Is there also a dissimilarity in the reasons men versus women become involved in animal defense? Given that the majority of animal defenders are women, does this not in itself say something? Women understand what it means to be deprived of freedom based on biological differences. We know that Western culture has situated women on the boundary of what is fully human, thus women have a very good reason to examine what our culture does to the other animals, while being suspicious of its control of women.
Premise 7: Abortion Rights Contributes to a Nonanthropocentric Ethic
Antiabortionists absolutize each individual fetus. They are deeply anthropocentric in their valorizing of the human fetus. But in a world in which we are attempting to learn how to be in relationship with the rest of nature rather than be triumphantly (though shortsightedly) dominant over nature, the presumption that every fetus should become a human being is glaringly anthropocentric. It ignores the increasing demands upon the environment made by each addition to the developed world. (I say developed world since my focus is on the debate in the United States, and children born in this country consume the world’s resources to a much greater degree than children born in other parts of the world.)21 As John Cobb remarks, “It may be a legitimate criticism . . . to say that the pro-[fetal] life movement has been insensitive to the needs of all forms of life except the human.”22 Rosemary Ruether observes that “the decisions to limit the number of births, both for one’s own family and as a part of a global community, is as much a decision for
life and for a more adequate distribution of the means of life as is the struggle to end the arms race.”23
Animal defense relativizes the human species. This is why antiabortionists feel betrayed by it. By relativizing the human species, it also relativizes the human fetus. (See Figure 8 for an example of the relativizing of the human fetus. Note: This example did not arise from within the animal defense movement, but from a feminist examination of the antiabortion movement.) Animal defense and environmental activism are nonanthropocentric. The sacredness of human life is placed within a new paradigm, the sacredness of the earth and its creatures.24 Given this paradigm shift it becomes more difficult to argue that every human fetus is equally or more important than the earth and its creatures that its birth will impact. This nonanthropocentrism is deeply threatening to antiabortionists and accounts for some of the many instances in which animal defenders are accosted by antiabortionists.
The human/animal dualism undergirds the anthropocentrism of anti-abortionists. Eliminate that foundational dualism, and the moral claims of antiabortionists, that human fetal life has an absolute claim upon us, is overthrown. Instead, human fetal life is placed in a new context: legitmate concern for the rest of nature, including its nonhuman creatures.25
As I was writing this chapter, I received a note from an animal defender who had just had an abortion. Her letter illustrated this nonanthropocentric commitment as it described her decision-making process when she discovered she was pregnant. She went first to adoption agencies and inquired whether they screened for vegetarians or animal rights activists. She did not want to give birth to someone who would be brought up to oppress animals and exploit the environment. After discovering that there was no possible guarantee that any child she might bear and give up for adoption would not consume or exploit animals, she determined to have an abortion.
Figure 8 Monkey and human embryos.
One of the best things we can do for the animals is to stop mandatorily filling the world with people, especially in industrialized nations where 22 percent of the world’s population consume 70 percent of the world’s resources.
Premise 8: A Striking Similarity Exists in the Medical Profession’s Role in Making Abortion Illegal and in Opposing Antivivisectionism
Some animal defenders say, look at the association between the medical industrial complex and abortion rights.26 Animal defenders are rightly suspicious of the lobbying efforts of this complex, knowing full well its goal to distort the basic message of those who seek to end the exploitation of animals.27 But an appeal to animal defenders’ legitimate distrust of the medical establishment, by equating medical doctors with abortion rights, distorts feminists’ distrust of the medical profession. It also masks the sordid history of the medical profession in criminalizing abortion in the first place. Once we get beyond the rhetoric, what we see is that the AMA’s current stance regarding animal experimentation recalls not a proabortion stance, but their antiabortion stance of the early nineteenth century.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, abortion before “quickening” (when the pregnant woman first felt the fetus move) was an accepted part of the common law of this country. By the end of the century, abortion had been criminalized. This effort was led not by the clergy but by medical professionals. In fact, “American public opinion tolerated the practice of abortion in 1850, and few people outside the medical profession called for its suppression as a social evil.”28 Why did the medical profession act this way? Numerous reasons are offered:
• The growth of irregular practitioners. Medical doctors saw the irregulars offering a service that women wanted, and feared losing their patients. “The best way out of these dilemmas was to persuade state legislators to make abortion a criminal offense.”29
• An increase in abortions: an estimated one out of three to one out of five pregnancies at this time ended in abortion.
