Response to Senator Obama’s Statements on Abortion (July 8, 2008)

Senator Obama recently explained a component of his position on abortion, saying “serious clinical mental health diseases” and “physical health” are exceptions to the rule that, in the third trimester, a woman cannot legally abort a pregnancy. He attempted to clarify by adding that “feeling blue” does not justify a “partial birth abortion.”

We might, in the aftermath of this statement, expect some women and feminists to remove their support from Obama’s campaign. While I disagree with following through with that reaction, I understand why women are disappointed and alarmed by Obama’s statement. In some women’s eyes, Obama just became another man philosophizing on the political terrain that is a woman’s body. Somewhere there are women to whom these “exceptions” apply, and they might be watching these male politicians on TV, or might be in the audience at an event as two men who know nothing about their lives or bodies talk, talk, talk. By avoiding us as people and ignoring the complex realities of our lives as women, male politicians might find talking about and around us much easier.

Some are also disappointed about Senator Obama’s statement because now that Senator Clinton is out of the running, and Obama should win the divided women’s vote, he does not seem to have much ambition to win it. He must really not care, some of us are thinking. We might also observe how, as a voting bloc, we are repeatedly taken for granted and viewed as push-overs. We resent that, and we resent that he does not seem to be fighting hard enough. We believe it indicates that nothing will change under his presidency, for us anyway.

We resent when men patronize us. We resent when men talk about us and legislate and make policy like we aren’t there. We resent that Senator Obama doesn’t defer to women on this one. And finally, “partial birth abortion” is a fake term. It is not medical, it was created by Republicans so that they could politically identify a procedure that in reality almost never happens, then they banned it, with exceptions for those cases that required the existence of this procedure in the first place: to preserve the health or save the life of the woman. And Senator Obama, our democratic candidate, used that term.

Maybe some women just won’t vote, or will vote for McCain.

Much of this is understandable, but I would offer a more cautious approach, and perhaps a better way of thinking about Senator Obama.

I was profoundly disappointed by Obama’s statements, but I will not withdrawal my support. I’m going to take a second to observe that a president will not solve everything. Some feminists wanted to elect Hillary Clinton to see a woman president before they died. If Senator Clinton had been the nominee, would they have happily sat at home because all the work appeared to be done? I truly hope not. Would she have been the answer to everything? Would our female president have worked for women, represented us, all of us, and made sure all the rights we have now remain intact? Would she lead the movement to get the rest of the rights owed to us? We really don’t know.

More than a president, we need a movement. Where we can make progress, we make it enthusiastically. Where we can forge new relationships and make men our allies (since they do make up the majority of politicians who legislate around and about us), we forge those relationships. We initiate feminist conversion wherever it can happen. And we must begin acting through the perspective that, at the very least, by voting for Obama we give ourselves the continued benefits of privacy as a constitutional right, continued support for cheap, accessible birth control, and an end in sight for abstinence-only “education,” even as all these progressions have been so imperfect and at times supported and rejected without full knowledge of what they are.

For instance, we know that the privacy argument is not enough, that abortion was decriminalized not because women were deemed human enough for full participation and full control over their reproductive capacity without exception, but because the constitution has a privacy clause that, with a certain interpretation, can include a woman deciding to terminate a pregnancy. This is imperfect, and so are distinctions made between arguments for and against abstinence-only “education,” as are those with raising minimum wage and cracking down on employers who have biases when they give out paychecks. Nobody has fixed these problems yet, so why do they fall on Obama because he has proposed changing the system?

Change is happening slowly. As feminists, we have everyday experience telling us it is difficult to change people’s minds. On one hand, I understand the impulse to cast a protest vote, or to opt out of voting altogether. But given that we have two choices in this election, Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain, we would do ourselves well to cast a ballot for the candidate we know for sure will at least secure what some of us have come to take for granted, and to be hopeful that with enough insistence, our representatives will work for us. In the meantime, we must add ourselves as a third choice: when we have a president in November, what will we do next?