labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janeiro/ junho 2016 - janvier/juillet 2016

Reproductive Freedom and Kantian Autonomy:

Explorations from an Indian Context

Kanchana Mahadevan

Abstract

Women’s equitable participation in public institutions is a challenge for liberalism. It is formally committed to an inalienable concept of individual freedom that is equally available to all. However, liberalism’s atomic concept of personhood structurally inhibits women’s freedom in the public sphere. This is outcome of what Pateman has defined as the ‘sexual contract’ of marriage, which has confined women to the private sphere. Consequently, feminist liberalism’s conception of reproductive freedom as the right to control the body is flawed in being founded on individualistic assumptions. Alternatively, the Kantian model of autonomy has the potential for re-inventing the notion of reproductive freedom from a feminist point of view.

Key-words: freedom, women, feminism, autonomy.

“The greatest story of masculine political birth is the story of an original contract that creates civil freedom and civil society” (Pateman 1988: 59)

“The concept of partnership (between men and women) is, after all, based on dialogue and debate” (Rajan, 2004)

  The question of gender equality and participation in contemporary public/political life is connected with freedom.  Women are not able to participate as equals in politics because they are structurally denied freedom.  Although gender inequality is as old as history, one can relate the specific problem of women’s lack of freedom to the modern liberal tradition. The later attempts to derive legitimate political institutions from freedom, understood as the inalienable rights of the individual. 

The social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau accord primacy to the individual as someone who is born free.  This legacy of modernity has been diagnosed as resting on an asocial subject, which is explicit in liberal tradition.  As Carole Pateman observes, since the late seventeenth century feminists have been exposing the patriarchal undertones of political theories that depend on individuals(1988: 19).  The citizen of public political life, feminists argue, is an individual male who excludes women and confines them to the private/domestic sphere. 

However, many feminists who defend reproductive rights have advocated the liberal model of freedom as the right to control the body or property. In doing so, they reproduce the aporias of patriarchal freedom.  In this context then, there are those such as Maria Mies (1993) who suggest that the discourse of freedom be eschewed as hopelessly patriarchal, to return to traditional forms of life.   Yet the question remains:  Can feminists glibly embrace existing communities?  Should freedom be renounced completely?  This paper examines ways in which freedom can be resurrected from a feminist point of view.  Its moot question concerns whether one can hold on to the domain of interrelations with that of freedom or autonomy.

I

The Feminist Critique of Contract

 Feminists tend to affirm freedom as an individual’s independence and control over life, body and property.  Thus, reproductive freedom is equated with control over the body; or “[…]any formulation of laws and rights needs to contextualize the economic rights of women as central…”(Agnes,2000:136).  This line of argument maintains that property should be “situated at the centre of the discourse on women…”(Ibid).

 Property can be treated in a broad sense as going beyond material commodities to include human lives and bodies; individual rights as control over property becomes a part of the aspiration for gender equality with men crucial for political participation (Weitz, 9).  Such a notion of freedom as control is rooted in liberal theory, which chalks out individual rights as the basis of a social-political order.  However, one would have to examine whether women’s freedom can be reduced to the ownership of property or whether reproductive freedom is about control over bodies.  The classical account of liberal freedom as control over property-be it material or bodily- is grounded on the exclusion of women. 

Liberals claim that all human beings are born with inalienable rights; they also acknowledge that the unbridled exercise of such rights intrudes into natural freedom.[1]  Hence, a social contract between individuals is necessary to ensure the protection of rights.  The right to interfere with others is given up by all individuals to a governing body in return for a private space of licentiousness.    As Pateman notes, liberal politics rests on the contrast between the private sphere of the family, where marriage is central, with that of civil society(1988: 35).  This split is problematic because of its gendered character emerging from social conditioning: men tend to occupy public spaces and those that are private are populated by women.  Privacy, along with its inhabitants women, is perceived as the natural dimension to which men have access as property (Brown 1995: 181).

Contract theorists use the masculine term in a generic way so that their notion of individuality applies only to men.  For example Locke defines right as the individual’s right to life, liberty and property; his pronouncement

“[…]every Man has a Property in his own Person” applies only to men as individuals (Pateman, 1988, 41). 

Freedom is thus ownership from which in turn is derived the right to contract or agreement to exchange what is owned.  Civil society is constituted by the conventional bonds of contracts not the particular natural bonds of kinship (idem: 59).[2] Women are absent from the political arena of contracts that cement political relations.[3] 

The nonexistence of women in the classical notion of rights and contracts is not fortuitous.  Instead of being perceived as individuals, women are treated as the property whose preservation is the end of contract.  As Pateman argues, the subordination of women to men did not originate in contract, but was seen by liberals such as Locke as natural (Ibid): [4] Men have the natural capacity for freedom and equality, while women are construed to be naturally subordinate to them.  In which case, although Locke permits the marriage contract in the state of nature, it is between individual men who have natural ability for contract and women who do not have such an ability(idem:54).  This is a paradox because contract is an agreement between equals and the marriage contract is an agreement between inequals(ibid). 

