For me, the slogan, and the feminist politics of
choice, have always described more than an attitude
about reproductive freedom. They've described a broader
sensibility. I use the term "morphological
freedom," which I have taken from an essay by Anders
Sandberg, to name this broader conception of the culture
and politics of choice, especially the technologically
constituted proliferation of choices available for the
genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification of human
bodies today and in the near-term futures we can
reasonably anticipate.

The feminist politics of choice has sometimes already
connected the defense of reproductive choices to other
political struggles?for example, to the politics around
queer forms of family and affiliation, transgender
rights and resisting the disastrous contemporary War on
Drugs. I think that it should be expanded further, to
accommodate an affirmative politics of genetic medicine,
the support of increased scientific research and
education, and the protection of multiplying therapeutic
options.

Exploiting ignorance and unease

On November 5, 2003, President George W. Bush signed
into law the so-called "partial birth" abortion ban. The
moment of the signing was captured in an

image that is perfectly emblematic of the larger
historical stakes in play for women in this moment. The
President is seated at his desk, document and pen before
him, staring a bit blankly into space. Behind him are
six grinning and enthusiastically applauding men.
Looming behind them are six American flags. There are no
women present at all. For the bodies of women, you must
turn to the text of the document itself, for the bodies
of women are treated as texts on which these men are
presuming to write.

I have described this law as the "so-called" partial
birth abortion ban because, as it happens, no such
medical procedure exists. Medical literature contains no
references at all to this banned and vilified procedure.
"Partial birth abortion" is a public relations creation
of the anti-choice (so-called "pro-life") right,
designed to conjure up a scene of profound violation
that can, for the lack of a clear reference in reality,
be attached in the popular imagination and subsequently
in the application of law to an ever-broadening range of
legitimate and affirmed medical procedures.

As technology continues to blur established
biological lines, such obfuscation will only get worse.

The trajectory of technological development has
introduced real perplexities into the status of profound
biological experiences such as pregnancy, sexual
maturation, illness, aging and death. Already, the
susceptibility of organisms to prosthetic and
pharmacological intervention has transformed the status
of "viability" as a stable measure of just when lives
can properly be said to begin or to end, or as a
benchmark against which to leverage intuitions about the
proper scope of such intervention.

Consider the impact of the emotional investments
sometimes occasioned by early-term ultrasound imaging of
fetuses in the womb, or the sometimes disturbingly agile
machine-assisted afterlives of the brain-dead or
irretrievably comatose. These technological spectacles
delineate a crisis in traditional meaning that is
exacerbated by contemporary technological developments
now on an almost day to day basis.

The appalling effectiveness of the rhetoric of
"partial-birth" abortion and similar anti-choice
interventions lies in their exploitation of ignorance
about specific procedures and capacities, as well as in
their exploitation of a deep uneasiness provoked by such
technological development about the biological limits of
recognizable human lives more generally.

Socially conservative bioethicists such as
Leon Kass,
current chair of the influential US President's Council
on Bioethics, deploy this kind of uneasiness like a
cudgel in support of their anti-choice agendas. Kass,
for instance, has notoriously urged that there is a
"wisdom" we should heed in the involuntary shudders of
repugnance that accompany for some the confrontation
with new genetic medical technologies.

Like a divine intervention, this admonitory
shuddering seizes Kass himself whenever he contemplates
abortion, physician-assisted suicide, in-vitro
fertilization, the radical amelioration of the diseases
of aging, embryonic stem-cell research or the merest
suggestion of cloning. Since a shudder of repugnance
need offer no reasons in support of itself for its
decisive force to be felt, one has to wonder (even if
you find his particular sympathies and antipathies
personally congenial) just how Kass would distinguish
his own instinctive recoils from those occasioned in his
predecessors in generations past by the contemplation of
anesthesia, interracial marriage or consensual sodomy.