• Nativism and the perception that abortion was being used by married women to limit their families. “Most regular physicians were white, native-born, Protestants of British and North European stock. And so, as they constantly reiterated for twenty years between 1860 and 1880 were most of the women having abortions. The doctors both used and were influenced by blatant nativism. . . . There can be little doubt that Protestants’ fears about not keeping up with the reproductive rates of Catholic immigrants played a greater role in the drive for antiabortion laws in nineteenth-century American than Catholic opposition to abortion did.”30
• Physicians were also very threatened by the change in women’s roles. “Regular physicians were among the most defensive groups in the country on the subject of changing traditional sex roles. . . . To many doctors the chief purpose of women was to produce children; anything that interfered with that purpose, or allowed women to ‘indulge’ themselves in less important activities, threatened marriage, the family, and the future of society itself. Abortion was a supreme example of such an interference for these physicians.”31
The medical profession, in redefining abortion from an accepted part of the common law, demonstrated the motives and strategies now apparent in the debate about animal experimentation.
They acted through their organization, rather than independently. In fact, through the politics of their antiabortionism they sought to increase the status of medical doctors and to professionalize medicine, as well as to exclude women from obtaining a medical education. Their provivisection commitment also represents an organizational strategy.
They claimed that they had information that no one else had, increasing their status and their control. This politics of knowledge appears in the debate about animal experimentation as well. We are told that medical doctors know something we do not and thus their words should carry more weight than a layperson’s. This mystifies knowledge by claiming that only they, “the experts,” can truly know the issues: when life begins, for instance, or the knowledge we can get from animal “models.”
They used the politics of professionalization to act in their own self-interest. They used the issue of abortion and the claim to special knowle dge to establish themselves as the medical professionals during a time of laissez-faire government and a proliferation of medical options. Physicians did not actually outlaw abortion in the nineteenth century as much as create “a category of ‘justifiable’ abortion” and make themselves the custodian of it.32 The creation of the “therapeutic” abortion exception, a product of the nineteenth century, left in
the hands of the medical profession the decision about who could get an abortion. Thus, abortion became “medicalized” in the nineteenth century. Some feminists argue for lay abortion, claiming that the procedure is neither complex nor life-threatening.33 The Jane collective of Chicago is notable for proving the effectiveness of layperformed abortion. The growth of the medical industry, including that aspect of it that engages in biomedical research, must be seen not only in relationship to women as consumers, but also to the centurieslong replacement/usurpation of women as healers, midwives and abortionists. When the medical field was professionalized, it was also masculinized.
Premise 9: Animal Defenders’ Antiviolence Stance Should Align It with Women
Animal defense has been entangled with the false labels of what constitutes violence in the debate about abortion: either we are consistent and thus antiabortion (because abortion is violent) or we are inconsistent and pro-choice. I bemoan the shortsightedness of these standards for both consistency and nonviolence. The presumption is that this definition of nonviolence is the acceptable one, and it is applied to a continuum that looks something like this:
violence of war . . .
violence against people . . .
violence against fetuses . . .
violence against animals . . .
But there is another continuum, one that only becomes visible when we take women’s lives and experiences seriously. It is the continuum of violence against women:
child sexual abuse . . .
rape, including marital rape . . .
woman-battering . . .34
Intercourse and consequent pregnancies are often not a choice in women’s lives. When I declare that animals and women ought to have the right to self-determination about when they wish to be pregnant and not be forced into birthing babies against their will, it is argued that animals have no choice, but women enter freely into sexual intercourse. This is simply not true. To ignore that human female animals are abused and coerced is as nearsighted as when humans ignore the fact that non-human animals are abused to benefit the self-interest of people.
Those who wish to open up the discussion of unacceptable violence to forms of violence enacted by people against people (and against potential persons) need to register their concern for the actual, real people whose lives are often ignored when theory is developed—women. The absence of attention to the extensive sexual violence against women and children mystifies this experience by ignoring it. It makes any abortion stance based on a sense of nonviolence hypocritical. It also ignores the violence of enforced pregnancy.
As long as women and animals are ontologized as usable (rapable on the one hand and consumable on the other) both animal defense and abortion rights will be necessary. Both women and animals are ends for themselves, not means for others.
Premise 10: The Argument about Nonbeing Reveals the Subjective Male Stance
The argument of nonbeing goes like this: isn’t it better that a cow was brought to life, was allowed to live many years on this earth, and then quickly dispatched, then never to have lived at all? And animal defenders have argued back that one can not experience nonbeing. A cow who never existed does not experience the deprivation of life.
Only those of us who are living can sentimentalize the idea of life without us. Rather than looking forward to the fact that we will not exist in the future because of death, we cast our eyes backwards and think, what if we never existed? We then apply this intensely self-possessed question to ethical issues; and the self possessed with this question is usually the human male subject.
People, but especially men, think that abortion exists as a retroactive comment on their own existence. Thus, whenever abortion is debated, someone stands up and says, “I am glad I was not aborted.” This is not the issue. This argument personalizes a state that does not exist—nonbeing—and by appearing to be a rational argument fosters the same reaction when the issue is animal defense.
