A Symposium on Reproductive Rights: The Emerging Issues
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Rights: The Emerging Issues
NADINE TAUB*
On February 6, 1982, the Women's Rights Law
Reporter sponsored a symposium at Rutgers Law
School, Newark, New Jersey. Attended primarily
by lawyers, but also by community activists, the
Conference was conceived as an opportunity for
feminists to identify and address emerging issues
in the area of reproductive rights, particularly as
those issues bear on achieving full societal partici-
pation for women.
Starting from shared concerns and commit-
ments, and functioning as a generous and collec-
tive working group, symposium participants ex-
plored difficult questions through interlacing
presentations and open discussion. Although not
treated separately, the issue of abortion was often
touched upon, and one of the day's understood
premises was that
the right to safe, legal abortion is the
sine qua non of a woman's ability to con-
trol her personal destiny. Without it,
women cannot gain access to or partici-
pate effectively in the political and social
processes which shape every aspect of
their lives. The degree of control women
are able to exercise over their reproduc-
tive lives directly affects their educa-
tional and job opportunities, income
level, physical and emotional well being,
as well as the economic and social condi-
tions the children they do bear will expe-
rience.'
LLB Yale 1968 Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School
Newark.
1. TESTIMONY SUBMITTED TO THE SEPARATION OF
PowERs COMMITTEE OF THE SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE ON
THE HUMAN LIFE BILL S .158 (June 1981) (statement on
behalf of: La Raza Legal Alliance, National Conference of
Black Lawyers, National Emergency Civil Liberties Com-
mittee, and National Lawyers Guild) at page 4. A copy is on
file at The Women's Rights Law Reporter, 15 Washington
Street, Newark, NJ 07102.
Another shared premise was the need to strug-
gle against sterilization abuse. As Peggy Barnette's
presentation for the American Indian Movement
reminded us, coerced sterilization victims are dis-
proportionately representatives of the Third
World. Moreover, when women are denied access
to abortion, the pressure on them to turn to sterili-
zation mounts tremendously.
In her lead-off paper, The Crisis in Equality
Theory: Maternity, Sexuality and War, Wendy
Williams explores the difficulties feminists are
now experiencing in confronting, both in judicial
opinions and in ourselves, the enduring con-
straints on gender and sex roles which are imposed
by cultural limits. Demonstrating convincingly
that cultural constraints, as reflected in and aided
by the law, have subordinated -women to men,
Williams takes a strong stand against reinforcing
these constraints by demanding special differen-
tial treatment for women-even where that treat-
ment can be seen as preserving the special values
associated with female preserves. Her concern is
that by relying on current, albeit deeply-embed-
ded, cultural definitions of women's situations to
justify sex-based classifications, we may inadver-
tently support and give credence to the very social
constructs we so earnestly mean to oppose.
Williams reaches the issue of pregnancy when
she poses the question: what does the culture iden-
tify as quintessentially female? And she brings to
the issue her general concern for an equality prin-
ciple that does not reinforce existing cultural lim-
its through special, albeit favorable, treatment for
women. As Williams makes clear, pregnancy clas-
sifications present particular difficulties for equal-
ity theory since childbearing (as opposed to
childrearing) is a biologically sex-specific func-
tion. If pregnancy is equated with other poten-
tially disabling physical conditions, classifications
singling out pregnancy clearly constitute discrimi-
[Women's Rights Law Reporter, Volume 7, Number 3, Spring 1982]
© 198: by Women's Rights Law Reporter, Rutgers-The State University
0085-8269/80/0908](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/worts7&div=28&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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A Symposium on Reproductive Rights: The Emerging Issues
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