Here's a quick Zeitgeist
check: First the two Kates.
A few weeks
ago, Kate Michelman, former head of NARAL, released a political
memoir "rebutting the pro-life movement's insistence that
making abortion illegal is the American way," as Publisher's
Weekly put it. In 1969, Michelman, a young Catholic mother
facing divorce, had to get the approval of three male experts
in order to abort her own child. The experience plunged her into
a life of abortion rights activism, including most recently stridently
attacking Sam Alito's decision upholding a Pennsylvania law requiring
a wife to notify her husband of her intention to abort. Michelman's
book, promisingly released in late December right into the media
maelstrom surrounding the Alito hearings, "passionately,
compellingly presents a living political drama that affects millions
of lives," according to Booklist. As I write, it is also
No. 54,770 on the Amazon sales list.
Meanwhile,
National Review editor Kate O'Beirne's new book, "Women
Who Make the World Worse," is an unsubtle assault on the
ideas of Kate Michelman and her fellow aging, orthodox feminists.
It stands at No. 73 (after a brief appearance on the best-seller
list).
To add injury to insult,
Sam Alito, with a public record of opposition to abortion, is
about to become a Supreme Court justice despite the last-ditch,
mean-spirited efforts by Senate Dems to impose a one-week delay.
Who'd have thunk it?
Certainly not Kate Michelman in the heady days of her feminist
youth as an abortion rights organizer.
Second sign
of the times: the two photos. They are oddly juxtaposed in my
head: One is a New York Times photo of Gail Sheehy in
a puff piece dedicated to her latest book, "Sex and the Seasoned
Woman." The one-time best-selling author of the influential
book "Passages," Sheehy is suggestively sprawled in
front of a fireplace, wearing a black sweater, with peek-a-boo
white lace at the cleavage, a black leather skirt, and fishnet
stockings. At age 68, Grandma vamps.
The second photo is
a picture of a dead girl, Nixzmary Brown, age 7, laid out in bridal
white at the R.G. Ortiz Funeral Home on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan.
The Nation
columnist Katha Pollitt, speaking of Sheehy's new book, explains
that to aging feminist boomers, sex is still a political issue,
perhaps the defining issue of her generation. "Feminism has
taught women that your sexuality is something you should take
charge of," Ms. Pollitt said. "We live in a very highly
sexualized culture. Sex is how we understand happiness and why
we are here."
Nixzmary
never lived to reach the age where sex-as-substitute-religion
had any appeal. Her mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, eschewing older
standards of bourgeois morality that once confined women's sexual
choices, according to the New York Post had six children
with four different men. The last one, Cesar Rodriguez, beat Nixzmary
to death.
What is the connection?
Surely not that feminists support child abuse; focusing new attention
to domestic violence remains one of the movement's achievements.
But the feminist leaders of Kate Michelman's generation, still
painfully peddling sexual liberation as a path to empowerment
for women, have never accepted responsibility for the carnage
that has been unleashed in feminism's name. A marriage culture
protects children by insistently asking adults to, in fact, confine,
contain and channel their sexual choices so that (among other
reasons) they don't hurt their own children.
Gail Sheehy makes
a good living at the top of the heap, peddling an elite's woman's
dream: "It's not over at 45, 'it' being sex, romance, discovery
of a new identity and a new passion in life," as her Web
site puts it.
Nixzmary represents
the very bottom: a child who had no say in her mother's sexual
choices but (like too many American children, born and unborn),
paid the ultimate price.
Copyright
2006 Maggie Gallagher
