I am a married man, and if I know anything from day-to-day experience, it is that you cannot infer a man's politics from those of his wife.
This truth came home to me again in a discussion about the politics of Jane Sullivan Roberts, the spouse of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. Over breakfast, I mentioned that Ms. Roberts has been active in a group called Feminists for Life.
FOR THE RECORD
Feminism: In a Thursday Op-Ed essay by Crispin Sartwell, his wife's name was misspelled. It is Marion Winik, not Marion Wink.
"I don't think you can be a feminist and try to force women to have babies they don't want," my wife, Marion Wink, said.
That claim succinctly expresses why many believe that abortion rights are central to feminism: Freedom entails control over one's own body. The idea that the state ought to control female reproduction is therefore an odious violation of the autonomy feminism seeks to uphold.
That's what Marion thinks. But for me, the matter is considerably more complicated.
Feminism has a broad agenda and a rich history. It has dedicated itself to equal pay for women, to making it possible for women to ascend to positions of power in all areas of human endeavor. It has dedicated itself to raising Third World women out of poverty and to stopping the rape, harassment, mutilation and degradation of women.
And feminism is anything but monolithic. There are anarchist feminists, communist feminists and Republican feminists. There are Christian feminists, Islamic feminists and atheist feminists. There are feminists who define pornography as rape and feminists who endorse it as a liberating practice. And although most feminists favor abortion rights, there are others who are not so sure -- even the radical feminist Emma Goldman had her doubts.
Jane Roberts has for many years been a high-powered attorney, a status made possible in part by the victories of American feminism. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity or intensity of her commitment to many of the tenets of feminism. But like many people, she comes from a religious perspective (in her case, Catholicism) that condemns abortion and, perhaps, she also has independent moral misgivings.
Such misgivings are philosophically defensible. If it were perfectly clear that abortion is only a matter of a woman's control of her own body, then you could not endorse the liberation of women without endorsing abortion rights. But that is not clear. To what extent and up to what point a fetus is part of a woman's body are difficult questions that trouble even as strong an advocate of abortion rights as my wife.
