never regretted the abortion and did regret subsequent children; because they had more than one abortion, which, like more than one rape, fixes

the woman’s guilt. Women keep quiet about abortions because

abortion inside marriage is selfish, ruthless, marks the woman as

heartless, loveless—yet she did it anyway. Women also keep quiet

about abortions they have had, illegal abortions, because the

woman who has had one, or tried to induce one in herself, is never

really trusted again: if she will do that to herself—hurt herself, tear

up her own insides rather than have a child—she must be the

frenzied female, the female gone mad, the lunatic female, the

female in rebellion against her own body and therefore against man

and God, the female who is most feared and abhorred, the Medea

underneath the devoted wife and mother, the wild woman, the

woman enraged with the sorrow between her legs, the woman

grief-stricken by the way men use her uterus, the woman who has

finally refused to be forced and so she must be punished by the

pain and the blood, the tearing and the terror.

The law gives a married woman to her husband to be fucked at

w ill, his w ill; the law forced the woman to bear any child that

might result. Illegal abortion was a desperate, dangerous, last-

ditch, secret, awful w ay of saying no. It is no wonder that so m any

respectable, m arried, God-fearing women hate abortion.

*

A n estimated 20 million illegal abortions are performed in the world each year and are a leading cause o f death among women of child-bearing age, a

study issued today said.

The report by the Population Crisis Committee

also said that another 20 million abortions were selfinduced annually and that the number was growing.

The New York Times , April 30, 1979

Women cannot be responsible for pregnancy, in the sense of acting

to prevent it, because women do not control when, where, how,

and on what terms they have intercourse. Intercourse is forced on

women, both as a normal part of marriage and as the prim ary sex

act in virtually any sexual encounter with a man. No woman needs

intercourse; few women escape it.

In marriage a man has the sexual right to his wife: he can fuck

her at w ill by right of law. The law articulates and defends this

right. The state articulates and defends this right. This means that

the state defines the intimate uses of a woman’s body in marriage;

so that a man acts with the protection of the state when he fucks

his wife, regardless of the degree of force surrounding or intrinsic

to the act. In the United States only five states have entirely abrogated the so-called marital rape exemption— the legal proviso that a man cannot be crim inally charged for raping his wife because rape

by definition cannot exist in the context of marriage, since marriage

licenses the use of a woman’s body by her husband against her

will. Nearly three times that many states have extended the husband’s right to forced intercourse to cohabiting men or, in some cases, even to so-called voluntary social companions. But even

where marital rape is illegal, the husband has at his disposal the

ordinary means of sexual coercion, including threat of physical violence, punitive economic measures, sexual or verbal humiliation in private or in public, violence against inanimate objects, and threats

against children. In other words, eliminating the legal sanctioning

of rape does not in itself eliminate sexual coercion in marriage; but

the continued legal sanctioning of rape underlines the coercive

character and purpose of marriage. Marriage law is irrefutable

proof that women are not equal to men. No person can enter into

an agreement in which her body is given to another and remain or

become or act as or effectually be his equal.

The law takes the form it does with divine sanction: civil law

reiterates religious dogma. The law enforces a relationship between

men and women that has its origins in so-called divine law; the law

enforces the divinely ordained subordination of women through its

regulation of sex in marriage. The law is an instrument of religion,

and it is precisely as an instrument of religion that law regulating

marriage gets its special character: laws against assault and battery

pale in importance when compared with the divine law giving a

man authority over his wife’s body. The man’s authority over his

wife’s body is willed by God—even if the same relationship outside of marriage and without reference to gender would be described as slavery or torture. The laws of God are upheld by the laws of this republic, this proud secular democracy. The marriage

laws fundamentally violate the civil rights of women as a class by

forcing all married women to conform to a religious view of

women’s sexual function. These same laws violate the civil rights

of women by compelling women to serve their husbands sexually

whether they will it or not and by defining women as a class in

terms of a sexual function that must be fulfilled. *

Women feel the pressure to submit in a m yriad of w ays, none of

which have to do with marital law as such. The woman is likely to

encounter marital law when she has been abused and seeks to act in