474 - Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood

Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood
By Kristin Luker
Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California, l984. 324 pp. $14.95.

This book is a study by a University of California sociologist of activists in the politics of abortion. Noting that the debate between "pro-life" and "pro-choice" advocates is one not of reasoned argument but of passion, polarization, and violence, Luker sets out to learn why. Her working hypothesis is that the fight is not about "the facts" but about competing self-interests, issuing in differing valuations of the embryo and of women and womanhood.

In Luker's analysis, the modern abortion issue is something new-in two respects. First, the activists are "ordinary women" rather than professional elites. On her reading of the history of abortion in America, doctors were the primary advocates of laws restricting abortion in the nineteenth century and, later, of laws clarifying and "liberalizing" the legal grounds of abortion (as in the 1967 California abortion reform law). By virtue of these laws, doctors were granted the authority to make the decisions regarding abortion. The 1960s and l970s mark the turning point in the emergence of abortion as an issue of, by, and for women.

Second, for pro-choice and pro-life women alike, the question of abortion symbolizes a fundamental threat to the status and role of women. The issue at stake is the devaluation of women. However, the two groups define this devaluation very differently and so find themselves fighting with each other over the meaning and status of motherhood-and of the embryo. Luker views this as the result of differing vested interests between the women who do and the women who do not work in the paid labor force', especially in the professions (which in turn reflects differing educational achievements and vocational aspirations).

This argument is based on interviews with activists in abortion politics in California. (An "activist" is one who works for the cause at least ten hours a week if pro-life and five hours a week if pro-choice.) The making of an abortion activist seems to be correlated with significant but contrasting experiences of pregnancy and child-bearing, and with participation (pro-choice) vs. non-participation (pro-life) in the paid labor force. Surprisingly, pro-life women, unlike pro-choice women, also do not participate in community activities (for example, the church or the PTA) or in any other multi-issue and multi-perspective voluntary associations.

The initial findings become the basis of Luker's interpretation of the social values and "worldviews" underlying pro-life or pro-choice activi-

475 - Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood

tism. Those views have to do with the nature and relation of men and women (two natures and spheres or one?), the purpose of sexuality and the use of contraception, the meaning of motherhood and parenting, the status of employment for women, the question of whether women's capacities are defined primarily in terms of possibilities or of limits, and the significance of religion. The different "worldviews" lead to different interpretations of the problem of devaluation. For pro-life women, it means the devaluation of women's distinctive capacities, especially of motherhood. For pro-choice women, it means the devaluation of women's essential capacities as human beings, expressed in the denial to women of self-determination and of equal access to the public world of economic and political participation.

In conclusion, Kristin Luker looks ahead, weighing the prospects for pro-life or pro-choice groups to capture the majoritarian middle-ground. She envisages various scenarios and acknowledges the unpredictability of the outcome. The rapidly increasing number of "working mothers" could be decisive for the future of the abortion question, given the profile of the pro-life constituency.

I commend Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood to anyone concerned with the issue of abortion. Read it, in part, for its insight on the differences among the participants. One caveat here: Luker's contention that pro-choice activists are secular (whereas pro-life activists are religious) ignores the extensive network of actively religious pro-choice people whose stance on the abortion issue is grounded in what their faith requires (respect for the integrity of covenantal relationships and freedom of conscience, responsibility in moral choice and consent, participation in the struggle for justice between the sexes). The statements of the mainline Protestant denominations on this issue are pro-choice.

Read it, too, for the light shed on the shared stake of pro-life and pro-choice women in protesting and ending the devaluation and degradation of women. On this point, this book does not go far enough. Luker presupposes the theory that conflicting self-interests are explanatory of political activity and thereby misses the opportunity to articulate the common interest that the data suggest. For in fact, the devaluation of motherhood and the exclusion of women from the public realm are not antithetical interpretations of the problem but intimately related dimensions of the complex, dynamic, pervasive, and persistent social structure of sexism.

Lois Gehr Livezey
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey