SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE LIBERALISM

Abstract

Once upon a time, in the beginnings of this wave of feminism, there was a feminist consensus that women's choices were constructed, burdened, framed, impaired, constrained, limited, coerced, shaped, etc. by patriarchy. No one proposed that this meant women's choices were determined, or that women were passive or helpless victims of the patriarchy. That was because many women believed in the power of feminism to change women's lives and obviously, women could not change if they were socially determined in their roles or pliant putty in the hands of the patriarchs. We even talked about compulsory motherhood and yes, compulsory heterosexuality! We talked about the ways in which women and young girls were seasoned into prostitution, accommodated themselves to male battering, and were channeled into low paying and dead-ended jobs.

Full text

SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE LIBERALISM
Janice G. Raymond
Once upon a time, in the beginnings of this wave of feminism, there was a feminist
consensus that women’s choices were constructed, burdened, framed, impaired,
constrained, limited, coerced, shaped, etc. by patriarchy. No one proposed that this meant
women’s choices were determined, or that women were passive or helpless victims of the
patriarchy. That was because many women believed in the power of feminism to change
women’s lives and obviously, women could not change if they were socially determined
in their roles or pliant putty in the hands of the patriarchs. We even talked about
compulsory motherhood and yes, compulsory heterosexuality! We talked about the ways
in which women and young girls were seasoned into prostitution, accommodated
themselves to male battering, and were channeled into low paying and dead-ended jobs.
And the more moderate among us talked about sex role socialization. The more radical
wrote manifestos detailing the patriarchal construction of women’s oppression. But most
of us agreed, that call it what you will, women were not simply “free to be you and me.”
Time passed, and along came a more “nuanced” view of feminism. It told
us to watch our language of women as victims. More women went to graduate
and professional schools, grew “smarter,” were received at the bar, went
into the academy, and became experts in ail sorts of fields. They partook
of the power that the male gods had created and “saw that it was good.” They

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started saying things like “... great care needs to be taken not to portray women
as incapable of responsible decisions” (Andrews, 1987: 46).
Some women thought these words were familiar, that they had heard them
before, but the feminist discourse analysts didn’t seem particularly interested in
tracing this back to what “old-fashioned” feminists labelled liberal patriarchal
discourse. They said this was boring and outmoded and, besides, women had
already heard enough of this, and it was depressing. Let’s not be simplistic and
blame men, they said, since this analysis “offers so few leverage points for
action, so few imaginative entry points for visions of change” (Snitow et al,
1983: 30). Instead, they began to talk about the “Happy Breeders,” and the
“Happy Hookers” and the “women who loved it” and those who would love it if
they could only have “the freedom and the socially recognized space to
appropriate for themselves the robustness of what traditionally has been male
language” (FACT. 1985: 31).
This was familiar too, but then something strange happened. Those women
who had noted the thread of continuity between liberal patriarchal discourse and
FACT feminism, for example, began to notice that instead of women mimicking
male speech, men began to mimic women. Gary Skoloff, the lawyer for Bill Stern in
the New Jersey surrogacy case, summed up his court argument by saying: “If you
prevent women from becoming surrogate mothers and deny them the freedom to
decide...you are saying that they do not have the ability to make their own
decisions...It’s being unfairly paternalistic and it’s an insult to the female

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population of this nation” (Snyder. 1987). Some women felt that. “Imitation is the
sinceresr of flattery.” They began to testify in favor of things like pornography and
surrogacy so that they could imitate all the men who imitated them. It became difficult to
tell who was imitating whom.
And state legislators began to submit bills advocating surrogate contracts, with
proper regulations of course, that mostly protected the sperm donor and the brokerage
agencies, because feminism was in the best interests of men, and finally men had realized
this. It was as the feminist humanists had always said, that women’s liberation means
men’s liberation.
Harvey Sorkow, the nudge in the initial “Baby M” decision, saw that Bill Stern, the
sperm donor, was overwhelmed with the “intense desire” to procreate and even said it was
“within the soul.” He said the feminist argument that an “elite upper economic group of
people will use the lower economic group of women to ‘make their babies’” was
“insensitive and offensive” to the Bill Sterns of this world. A man of feeling himself, he
said that Mary Beth Whitehead was a “woman without empathy.” He was very concerned
that Mr. Stern experience his “fulfillment” as a father, and so he gave him Baby Sara whom
Mr. Stern called Baby Welissa (“In the Matter of Baby ‘M’,” 1987: 72, 73, 72, 106, 96).
Shortly before this, the Attorney General convened a Commission on
Pornography which heard testimony from women who had been abused in
pornography -- “. . . a parade of self-described victims who tell their sad stories
from behind an opaque screen...Many experts on both sides of the question
say such anecdotal tales of woe prove nothing about the effect of sexually

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explicit materials” (Kurtz, 1985: A4, emphasis mine). This was reported by Howard
Kurtz of the Washington Post, another man of feeling. Not to be outdone in feeling, Carol
Vance poured scorn on the testimony of these same women by quoting with approval a
male reproter who would nudge her during the hearings and say “phoney witness”
(Coveney and Kay. 1987: 12).
Victims of pornography choose their own beds to lie in. Mary Beth
Whitehead chose to sign her contract. All men and women of feeling understand
this. It’s our right to choose, which is at stake. Pornography and surrogacy protect
that right of choice. Feminism is FACT; feminism is “procreative liberty.” Liberty
is liberalism.
*************
Within the “coming of age” of this particular wave of feminism, we have seen a
shift from feminist radicalism to feminist liberalism. This feminist liberalism is both
cause and effect of the so-called feminist pro-pornography and feminist sexual libertarian
movements. The sexual liberalism that has come to be defined as “feminism,” we are
now witnessing again in the reproductive realm. There are several comparisons that can
be made between the sexual and reproductive liberals, especially in their vindications of
pornography and the new reproductive technologies. I want to illuminate one of these
comparisons here, specifically how both groups use the rhetoric of a woman’s “right to
choose.” Both the sexual and reproductive liberals have invested an old liberal discourse
about choice with a new and supposedly feminist content.

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The sexual liberals are uncomfortable with focusing on women as objects
and victims of male supremacy. They invoke a language of going “beyond” the
ways in which men objectify, exploit, and victimize women (not to any reality of
how women survive because of their bonds with other women, however). They
would have us take a “great leap forward” to the ways in which women are agents
of, for example, their status in pornography or their role as surrogates in
reproduction. Reasoning that because women choose pornography or surrogacy,
they argue that women need these “choices” to be free.
Feminist sexual and reproductive liberalism calls for a more “nuanced” view
of women and the world. This is a feminism that represents many women as
“choosing” prostitution, pornography, and surrogacy, while paying perfunctory
attention to the ways in which those “choices” are burdened by the male construction
of women’s reality. Further, the liberals maintain that because women supposedly
choose the above, feminists should reconsider the ways in which prostitution,
pornography, and surrogacy are not monolithically oppressive but can be liberating to
women. While feminist liberal discourse often pays lip service to women’s
victimization by male supremacy, it is “turned on” by the fantasy that women agent,
or at least mediate, the culture of male supremacy. Constant focus on the ways in
which that culture uses and exploits women, they say, perpetuates a view of women
unable to make choices.
We all know that because women have been constrained or
influenced by a social context that fosters pornography, prostitution, and

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surrogacy, this does not mean that women are determined by that social context. But the
sexual liberals caricature the anti-pornography and anti-surrogacy feminists as
subscribing to a brand of social determinism. The liberals would have it that one can no
longer talk about constraints or influences without lapsing into determinism. This is a
convenient reductionism achieved by liberal discourse for the purpose of valorizing both
the sexual and reproductive trade and traffic in women’s bodies.
Lori Andrews sounds the new/old liberal discourse of choice in her
writings for both the American Fertility Society, in its report recommending
surrogacy as a “treatment” for infertility; and in her policy recommendations
and legislative proposal on surrogacy for the Rutgers “Reproductive Laws
for the 1990s” Women’s Rights Litigation Project (1). Note that there is a
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1 The American Fertility Society Report entitled “Ethical Considerations of
the New Reproductive Technologies” (Special Issue of Fertility and Sterility,
Supplement 1, September 1986, Vol.46, No.3), was authored by “The Ethics
Committee” of the American Fertility Society. This group counts among its
membership many of the reproductive endocrinologists and surgeons who are now
engaged in research and practice of the new reproductive technologies. Among the
members of its “Ethics Committee” of eleven, for example, were Clifford Grobstein,
Gary Hodgen, Howard Jones, and Richard Marrs who are all prominent research
scientists and/or practitioners of the new reproductive technologies. In addition, John
Robertson and Lori Andrews who were the lawyers on the committee both validate
the technologies as “procreative liberty.” The document reads like a brief for the
technologies with all members in agreement as to their real and potential benefits. The
only dissenting voice from this chorus of approval came on the use of third parties in
reproduction, specifically on surrogate reproduction. One member argued that third
parties were “ethically inappropriate.” Lori Andrews was the principal author for the
sections on surrogacy.
Lori Andrews was also the principal author of “Feminist Perspectives on
Reproductive Technologies” (in first draft called “Reproduction Involving Third
Parties), a position paper which is part of a larger project entitled “Reproductive

