In last weeks column, There is a feminism without abortion, I began to share the interview given to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein by feminist and legal scholar Dr. Erika Bachiochi. She argues in her 2021 book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, that the sexual revolution coupled with hi-tech forms of contraception and easy abortion have been devastating for womens well-being and the cultivation of virtue.

Reflecting on the evolution of feminism, Dr. Bachiochi observes that in capitalism, the market has grown to value women not because they are biological women but when they perform at the workplace like men. The standard has been maleness, undervaluing (indeed ignoring) the roles and functions of women qua women. This is the ultimate patriarchy.

Weve seen women advance in so many ways, except there isnt this concomitant valuing of the work thats done by women in pregnancy, and then the work thats done by both men and women in the home. The modern day womens movement really capitulates to a market logic, where equality is seen in market terms, where instead of women as caregivers and men as breadwinners, both men and women are valued only as breadwinners.

And that really important work of care that women especially but increasingly men too really value, that work of care they do in the home, has not been valued in the market And that has been especially, I think, difficult for poor women.

In capitalism, the market would prefer women to be just like men never getting pregnant, never needing maternity leave. Biological women may get pregnant, requiring absence from work on full pay; someone may have to be paid to backstop. In capitalism, women becoming pregnant is inconvenient, and expensive; this may partially explain why women are often paid less than men for the same work.

According to Dr. Bachiochi, abortion and contraception really serve the needs of capital and the market at the expense of families.

There should be massive realignment where theres a real renewed attention to but support of caregiving. But just the fact that there is a choice [for abortion] means that employers see it as a cheaper choice.

This is exactly why you have employers, corporations states talking about the corporate case for reproductive health its a far cheaper option than accommodations for pregnancy for caregiving. And so when theyre thinking about the bottom line, this is the way theyre going to go.

Suddenly, theres all this talk about autonomy, and theres a very Lockean approach to the way progressives talk about abortion rights and this idea that the child well, they dont [use the word] child the fetus is like a trespasser on their property of their body, the self-ownership of their body, again, in a very Lockean way and they then have this right to dispel anyone who comes through it in kind of an absolute property right, when it seems to me that in the progressive tradition, theres a better understanding of the duties of care we owe one another, that were all interdependent, that theres more of a responsibility for those who are vulnerable and dependent. And the child, who is a human being and is really utterly dependent on his or her mother at that time for those nine months, is the most vulnerable and the most dependent.

Instead of arguing that because the child growing in the womb is vulnerable and dependent upon the mother for life, that very vulnerability is used to argue that the child has no right to live, no right to be called human, because it is not viable outside the womb. Capitalism and the market has no use for the vulnerable the aged, the handicapped, the idle unskilled because they cannot produce, or because they constrain optimal production.

Dr. Bachiochi suggests that the liberal capitalist way of thinking (exemplified by John Locke commonly known as the father of liberalism) may be at the root of a radical individualism masquerading as personal autonomy that is ultimately anti-family and anti-community. This approach to life must be challenged.

In terms of the poor woman by resetting this question the law does teach. By saying that there are all sorts of people, maybe not everyone in the country obviously, who believe that a childs life is taken in an abortion and that we actually owe duties to that child, that it helps reset thinking about sex itself, that I think it ought to help us take sex more seriously.

When we take the natural facts of human reproduction seriously, that there are asymmetrical burdens on women, therefore women should hold men off more and expect more from them.

In the same way, I think that enabling and, again, empowering the poor to take seriously the really important work of the home, of rearing children is basically what the rich already do. And its kind of not fair that the wealthy, the rich, the well-educated see how important it is to prioritize their childrens development, their childrens moral and intellectual development, and then say, oh, well, we shouldnt expect that of the poor.

To me, that is actually more of a flawed way of thinking about the capacities of the poor. And our human equality is not in how much property we own or wealth we have or how much money we make or anything. But its just in our equal human capacity for moral development.

And I think rich and poor both have that and that should be an expectation that our laws have that we all ought to be striving for moral development. We ought not to shield moral responsibility from the poor or the rich, that our laws and our policies should be enabling people to carry out their obligations to one another, because thats how people develop virtuously. And that tends to lead toward both personal and societal happiness.

Engaging in the natural act of sexual intercourse implies moral obligations many seek to avoid. Readily available abortion and contraception assist in this, and lead to a new antinatalism people deciding ex ante that they never want to become parents. This can lead to immature behaviour, and sexual irresponsibility.

People dont realize what theyre missing out on when they make those sorts of determinations well ahead of time. Parenting is profound. And I think for eons and eons, what human beings have seen is that becoming a mother or father really develops the person, requires a great movement away from the focus on self toward another, toward benevolence and in order to then be able to focus on others outside of your family as well, and that maturation process, I think, is most definitely needed in our culture right now on the part of both men and women.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and a development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com

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Peter Espeut | The economics of abortion | Commentary - Jamaica Gleaner