To conclude, animals have a right to their own lives no matter what we as human beings wish them to do or be for us and a woman needs access to abortion for whatever reasons she chooses not to bear a specific pregnancy. Abortion rights and animal defense make sense together.
Figure 9 slink by lynn mowson, photograph by Carol J. Adams, February 2017.
Artist’s Statement: Some Thoughts on slink
As a sculptor my practice is driven by the entangled relationships between human and non-human animals, in particular agricultural animals. slink (2014) is a site-specific sculptural installation, initially part of a suite of works entitled beautiful little dead things, slink is comprised of multiple adult female forms, baby forms and sacs. The babyforms were made from the all-in-one baby-suits that my son was outgrowing as I made this work. These little suits had protected him and kept him warm. Sculpturally when I use the modified human form I am not simply replacing the human for the non-human animal, but rather I am aiming to indicate those connections that we share with our fellow-creatures,* such as mo therhood.
I remember visiting a farming museum in rural Australia and seeing a strange collar full of long spikes. I found the small label that revealed that the collar was put on calves to prevent them from feeding from their mothers. I imagined the situation where the calf would try to get milk, only to stab his/her mother repeatedly with this collar, until the mother could no longer allow the calf to suckle. These barbaric instruments of cruelty remain cutting and digging into my flesh. The lives and deaths of dairy cattle were already traumatic knowledge† for me, but motherhood made the issues more personal, emotional and embodied.
The series slink became a way of exorcising the traumatic knowledges of the treatment of fetal calves in abattoirs, and the domination and exploitation of motherhood in the dairy industry. I present these works as testimonial objects because, for me, they do the work of testimony, a process of bearing witness by proxy for the other, to an-other. These objects expand the boundaries of testimony beyond the factual and documentary, to incorporate the more indirect and wayward representations of creative practices. They emerge in the context of an empathic witnessing that brings the other into awareness‡.
Slink is a wonderful word; lurking, prowling, slithering, skittering, skulking around. Slink also means to be born prematurely, although calves used for slink leather are not born, but rather left to die in their mother’s body or worse. Slink leather is a highly valued luxury item, most often used in expensive gloves and religious scrolls, and it is desirable because it is soft and unblemished. I fabricated these latex skins to resemble membranes and parchment—dried and treated animal skins devoid of hair.
Each form is slightly different, so while there is the appearance of mass and uniformity there is also individuality. slink combines the seemingly paradoxical processes that pervade nearly all my testimonial objects—violence and care. Removing the latex from the molds is a rough and violent task that involves cutting, tearing and pulling the skins from the little baby forms. To me this process of violent skinning echoes the disassembling of animal subject that occurs both literally and linguistically, and I find it a challenge to undertake. I follow this violence with a phase of care and reparation, gently washing then sewing the forms together. Sewing takes a number of different approaches; some forms require more attention than others, sometimes the process was a pleasure, contemplative, healing and restorative, other times, it was futile and impossible, the sewing carrying too much emotional labor.
To hang the babyforms I repurpose clothes hangers as gambrels (a frame used to suspend animal bodies in the slaughterhouse) as a reminder of the use of non-human animal skins in fashion and their origin. In this installation (2017, The Animal Museum) the mother form is suspended, surrounded multiple baby forms and gestational sacs, acknowledging the physical reality of the exploitation of dairy cattle.
lynn mowson
*I use the term “fellow-creature” in the context of Cora Diamond’s “Eating Meat and Eating People,” Philosophy,
53, no. 206 (1978): 465–479.
†A phrase articulated by Carol J. Adams in various texts including “Home Demos and Traumatic Knowledge,” SATYA (March 2004). http://www.satyamag.com/mar04/adams.html.
‡The empathic encounter is described by the philosopher Edith Stein; she argued that even a trace of a being, or something presented as a living being could be read empathically. Stein’s articulation of empathy is an embodied, contingent and conscious encounter, a process that allows us to recognize others as subjects; worthy of attentiveness and mutual respect, while simultaneously recognizing their absolute alterity.
Chapter 4
On Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity
When animals figure, or can easily be thought of as figuring, in binary oppositions; they invariably represent the negative term in the opposition: “the Other, the Beast, the Brute.”
—Steve Baker
While juxtaposing and reconciling abortion rights and animal defense is a necessary effort, both movements are actually situated within wider contexts: abortion, within the context of reproductive freedom, and animal defense within the context of challenging all forms of social oppression. Issues related to reproductive freedom indicate the way that social oppression is experienced by women of different races and classes.1 Situating animal defense within an analysis of social oppression enlarges Alice Walker’s recognition that “we are all one lesson.”
Neither Man nor Beast Page 10