A word on selfishness. There is a selfish element in most good movements for justice, because most good movements are responses by people who are unjustly treated to their unjust treatment. I know that in the labor disputes I have supported most of the people involved were being selfish in the sense that they were demanding more pay/better working conditions, etc, for themselves. What was especially depressing for me about the clinic defences was the asymmetry in the expression of meanspirited vitriol. People on my side sometimes seemed to have no sense at all that some of our opponents were generally decent people who, in some cases I knew had records of activism for social justice that none of us could hope to emulate. I’ve never had that problem when the police have been on the other side from me.

Also, just to note that I didn’t use the term ‘middle class’!

Finally, though, thanks for the very nice comment about my (other) writing, which I really found touching and very encouraging. Hope I don’t seem touchy in the above, I don’t feel touchy I just wanted to expand on what actually happened, and your nice comments outweigh by far the slightly ungenerous reading of my email!

It is a restatement of that old refrain ‘the darkies [insert relevant group] were quite happy until those darned over educated ratbags came down here and disturbed the deeply traditional and holy relationships that prevailed until their interfering ways disturbed our community harmony’.

Poppycock. It’s the same ole same ole.

These creeps’ real position in condemning or rendering illegitimate, ‘middle class’ women or men, who agitate for themselves and others, rights which the wealthy and well connected take as their due, is simply a restatement of the position, that the defence of privilege or power, is really the defence of the underprivileged and powerless.

The issue of who may be termed ‘middle class’ is also interesting. In the US the term ‘middle class’ is used to describe just about anybody who isn’t demonstrably a part of the indigent poor. If a schoolteacher, social worker, engineer or skilled tradesperson can be safely excluded from having their political and social values and preferences taken seriously, on the grounds that they are ‘middle class’, this leaves the field clear to permit the values and preferences of whom exactly, as being more legitimate? Pull the other one!

I don’t think I would have coped with those early weeks of motherhood if I felt at all that this situation had been forced upon me by a lack of other options. If I hadn’t been able to make a choice, for myself, and to plan a way for us to manage our surprise. Having made a choice, I was free to throw myself in whole-heartedly.

When we call ourselves pro-choice, we’re just that, not pro-abortion as such.

People who oppose abortion rights most vocally and successfully, incidentally, are just as wealthy as those who support free access to it. Most of the people who go to church might be poor and less-educated, but the institutions, the church leaders, and the politicians are not.

Thanks for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully to my post, especially give your strong disagreements with it. Your claim about abortion (and other things) being a “decision” as opposed to a “choice” (which is easily reducible to a kind of commodified view of life) is particularly strong. Figuring out what I would say in response to that would take more time than I have right now; very briefly, suffice to say that I think you’re framing the issue in terms of the affirmative construction of the self (that is, I decide to do this or that thing), where as was thinking much more specifically about the civic or social consequences of making as much as possible, including the whole range of possible outcomes to sexual relationships, subject to one’s own decisionmaking (that is, what used to be consequence or an obligation is now optional, as it were). Do you have to have the latter to have the former–does appreciating the positive and socially strengthening results of responsible decisionmaking become a positive argument in making certain that as many choices as possible are available, especially in regards to such personal matters as sex? I’m not sure. Perhaps. Something that I have to think more about.

Regarding the middle class thing, I think it’s important to read between the lines there: what’s really being talked about is not that abortion rights benefit the middle class more than the poor–clearly, given that the wealthy have always and probably will always be able to avail themselves of this option, the opposite it true. Rather, what’s being talked about is the fact that, in the U.S. at least, the overwhelming majority of those who demonstrate and agitate on behalf of abortion rights are from that bourgeois segment of the population for whom consumption and choice are natural concomitants, whereas quite often those who oppose abortion rights–those who find it immoral or wicked or just distasteful–tend to be from the lower classes. Religion obviously plays a big role in this; the more educated you are in America, the less likely you are to be religious. But anyway, it’s really just a comment on (I think unintentionally exclusive and even somewhat selfish) styles of speech and rhetoric, not a claim that middle-class women are themselves selfish.