Check out advocatesforpregnantwomen.org for the facts of countless stories, and activist opportunities.

Spending time in a Israel this summer, a place where women receive free fertility treatment from the government, while having to go before a committee of three in order to be granted permission for an abortion, I cannot help but search for the common links between free fertility treatment in one small part of the world, and criminalization of women’s bodies in another rather large part of the world. 

To begin with, the abortion committees, the fertility treatment, and the incarceration of pregnant women are all policies that are largely supported by the extreme religious folk in both America and Israel.

However, even that link does not run deep enough, because it does not answer why religion has become a repository for conservative perspectives (I believe religion at some point may have been a radical force for progress), and second of all why does everyone else go along with it? In the liberal circles crack mothers have little support as well.

This issue fascinates me to no end because more then anything other issue the rights of women when it comes their reproducing bodies or the lack there of, is the epitomy of  gender injustice, because to a large degree arguments for gender difference/ inequality stem from the reproducing bodies of women.  This being the case, there cannot be feminism without women having complete control over their reproducing bodies.  But according to the prevailing model the pregnant body becomes the exception to women’s rights. (Women generally, have rights, except when they are pregnant.) In such a system, women cannot, by define have rights, because for the majority of their adult life, that can at anytime become pregnant, and rights that can be removed at anytime, are not rights to begin with – rights by definition do not get taken away by the state.

However, there is a powerful argument that can be made for the “rights of the fetus.” After all, doesn’t my right to swing my fist end at your nose? So too, it ends at my “fetus’s nose,” says the rights of child ideology.  Thus women’s rights are sublimated to the rights of the fetus, which of course is not a problem considering that women are expected to sublimate themselves to the needs of their family and children, so why not start early, before the child is even born, and we might as well make it the law.   

 Pretty much all inequality for women stems from their role as baby machines (women are nurturers, aka  unqualified to public life and serious careers where competition  and hard work is required. (I say “baby machines” on purpose, because I speak of an ontology that sees women’s essential rule in society as reproducers  – objects, this is a universe away from an individual women’s right to be mothers on their own terms).

Today gender inequality persists because women are still “baby machines.”  The laws that makes this happen are not surprising, they are inevitable in society such as ours. Often these law are perpetuated by the extremely religious, because religion in its tradition manifestations is based on law and order that is constructed through predetermined and clear-cut roles for all members of society.  Women’s primary role is motherhood within this mapping of reality.  And thus “fetus rights” becomes away to continue a system that actually has nothing to do with rights for anyone and everything to do with predestined roles (aka what is socially constructed is absolute and inevitable.)

 This perspective is absolutely bad for women! and frankly everyone else, if you ask me.

So once again I ask – who or what is helped when I work in the dining room from 8 to 5 pm six days a week?

Kibbutz Ketura is a community where you don’t do your own cooking, laundary or banking. You never see your paychecks, and the kibbutz accountant gives you a monthy amount based on your “need.” The vast majority of the money comes from some sort of super algae that the kibbutz grows and then sells in-you guest it- in the international market place.

Of course there is nothing wrong with such a community- as long as it remains voluntary membership and other options abound, and this of course is the case in Israel. However, it is not viewed as an option amongst members and volunteers, but as a socialist, morally superior ideal. And thus, Kibbutz Ketura, one of the last non-privatized kibbutzm becomes a sort of willful “truman show” for an ideal that if realized universally would actually be terrifying (at least to me). It is game of “socialism” sustained by the capitalist reality that buys their super-algae and turns it into expensive makeup for wealthy women, while hiring foreign workers who live in shacks, and relying on the labor of “idealist” volunteers who think they are serving some goal of a better world.

A better world does not start here,and certainly it will not end here of that I’m sure.