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blatant conflict of interest here. In crafting the case in favor of surrogacy for the
American Fertility Society. Lori Andrews has justified the in-house interests of a
medical group that promotes the new reproductive technologies as part of its
research and livelihood. In writing for the Women’s Rights Litigation and
Reproductive Rights project, she is representing a women’s group that should
address feminist concerns unaffected by the priorities of the medical
establishment.
This collusion and conflict of interest is not surprising, however, when we note
that the major author of the FACT brief, which opposed the anti-pornography ordinance
and in fact supported pornography as necessary to women’s sexual freedom, works for
the ACLU. Hugh Hefner is one of the biggest contributors to the ACLU. As the
feminist pro-pornography forces were funded with pornography money, so too it
appears that some of those who represent “women’s rights” policies in defense of the
new reproductive technologies, especially surrogacy, have the same double agent
status.
As for the rhetoric of choice, Lori Andrews in the Rutgers position
papers sounds the theme that “great care needs to be taken not to portray women
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Laws for the 1990’s” (See Andrews, 1987, References). This “Reproductive Rights
Law and Policy Project” is a joint effort of the Rutgers Institute for Research on
Women and the Women’s Rights Litigation Project of the Rugters Law School. “The
Project’s goal is to advance policy-making in the area of reproductive autonomy and
gender equality by developing briefing papers and where possible, specific legal
proposals.” Much of the thinking that is contained in Andrews” American Fertility
Report segment is repeated -- in places, almost verbatim -- in her Rutgers briefing
paper.

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as incapable of responsible decisions” (Andrews, 1987: 46). Her emphasis mimics
legal scholar John Robertson’s notion of “procreative liberty.” She caricatures the
basic radical feminist tenet that choice occurs in the context of a society where
there are serious differences of power between men and women as “a presumed
incapacity of women to make decisions” (Andrews, 1987: 14). In contrast,
Andrews fosters “enhanced decision making” to assure that women make
“informed, voluntary choices to use reproductive technologies,” and “enhanced
participation of women in the development and implementation of reproductive
technologies . . .”(Andrews, 1987: 14). In one sentence, she has let the new
reproductive technologies (NRTs) in the social door as necessary to enhanced
decision making. With women participating in the development and
implementation of the NRTs, with greater access to information and resources, and
with greater control over the use of the technologies, the goal of full procreative
liberty can be reached, she says.
If this rhetoric of choice sounds familiar, it is, we’ve heard it before in the
FACT brief which was written specifically to oppose the Dworkin-MacKinnon
anti-pornography law. For example, the brief attacks the anti-pornography
ordinance because “it implies that individual women are incapable of choosing
for themselves what they consider to be enjoyable sexually arousing material
without being degraded or humiliated” (FACT, 1985: 4). It goes on to say that the
anti-pornography ordinance “perpetuates beliefs which undermine the principle
that women are full, equal and active agents in every realm of life, including the

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sexual” (FACT, 1985: 18). Thus it attacks the first legal definition of pornography
that was developed specifically to address the real ways in which pornography harms
women. It does so on the basis that the proposed definition of pornography harms
women more than the pornography itself because it implies that women are incapable
of choice.
In her briefing paper on surrogacy, Lori Andrews echoes the same theme. She
caricatures feminists who point to “societal pressures” which constrain women’s so-
called choice to mother as denying women the faculty of choice. Like the authors of the
FACT brief, Andrews cautions that the feminist arguments against the NRTs offer a
protectivism that instead of helping women, ultimately results in harming them. This
amounts to stereotyping women as powerless victims in the opinion of both Andrews and
FACT.
To expose the victimization of women by men is to be blamed for creating it
and for making women into passive victims. The liberals fail to recognize that
women’s victimization can be acknowledged without labelling women passive.
Passive and victim do not necessarily go together. It is the liberals equate
victimization with passivity. It is they who devise this equation. Jews were victims
of the Nazis, but that did not make them passive, nor did the reality of victimization
define the totality of their existence. It seems obvious that one can recognize that
women are victims of surrogacy, pornography and prostitution without stripping
women of agency and without depriving them of some ability to act under
oppressive conditions.

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The FACT Brief went so far as to say that women have been stereotyped as
victims by the statutory rape laws. “Such laws reinforce the stereotype that in sex the
man is the offender and the woman the victim, and that young men may legitimately
engage in sex, at least with older people, while a young woman may not legally have
sex with anyone” (FACT, 1985: 6). Along these same lines, it faults the Mann Act,
contending it “was premised on the notion that women require special protection from
sexual activity” (FACT, 1985, 7). The Mann Act was enacted to legislate against
abducting women into sexual slavery and specifically forbids interstate transportation
of women for purposes of prostitution. The FACT brief finds this to reflect “the
assumption that women have no will of their own and must be protected against,
themselves” (FACT, 1985: 7).
As the Rutgers briefing paper on surrogacy went beyond attacking those who
oppose surrogacy to a defense of surrogacy, the FACT brief goes beyond attacking the
feminist anti-pornography position to a defense of pornography. Compare these two
statements:
Women need the freedom and the socially recognized space to
appropriate for themselves the robustness of what
traditionally has been male language (FACT, 1985: 31).
Traditionally, people have been allowed to participate in risky
activities (such as firefighting) based on their voluntary
informed consent. The risks of participating in alternative
reproduction do not seem to be greater than risks women take
in other areas of their lives (Andrews, 1987: 11).
The sexual and reproductive liberals reiterate, almost, as an incantation, that
women are not, merely the passive victims of surrogacy or the passive recipients

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of pornography, but are the agents of many different motives and practices in these
contexts. New approaches, they say, must give prominence to women as agents in this
“culture” and the ways women create, use and infuse pornography and surrogacy with
meanings unintended by the patriarchs. Women may be used, but women in turn use
surrogacy and pornography in their own interests. The key word in the liberal lexicon is
women’s agency.
There is one thing very wrong with this emphasis. It finds evidence of
women’s agency within the very institutions of pornography and surrogacy. It
primarily locates women’s agency within the “culture” of male dominance. It shifts
attention from an analysis and activism aimed at destroying these systems to a
justification of them. By romanticizing the victimization as liberating, it puts
women’s oppression in surrogacy and pornography on a pedestal. And in doing so, it
encourages more women into these systems, more frequently. It accommodates
women to a sexual and reproductive freedom whose “freedom” consists in giving up
their freedom. How women come to want, desire, choose what men want and desire
us to choose is not part of the liberal agenda. It is this complexity that the more
“nuanced” feminist liberalism would simplify.
Radical feminists have never denied the agency of women under
conditions of oppression. But radical feminists have located women’s agency,
women’s making of choices, in resistance to those oppressive institutions, not
in women’s assimilation to them. Nowhere in the more “nuanced” feminist
liberal literature on choice is women’s resistance to pornography and surrogacy