As Pateman observes, marriage contracts precede the social contract and women who are said to lack the capacity for contracts; hence, it is only through force that they can be made to enter into marriage contracts.  This is especially because3women lack individuality and property to become the equals of men in contract. The notion of contract is brought in to justify men’s natural conjugal right over women in the family-men convert their natural right over women into civil right(6, 59). [5]

Moreover, the exclusion of women from the sphere of contracts does not imply that they are extrinsic to such relations; indeed, they are necessary conditions for contracts between men.  Yet, liberal theory overlooks the support provided by the domestic sphere to civil society.  It is through the reproductive function of women that men are able to emerge as individual citizens in the public sphere.[6] In the era of classical liberalism, women’s domestic work and men’s public work made contracts between privileged individual men possible.  In contemporary times, the additional task force of women working in the public sphere has enhanced contractarian relations.[7]

As Mary Poovey (1992: 241) observes, individual or private rights are based on a set of assumptions about the nature of the individual who possesses those rights and these in turn entails assumptions about gender.  The individual of modern philosophy was based on the foundation of “maternity” of the female subject

“[…]the female body was constituted as a maternal body because the ideology of bourgeois individualism required maternity as a social practice over and above simple reproduction” ((idem:243). 

If individual identity is extended to this natural notion of maternity one cannot really aspire for change in the status quo as the following section suggests.  Only this time the exploitative relation shifts from men/women to women/women.           

II

Expanding the Right to Control to include Women

Pateman’s observation regarding contract theorists is instructive that though  “[…] their arguments are couched in universal terms,”, “[…] equality, freedom and contract are male privilege…”(1991: 62). 

 This has been interpreted as the right to property, which in turn hides the differences between the property owner and the buyer – especially when the property owner has nothing to sell but his or her labour  (Marx 1977: 280; Warnke 1987: 115-16; Mahadevan 2014, 191-92).   This inherent inequality in the contract model of liberal freedom as the right to property makes its adoption by liberal feminists problematic; it reduces women to “pale reflections of men” (Pateman 1988, 14).[8]

            Liberal freedom as the right to property is abstract.  It is indifferent to embodiment and situation- it believes in an asocial individual whose right to property can be exercised by all.  But given its exclusions, extending such a right to women in the guise of reproductive freedom as the freedom to control the body would only benefit privileged women.  To comprehend the implicit domination in reproductive freedom, Mies(1993) suggests one take into account the global system of Western capitalism[9].  The international division of labor persists in this system; it is a division where  privileged Western women get well-paid jobs, while those underprivileged in the non-Western world provide cheap labor appropriated by Western corporate interests(Mies,1993: 219-20).  Mies cites the example of a Bangladeshi woman who is forced into brutal forms of birth-control by her impoverished circumstances for a pittance (idem:219-20).  She concludes that the right to control the body does not structurally mete out equal treatment for all persons. 

Reproductive freedom as the right to contraception is hardly a matter of choice for many poor Indian women who are refused the right to have children in India due to their becoming targets of institutionalized family planning programmes.  Mies’s (1993)concerns regarding reproductive freedom in the non-Western context can be extended further.  Studies have brought to light that poor pregnant women who suffer from HIV in Africa and Asia are being used for clinical trials of drugs that prevent AIDS virus from spreading from the mother’s womb to the child (Srinivasan, 1998)[10].

 These drugs are marketed in Western countries when proved effective.  Interestingly, clinical trials are conducted with the permission of the Western companies that sponsor them, as well as, the local governments.  Moreover, these trials also have the full consent of their subjects.  However, the specific problem is felt differently among the poor and the rich.  Impoverished women who prefer large families to mitigate their economic problems are subject to forcible forms of birth control (Idem).   Women are not able to enter the political process through village panchayats because of the imposition of a norm that debars those with over two children (Parekh, 2002).   Those from affluent families who adhere to the norms of one or two children prefer boys, so that sex selective abortion becomes common place (Subramaniam 2003).  There is a disparity in the sex ratio between girls and boys as the 2001 census reveals on an all India level (Idem).      

In response, Mies (1993) maintains that the notion of freedom or autonomy is an imperialist ideal imported from Western Enlightenment, which may have led to freedom and equality for the West, but has spelled colonization for the non-Western world (1993: 223-24).  She professes that even though the Western feminist movement in the seventies and eighties upheld the idea of autonomy, it is not viable for non-Western women.  Mies observes that autonomy translates itself into a right of self-determination that is a form of control (idem:221-26).   Accordingly, women who have been traditionally perceived as the property of men press for the right to control their own property, namely their bodies.  Mies argues that women who defend reproductive rights in the name of autonomy follow the male pattern of control and property ownership. 

