Identities, Politics, and Rights

Bodily Integrity and the Right to Abortion

Bodily Integrity and the Right to Abortion Drucilla Cornell In this chapter, I will argue that the right to abortion must be guaranteed , as it is absolutely essential to the establishment of the minimum conditions for individuation.1 My argument will proceed as follows: First, I will argue that the right to abortion should be treated as an equivalent right for women to what I will term "bodily integrity,"2 1. See Drucilla Cornell, "Equivalence and Equality: A Defense of Minimum Conditions of Individuation," in The Imaginary Domain: A Discourse on Abortion, Pornography and Sexual Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995). The traditional conceptions of individuality offered by liberal thinkers mistakenly assume individuality as a given. Against this position, I argue that individuation is a fragile achievement, and one, as the word implies, that is necessarily dependent on constitutive relations with others. I therefore accept the communitarian insight that "selves" only come into "being" in a web of relations and sociosymbolic ties in which we are entangled from the beginning of our lives. However, I adamantly oppose the rejection of rights and the critique of "overindividuation" advocated by some "communitarian feminists." Philosophical insight into how selves are constituted does not necessarily lead to any conclusions about the role of rights and the importance of individuation for those selves designated as women. As I have argued it is only if one ignores the significance of patrilineage as well as the legal and social institutions that implicitly or explicitly rest on patriarchy, and, therefore, on a specific form of stratified social differentiation, that one can wax sentimental about the value of family and community and warn against the corrosive powers of overzealous feminists and lesbian and gay rights activists. But if one rejects the idea that every individual or subject has a pre-given substantial core that, by definition, makes him-I use the word him deliberately because this very idea of the person has been criticized for its erasure of sexual difference-equal as a person before the law, then even the foundations upon which conceptions of rights or equality stand must be rethought. Any defense of the right to abortion that reinstates the reductionist alternatives I have described demands nothing less than the rethinking of these basic concepts. 2. My explanation of integrity is intended to encompass the concept of process of integration. 21 22 IDENTITIES, POLITICS, AND RIGHTS understood from within the context of mother right and reproductive freedom. The wrong in denying a right to abortion is not a wrong to the "self," but a wrong that prevents the development of the minimum conditions of individuation necessary for any meaningful concept of selfhood. I will provide a psychoanalytic account of how individuation demands the projection and the recognition by others of bodily integrity. Second, I will argue that because the conditions of individuation are social and symbolic, the right to bodily integrity cannot be understood as a right to privacy, if that right is understood as a right to be left alone.} Thus, it is not enough for the state to refrain from actively blocking women's "choice" to have abortions. The right to bodily integrity, dependent as it is on social and symbolic recognition, demands the establishment of conditions in which safe abortions are available to women of every race, class, and nationality. I place the word choice in quotation marks because the word itself trivializes how basic the right to abortion is to women's minimum conditions of individuation. Moreover, it should be obvious that mtwoman chooses to have an unwanted pregnancy. If we could control our bodies, "ourselves ," then we would not need state intervention to ensure conditions for safe abortions. The rhetoric of "choice" and "control" implies the much criticized dualistic conception of the subject as the king who reigns over the body. Distancing ourselves from the liberal analytic conception of individuality as a pregiven core or substance demands both a different political rhetoric and a redefinition of the content of the right to abortion itself. The demand for new rhetoric also inheres in the effort to symbolize the feminine within sexual difference, a difference that is necessarily erased by a conception of the subject that defines itself as "above sex." This erasure underlies the difficulty in liberal analytic jurisprudence of conceptualizing abortion as a right: this right cannot be separated from some notion of ourselves as embodied and sexuate be3 . The original analysis of the common law right to privacy was presented by Samuel...