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stressed as signs of women’s agency. What about the agency of women who have
testified about their abuse in pornography, risking exposure and ridicule and often
getting it? What about the ex-surrogates who choose to fight for themselves and their
children in court, against the far greater economic, legal, and psychological advantages
of the sperm donor? If we want to stress women’s agency, let’s look in the right places.
Feminist liberals are demanding that women be credited with a capacity
for choosing pornography or surrogacy, because without this gloss on women’s
reality, they could never vindicate these institutions. If they really cared about
how women break out of oppressive and traditional patterns of sexual and
reproductive slavery, duty, and roles, then they would not find the evidence in
behavior and actions which keep women’s agency restricted to the states of
pornography and surrogacy.
It is interesting to see where our right to choose gets defended and where it
doesn’t. It is more than coincidental that the liberals have not defended women’s agency
in the creation of a culture that defies patriarchy but have chosen to restrict their defense
of women’s agency to those very institutions of pornography and surrogacy that uphold
male supremacy.
The choice which radical feminists defend is substantive. We ask what is
the actual content or meaning of a choice which grows out of a context of
poweriessness. Do such choices as surrogacy foster the empowerment of
women as a class and create a better world for women? What kind of choices do
women have when subordination, poverty, and degrading work are the options

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available “to most? The point is not to deny that women are capable of choosing
within contexts of powerlessness, but to question how much real power these
“choices” have. To paraphrase Marx and apply his words here, women make their
own choices, but they often do not make them just as they please. They do not make
them under conditions they create but under conditions and constraints that they are
often powerless to change. When Marx uttered these thoughts, he was acclaimed for
his political insight. When radical feminists say the same, they are blamed for being
condescending to women.
The sexual and reproductive liberals would convince us that our freedom is in
abdicating our freedom -- in the case of surrogacy, the secured liberty of a contract
which “frees” the so-called surrogate to be artificially inseminated, to be constantly
monitored medically, to be paid only partially if she miscarries, to submit to
amniocentesis, to undergo an abortion if the test reveals the fetus to be genetically or
congenitally abnormal or, conversely, to refrain from aborting if the fetus is normal, to
follow doctors’ orders faithfully, to abstain from smoking, drinking, and drugs not
authorized by the physician. Are these the freedoms that women have died for? Is this
the final absurdity of a word and reality of freedom that has lost all depth and power of
meaning.
If this is what female freedom reduces to, we are not far from the world that
Orwell described in 1984 where, in pointing out how thought is dependent on
words, he gave the example of the word “free” which had been stripped of all
political meaning. Thus “free” could only be used in such statements as “This dog is

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free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” “It could not be used in its
old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectuality free,’ since political and
intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts. . .” (Orwell, 1949:
247). Judge Sorkow and the liberal lawyers such as John Robertson and Lori
Andrews whom he echoes in defending surrogacy as “procreative liberty,”
only serve to further strip the concept and reality of freedom of any real
political meaning for women. For they help to reinforce the notion that female
freedom is in having “the right” to give up our freedom, our control over our
bodies.
There’s a lot of pseudo-feminist rhetoric of freedom and choice that masks
the essential slavery of surrogacy. And there’s a conscious manipulation of
language and reality that happens when defenders of surrogacy use the rhetoric of
“procreative liberty.” knowing that many women will resonate with this phrase
because of the earlier feminist emphasis on reproductive choice articulated around
the abortion issue. Judge Sorkow himself equated the “right” to be a surrogate
mother with the right to have an abortion. The feminist fight for legal abortions
was the right to control over our bodies. Let there be no mistake about it ---
surrogacy is the “right” to give up control of our bodies. And anyone who doesn’t
understand this should read carefully the surrogate contract, even the ones that
have been legislatively laundered to omit the grosser inequities of the Whitehead-
Stern agreement.

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REFERENCES
Andrews, Lon, 1987. “Feminist Perspectives on Reproductive Technologies.” In
Reproductive Laws for the 1990’s. Briefing Handbook, Women’s Rights
Litigation Clinic, Rutgers Law School, Newark, New Jersey 07102.
Coveney, Lal and Leslie Kay, 1987, January. “A Symposium on Feminism, Sexuality,
and Power.” Off Our Backs.
FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce et al), 1985. Brief Amici Curiae, No. 84-
3147. In the U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit, Southern District of Indiana.
“In the Matter of Baby ‘M’.” 1987, March 31. Superior Court of New Jersey.
Kurtz, Howard. 1985, October 15. “Pornography Panel’s Objectivity Disputed.”
Washington Post.
Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. New American Library, New York.
Snitow, Ann. Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. 1983. Desire: The Politics
of Sexuality. Virago, London.
Snyder, Sarah. 1987, March 13. “Baby M Trial Hears Closing Arguments.” Boston
Globe.