Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

area of discourse on what women are for: surrogate motherhood. A

man, married to an infertile woman or on his own, wants a baby;

he buys the egg and the use of the womb of a surrogate mother— a

woman who w ill accept the introjection of his sperm through artificial insemination, gestate and give birth to what is contractually established as his child. In vitro fertilization— in which the egg is

extracted from a woman surgically, fertilized in a petri dish, then

vaginally introjected into the female— expands the possibilities

of surrogate motherhood. The uterus is exempt from the immune

response. Scientists already are able to remove the egg of one

woman, fertilize it outside her body, then introduce it into a second woman’s uterus, where it will gestate. * T hey have not done so, but there is no technological barrier to doing so. These two

reproductive technologies— artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization— enable women to sell their wombs within the terms of the brothel model. Motherhood is becoming a new branch of

female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to

the womb for experimentation and for power. A doctor can be the

agent of fertilization; he can dominate and control conception and

* According to Gena Corea, an expert in these technologies and their

effects on women, “men are hoping to fertilize an egg inside a woman’s

body (in vivo), flush it out and then transfer that embryo to another

woman. That has not yet been done. ” Letter to the author, February 12,

1982. The pure sadism of this seems outstanding.

reproduction. Women can sell reproductive capacities the same

way old-time prostitutes sold sexual ones but without the stigma of

whoring because there is no penile intrusion. It is the womb, not

the vagina, that is being bought; this is not sex, it is reproduction.

The arguments as to the social and moral appropriateness of this

new kind of sale simply reiterate the view of female will found in

discussions of prostitution: does the state have a right to interfere

with this exercise of individual female will (in selling use of the

womb)? if a woman wants to sell the use of her womb in an explicit

commercial transaction, what right has the state to deny her this

proper exercise of femininity in the marketplace? Again, the state

has constructed the social, economic, and political situation in

which the sale of some sexual or reproductive capacity is necessary

to the survival of women; and yet the selling is seen to be an act of

individual w ill—the only kind of assertion of individual will in

women that is vigorously defended as a matter of course by most of

those who pontificate on female freedom. The state denies women

a host of other possibilities, from education to jobs to equal rights

before the law to sexual self-determination in marriage; but it is

state intrusion into her selling of sex or a sex-class-specific capacity

that provokes a defense of her will, her right, her individual self—

defined strictly in terms of the will to sell what is appropriate for

females to sell.

This individual woman is a fiction—as is her w ill—since individuality is precisely what women are denied when they are defined and used as a sex class. As long as issues of female sexual and reproductive destiny are posed as if they are resolved by individuals as individuals, there is no way to confront the actual conditions that perpetuate the sexual exploitation of women. Women by

definition are condemned to a predetermined status, role, and function. In terms of prostitution, Josephine Butler, a nineteenth-century crusader against prostitution, explained the obvious

implications of its sex-based nature:

M y principle has always been to let individuals alone, not to

pursue them with any outward punishment, nor drive them

out o f any p la ce so long as they behave decently, but to attack

organized p rostitu tion , that is when a third party, activated by

the desire of making money, sets up a house in which women

are sold to m en . 12

This is the opposite of what the state does when prostitution is

illegal: the state harasses and persecutes individual prostitutes and

leaves the institutions and the powerful who profit from them

alone. It does this because it is accepted that prostitution expresses

the w ill of the prostitute, and that therefore punishing her is the

proper expression of hostility toward prostitution. It is precisely

this notion of individual responsibility (when in fact there is only a

class-determined behavior) that perpetuates prostitution and protects the profits and power of those who sell women to men. Feminists, unlike the state, go after the institutions and the powerful, not the individual women, because feminists recognize above all

that the prostitute is created by material conditions outside herself. * In the new prostitution of reproduction, which is just beginning to unfold, the third party that w ill develop the female population for sale w ill be the scientist or doctor. He is a new kind

of pimp, but he is not a new enemy of women. The formidable

institutions of scientific research institutes and medical hospitals

will be the new houses out of which women are sold to men: the

use of their wombs for money.

*This does not mean that prostitution is reinvented in every generation

only through material conditions. The colonialization o f women is both

external and internal, as Kate Millett made clear in Sexual Politics. Sexual

exploitation and abuse create in women a psychological submission to self-

denigration; in The Prostitution Papers Millett went so far as to describe this

submission as “a kind o f psychological addiction to self-denigration. ” (See

The Prostitution Papers [New York: Avon, 1973], p. 9 6 . )

Before the advent of any reproductive technologies, the farming

model used to be very distinct from the brothel model. Even

though the woman was not human—the land—or was less than

human—a cow—farming had the symbolic overtones of old-fash-

ioned agrarian romance: plowing the land was loving it, feeding the

cow was tending it. In the farming model, the woman was owned

privately; she was the homestead, not a public thoroughfare. One