The Catholic Weekly 26 April 2020

catholicweekly.com.au 13 26, April, 2020 A pro-life demonstrator holds a placard during the March For Life rally in London in 2019. Strangely, most feminists have embraced a masculinised logic which demands women live by men’s standards. PHOTO: CNS/PETER NICHOLLS, REUTERS and the loftiest ideals, leads to gravest evil. The Second Recognition BEFORE BECOMING amoth- er, in an effort to make sense of myself, to find my place in the world, I had embraced the mantle of feminism and its cardinal virtues: autonomy, self-sufficiency, equality, em- powerment. These named and shaped my experience, my sense of identity. Motherhood and preg- nancy had long dazzled and entranced me—but only as romanticised metaphors for a kind of selfhood that is com- passionate, creative, welcom- ing of the other. I loved reading and theo- rising and writing about these metaphors. The reality was more terrifying. I’d watched friends and acquaintances become moth- ers and get swallowed into a child-centred world, where conversations about regurgi- tation and breastfeeding and birth plans reigned, where once-clean houses were overrun with laundry and plastic toys, where time was both frenzied and monoto- nous, where no one had sex anymore, where wives and husbands became Mums and Dads and got a bit fat. I thought of this world as Mum- myland, and the inhabitants as women who lost them- selves in their children and their home lives, compromis- ing their independence and ambition and freedom, ced- ing control of both body and mind. I wanted to be a mother — one day, I said — but I did not want to disappear. So I would not, I resolved. It would be different with me. I prided myself that my marriage was not like that, no fusion of identities, no joint Facebook profile. I kept my own last name, our marriage an alliance of love between two autono- mous beings. Like most, my twenties were a time of intense self-dis- covery, and aptly so. My sense of self so newly discovered, I was afraid to lose it. While this is hard to admit, my feminism was, in good part, self-centric. It was very much concerned with my identity, my power and poten- tial. Of course, this expanded to include an interest in woman- kind more generally, but my passion for feminism none- theless sprang from an exalta- tion of my own experience. I extolled the ideals of au- tonomy and independence — until those ideals were ut- terly undone by the realities of pregnancy and motherhood, the reality of Julian. Sudden- ly, I was confronted with the intractability of maleness and femaleness. As it turns out, these are not mere social constructs. My femaleness is not something I chose, not something I con- trol. Motherhood and father- hood are not interchangeable. I grewmy son inside my body. At the appointed time — unknown and undecided by us — my body birthed him, with strength I did not know I possessed. My body bled for weeks while it healed the rupture of our union. My body made sweet milk for him. I spent hours ma- rooned in the rocking chair, sometimes enraptured, some- times bored out of my mind, feeding him frommyself. My husband, was there, too, caring for him in his way, but our experiences were not, cannot, be interchanged. Before parenthood, our do- mestic division of labour was equitable, fluid — but now we were at themercy of biological realities beyond our control. The traditional feminist solution to the “problem” of female biology is unfettered access to contraception and abortion: this reveals an iron- ically masculine bias. Rather than seeking to change social structures to accommodate the realities of female biology, the femi- nist movement, since its sec- ond wave, has continually and firmly fought instead for women to alter their biology, often through violence, so that it functions more like a man’s. Tellingly, the legal right for a woman to kill a child in her womb was won before the le- gal right for a woman not to be fired for being pregnant. The message is clear: womenmust become like men to be free. In the “sex-positive” realm of popular feminism, where I once sought refuge, pleasure is the ruling paradigm. I was reminded of this re- cently, when I attended a fem- inist panel on sex and theolo- gy at the national convention for the American Academy of Religion. In the entire 90 minutes of discussion, with multiple fe- male scholars presenting and an audience of female aca- demics actively engaging, not once did anyone mention that fact that sex can result in preg- nancy. It was as if we were operat- ing within a world where that no longer happens, where new human beings emerge out of cabbage patches, or spring from men’s thighs, like Dionysus from Zeus. Unfortunately, it is women who pay the price when this fantasy skids into reality. I remember seeing a heart-wrenching Facebook post in the midst of my con- version, in which a woman I do not personally know was explaining her decision to have an abortion. She begins the post by re- vealing that this is the second time she has gotten pregnant on long-term hormonal birth control, and she concludes by making a pitch for access to abortion, because “bodily au- tonomy exists and it exists for a reason.” There is a basic logical problem if we cannot see the contradiction there: the very fact that she is in such a dif- ficult and painful situation is because, in fact, bodily auton- omy does not exist for women as it does for men. When an unwanted preg- nancy resulting from consen- sual sex is labelled “forced motherhood,” the question arises: who is doing the forc- ing? It is not the man, or society; it is the woman’s own body. This is a framework that makes women at war with themselves. Men can have sex until their eyes pop out; they will never get pregnant. This is not true for women — just ask my husband, who was conceived after a tubal ligation. The myth of complete sexu- al freedom, complete autono- my, is based on male biology, and women can only pursue that ideal by doing violence to themselves. Feminists, of all people, should be attuned to this, but they believe and propagate the myth as much as anyone. As I once did, wholeheartedly. Becoming a Catholic did not make me pro-life; becom- ing a mother did. Motherhood unmasked the illusion of my own autonomy. The illusion that an unborn human being is not a human being. The illusion that maleness and femaleness are inciden- tal to human existence, rather than a powerful and purpose- ful reality that tethers us to the created order. Catholicism, which swept in soon after I became amoth- er, provided me with words to name these recognitions — and, more importantly, per- mission to accept them, even though it meant transgressing, and ultimately abandoning, this central dogma of feminist orthodoxy. Abigail Favale is a Fellow with the Notre Dame (US) Office of Human Dignity & Life Initiatives. Portions of this essay have been adapted from the author’s memoir, Into the Deep: An Unlike- ly Catholic Conversion, available now fromCascade Books. The myth of complete sexual freedom, complete autonomy, is based on male biology, and women can only pursue that ideal by doing violence to them- selves. Feminists, of all people, should be attuned to this ...” Abigail Favale FEATURE