Family resemblance

There is a decisive family resemblance between
conventional anti-choice politics that try to hijack the
concept of "life" and the recent effort of many
conservative bioethicists to hijack the concept of human
"dignity" in the service of projects to ban and restrict
therapeutic choices and avenues of medical research just
to better reflect their own parochial interests and
tastes (and very often it is literally the same people
who are making these parallel arguments).

Conservative anti-choice politics take amazingly
diverse forms, but the broad contours always seem
suspiciously familiar to feminists long-used to
conservative arguments against abortion rights. Last
year, for example, I read about

an Illinois bill to restrict surgically splitting the
tongue lengthwise to
produce the appearance of a snake- or lizard-like
forking. Shannon Larratt, a Canadian who had his tongue
split in 1996 for esthetic reasons, argued that it "can
be a dangerous procedure. Now they'll force people who
want this?and there are a lot of people who want
this?into untrained hands."

Sound familiar?

Where should progressive futurists look to find
allies in the struggle to articulate and support our
morphological freedom? Facile libertarian technophiles?
I judge the conceptual and strategic resources available
to the feminist culture of choice far more relevant and
more robust to the delineation and defense of what I am
calling morphological freedom than, say, the comparably
anemic "negative liberty" of the libertarian. When
feminism embraces the technologies and therapies through
which a desired but otherwise unavailable pregnancy is
initiated, or through which an unwanted pregnancy is
terminated, these reproductive freedoms provide more
than a simple defense of a woman's liberty, but
represent instead moments in a profoundly emancipatory
technologically mediated struggle for equality and
self-determination inconceivable in any "state of
nature."

Already feminist sensibilities contribute
indispensable perspectives to the negotiation of complex
bioethical dilemmas that a "negative libertarian"
framework will hopelessly oversimplify. Should growth
hormone be administered by a parent to confer a
positional advantage on an otherwise developmentally
normal child? Does plastic surgery consolidate or
subvert arbitrary and in fact damaging standards of
bodily attractiveness? Will preimplantation genetic
diagnosis diminish valuable human diversity even as it
certainly diminishes human suffering? Is the advocacy of
physician-assisted suicide a way of defending individual
autonomy or does it amount instead to encouraging
valuable human beings to leave the scene rather than
spending the resources in health care and social support
that would help many who are suicidal feel their lives
are worth living? And so on.

Added benefits

While adding a welter of new technological quandaries
to the politics of choice may seem to risk an evacuation
of the real urgency of pro-choice politics in the
specificity of their reproductive applications,
emphasizing the range of their affinity and connection
to other vital struggles seems to me just as likely to
strengthen them in that specificity even as it
illuminates those other struggles.

By embracing the technological forces that would
expand the reach of reasonable individual choices over
once-definitive biological limits, a hopeful radical
feminist politics of choice can seize the initiative
away from the conservative politics of fear in this most
intimate collision of technology with individual human
bodies. This more hopeful politics of technological
possibility is necessary to turn the tide against recent
conservative successes that limit our access to
contraceptive procedures and reproductive technologies
as well as to reasonable and life-saving sex education
practices and a whole host of related issues.

It would also put us in a more credible position to
resist a few developmental pathways that really are too
dangerous by objective measures (reproductive cloning,
at least for now, is such an example), to protect our
right and capacity to choose the ways in which
development impinges on our own narratives of personal
meaningfulness, as well as to plausibly regulate
technological development to ensure that its costs and
risks as well as its benefits are distributed fairly
among all the stakeholders to that development.

Human dignity, surely, is not diminished by a
proliferation of the choices available to us, nor by the
spectacle of the play of the choices we make. Dignity,
it seems to me, demands freedom above all.

This column is a version of a paper entitled "Keep
Your Laws Off of My Body!" that was delivered on March
11, 2004 at the 13th Annual Boundaries in Question
Conference. Held at the University of California at
Berkeley, this year's conference had the theme
"Feminists Face the Future: New Feminist Perspectives on
Biotechnology and Bioethics."