N.B. I’m going to use “woman” somewhat loosely in multiple contexts in this post without much disambiguation. On one hand, I’m using it as shorthand for people the abortion issue directly affects: people with functioning wombs, of which it is worth noting not all of whom are women, and is a class that not all women fall under. However, many of the social issues I’ll discuss transcend the direct effects of the issue at hand and have ramifications for women as a perceived political/social class, distinct from the exact group of people the policy itself harms.
Here’s the thing, almost none of them have some like… master plan. I guarantee almost nobody is squatting in the shadows, cackling like a goblin, saying “mwahahaha just another step in my MASTER PLAN to control people with functional wombs!!!” This argument, like the definition of patriarchy, isn’t some argument about what some shadowy cabal is explicitly planning to do to women.
It’s an argument about what the undercurrent of their position is, especially when taken in concert with the particular arguments they use, the attitudes they hold, and the other positions they support. As well as an assertion about the ramifications of policies engineered to enforce these attitudes.
When viewed under this lens “but women do it too” isn’t really a sensible counterpoint. Of course individual women can be complicit in, and in some cases actively supportive of, institutions and actions that oppress women as a collective group. All oppressed groups contain members who facilitate or support their own oppression, whether they mean/want to not. This doesn’t mean “oh, these poor women, they know not what they do and act against their own self interest!” But it doesn’t change the fact that that they are reinforcing institutions that harm women as a class, even if they’re in a position where they as an individual wouldn’t be harmed by the specific policy. In fact, I’d argue that all of us women are, in at least one aspect of our lives, doing or arguing for something that undermines women as a class, it’s a nature of the system, that doesn’t mean we can’t criticize those things because almost all of them are things women do or defend.
A lot of this rhetoric owes itself to both radical and marxist/socialist feminism (which are two groups that are not identical and sometimes at odds, but have similar ideas about the origins of the oppression of women in the modern context). Both radical and socialist feminism view the classification of women as entities whose primary role and definition is reproduction and tasks surrounding reproduction (such as housekeeping) as one of the roots of female oppression. Socialist feminism departs from radical feminism here because radical feminism largely views this as the defining aspect of womens’ oppression (which is why so many radfems are trans or sex work exclusionary), whereas socialist feminists view this as part of the redefinition of womens’ roles under the rise of new economic systems and another means to create a class divide (see the book Sylvia Fedricci’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, which is not quite a Marxist text but contains many of these arguments). In both viewpoints, of course, this is seen as something to be eliminated, albeit they take very different routes towards addressing this.
Under such a framework, the explanation for a lot of sexism takes form. Note that while some radfems may claim this as foundational, most wouldn’t deny that many of these attitudes have multiple causes, but merely this is the primary cause. For instance, social policing of womens’ sexual promiscuity as “sluts” is the manifestation of social forces requiring women to only engage in reproductive behavior on society’s narrow terms – controlling their social roles and bodies, in essence. Similarly, victim blaming for rape and social expectations about women being more “on the hook” for worrying about birth control stem from women being the ones expected to be the custodians of reproduction on society’s own terms.
Note that this is a very nuanced viewpoint with a lot of foundational theory, as well as historical and statistical evidence that’s difficult to cover in one post. There are aspects of these viewpoints I’m leaving out. Including the importance bits that contextualize the treatment of women who cannot produce children in such a system.
Regardless, under this viewpoint where women are oppressed in large part (or fundamentally, if you’re a radfem) due to their societal role centering around their reproduction, then control over the terms under which women may elect whether or not to reproduce is an attempt to leverage that role against women. By defining when women may elect to reproduce, we’re not only requiring women to engage in this definition (as they have little choice whether to engage in motherhood now), we’re also renegotiating their freedom of engaging with it on their own terms.
Women have even less freedom to engage with their social role as babymakers. It’s controlling their social role, their lives, and yes, their bodies.