On Abortion and the Promise of Democracy, But Only for Men
This is the first installment of an upcoming series on abortion rights and access, including the illegal abortion stories of Carol Ferris and Ann Carroll. Stay tuned, and stay engaged.
May 3, 2022
If I don’t comment on a major news story in these weekly missives it may be because I’m pressed for time, because I’m reluctant to join in an unhelpful cacophony of stress, or because I’m too much in my own feelings to say a word. When it comes to the swift erasure of abortion rights in the United States, it’s the latter. This one is more personal than most. But with today’s leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, my wordless shock has had to give way. It’s long past time. What follows here is the first in a forthcoming series on abortion. In this series, in addition to my writing, Carol Ferris and Ann Carroll will be sharing their stories of illegal abortions, the extreme dangers they both faced, and the result of their abortion decisions on their lives.
I’ll begin here:
I have never had an abortion. Thanks to Roe v. Wade, I grew up knowing I would have access to abortion, should I need it—something I thought about a lot. Since I was young, I have felt haunted by a society in which my right to an abortion was up for discussion. The notion that my reproductive organs in my body were not considered entirely my own was a constant, persistent reminder of my Otherness. I was the perceived, not the perceiver. I was the object being debated, not the debater. I was not the one at the table.
Jung commented frequently about the dangers of a patriarchal society in which women, and the feminine, had been diminished in favor of men and the masculine. In this piece with the sub-header “The Worship of Woman and the Worship of the Soul” (CW6), Jung commented on the extreme threat to women when the total absence of the feminine in Christianity was suddenly replaced with the worship of Mother Mary.
“Since the psychic relation to woman was expressed in the collective worship of Mary, the image of woman lost a value to which human beings had a natural right. This value could find its natural expression only through individual choice, and it sank into the unconscious when the individual form of expression was replaced by a collective one. In the unconscious the image of woman received an energy charge that activated the archaic and infantile dominants. And since all unconscious contents, when activated by dissociated libido, are projected upon external objects, the devaluation of the real woman was compensated by daemonic traits. She no longer appeared as an object of love, but as a persecutor or witch.”
When men worship “The Mother,” be it Mother Mary or Mothering as the primary work of women, they depersonalize the woman herself. She becomes a shell for projections and if she is not acting according to the expectations of the projector (welcoming Motherhood with open arms, no matter what), than she may very well be evil. She is not playing her social role.
Limits on abortion rights have nothing to do with “life.” Women’s lives (read: life) are at risk in countless ways when abortion access is limited, as are the lives of their already-born children (if they have them). Meanwhile, when pro-life couples seek fertility treatments in order to have children, we know that far more eggs are fertilized than will ever come to term. Yet their search to make the woman a Mother makes this trade-off acceptable because what is really being celebrated is white Motherhood and the continuation of a conservative, religious hierarchy in which men are in charge and women are Mothers. Women are the perceived and men are the perceivers. Women are docile and men are protectors. This is about maintaining a historical narrative with control of women at its core because, whether in the creation of codified Christianity or of American democracy, women have never been at the table.
Unless we make detoxing from it a priority, a patriarchal mindset permeates everything. It’s a view too often perpetuated even in the Jungian world with the kind of nonsense that promotes “the archetypes of men” as versions of “The King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover” (never Father), and “the archetypes of women” as “Maiden, Mother, and Crone” (never Queen). For women, these archetypes are tied directly to her sex life or her reproductive organs: between puberty and motherhood (Maiden=dangerous), during motherhood (Mother=nurturing), and after menopause (Crone=wise or dangerous again). If you’ve studied with me, you probably know that I reject gendered archetypes, or really any fixed archetypes at all. Most overly concretized archetypes either come from patriarchal (and racist) history or an overly gendered reaction to it, a reaction which really must evolve again in favor of the core point of Jung’s psychology: we are all ultimately seeking wholeness and individuation, the ability to pursue the life that calls, however unusual it may appear to others. Once you’re living by one or a few archetypes, you’re back to being split. History, no matter how archetypal, requires revision and reconsideration.
In today’s leaked Supreme Court draft ruling, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion:
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’”
The Constitution makes no reference to abortion. Rights must be deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.
If you are not smacking your head at this idiocy, you should be. Justice Alito’s lines are jaw-droppingly myopic.
If we are ever going to move forward, history cannot continue to be the f*^%ing precedent.
Women. Were. Never. At. The. Table.
In 1776, before she was America’s (second) first lady, Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, at the Second Continental Congress.
“I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
John Adams and his fellow delegates did not remember the ladies. In fact, they teased the notion of women being part of the conversation, just as they scoffed at the idea of Black, brown, Asian, or Native peoples being citizens. Those precedents, religious, Constitutional, or archetypal cannot stand.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies