Volume 40, Number 11 · June 10, 1993
Feminism and Abortion
By Ronald Dworkin
Women who regard themselves as feminists, or as part of the 'women's movement,' do not necessarily all have the same set of convictions, and it is a crude mistake to treat them as if they did. There are serious divisions of opinion within feminism over the strategies for improving the political, economic, and social position of women—for example, over the ethics and the wisdom of censoring literature which some feminists find demeaning to women. Feminists also disagree about deeper questions: about the character and roots of sexual and gender discrimination, about whether women are genetically different from men in moral sensibility or perception, and whether the goal of feminism should be simply to erase formal and informal discrimination or to aim instead at a thoroughly genderless world in which roughly as many fathers as mothers are in primary charge of children, and roughly as many women as men hold top military positions. Feminists even disagree over whether abortion should be permitted: there are 'pro-life' feminists. The feminist views I shall discuss here are only those concerned with the special connection between a pregnant woman and the fetus she carries.
Feature, 4241 words
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