The cultural differences among Western women and their non-Western others, she contends, creates differences in their respective attitudes to reproductive rights.  Further, privileged women and their affirmation of reproductive freedom as the right to control their bodies is predicated upon the sacrifices of underprivileged women.  This relation of inequality between women parallels that between men and women.  Surely, women’s affirmation of liberty and their quest for equality with men should not lead to an inequality among themselves.            

The agreement to barter one’s bodily well being for material upliftment reveals that agreement or contract can have adverse effects under unequal and exploitative circumstances.  Agreement cannot be viewed in an abstract way without any reference to concrete forms of life.  In fact, contract has an antithetical effect on those who are placed at a social disadvantage, while those who are placed at an advantage can avail of its positive dimensions.  The liberal notion of atomic freedom cannot be uncritically adopted by women in non-Western contexts; indeed, they often become the victims of liberal choice exercised by privileged women.

 Mies (1993) adds a cultural dimension to this argument. She diagnoses the isolatedness contained in the notion of freedom as self-determination or autonomy as unsuitable for non-Western women.  Mies believes that only those inhabiting advanced industrial societies are in a position to pursue autonomy by virtue of enjoying the safety net of the welfare state.  Sans such a protection, women in the so-called developing world have no choice but to integrate with the bonds of their communities and families.

Mies urges women inhabiting indigeneous cultures towards a “recreation of a living relation” with nature and community (1993, 228).    She argues that rather than look down upon community and relationships of care as weakness, they should be seen as strengths(220).  Consequently, she stipulates the community as the normative foundation for the feminist movement in India and other so-called developing countries.  The hierarchical relations and cultural differences between nation-states fracture the seemingly unitary character of gender.  Mies believes that there can be no singular solution to the gender problem; hence, autonomy cannot be a universal ideal.  Mies champions communitarian caring as an apt non-imperialist route for non-Western women.[11]However, there are several problems with identifying the community as a benchmark of gender sensitive values.  India is rife with examples whereby patriarchal shades color the communities in which women live.  To begin with, women identify themselves as reproductive agents because of communitarian pressures.  Moreover, the pressure on having a male-child is not an individual choice but a product of the communities that women inhabit.

 In fact, even in the privileged sections of society choices made by women and men are affected by cultural norms and symbols.  For instance, even though many women in India adhere to the model of a small family, they retain their biases in desiring boys and contributing to missing women.  The two child norm in India has become a matter of social status rather than enlightenment (Subramaniam, 2003).[2]  Further, even privileged women in Western societies are not rid of the symbolic structures of their communities as Mies imagines.  A study conducted on professional and privileged women in Denmark about the implications of genome analysis of the fetus reveals some startling conclusions (Bang and Petersson, 1996).  Women in Danish society do enjoy a certain measure of personal freedom of choice to become single mothers; they also have some degree of freedom in selecting their professions.  Most of those questioned upheld that they would not hesitate to test their fetuses for normalcy.  However, even though they saw prenatal diagnosis as a personal choice, they expressed apprehensions about the meaning of normalcy.  They admitted that it was not an exclusive biological matter, but was a product of the symbolic, cultural system of values.  Consequently, even for women in economically and technologically advanced countries such as Denmark, prenatal diagnosis tended to subjugate women’s bodies to an impersonal and cultural control.[13]

Against Mies’s belief, the relation between social circumstances and choice has been affirmed globally (Mahadevan 2014: 187-88, 192).   Even individualistic assumptions of liberalism are beliefs that can be ascribed to liberal communities in the West.  Hence, one cannot just turn to the community as a resolution to the problems of liberal individualism, which defines freedom as control.  Communities are hardly havens of harmonious interaction; they are inflected with hierarchy, exclusions and so forth. Given the need for reform of communities, gendered sensitivity is necessary.  This implies that there is a need for some degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the community that reverts back to freedom.  Isaiah Berlin(1969) has differentiated between two senses of freedom:

(i)   The negative freedom from constraint to pursue one’s desires or decisions.  Liberals such as Hobbes or Locke have understood freedom in its negative sense as the unhindered pursuit of desire.

(ii)   The positive version of freedom to make decisions.  Kant terms this as an autonomous will that is possible only by cutting off from the domain of sensations.

The liberal model emphasizes negative freedom, or an individual’s freedom from interference.  This freedom is geared towards positive freedom only in terms of property rights-that is the freedom to maintain property.  It is also a freedom that evokes necessity as Brown observes (1995: 154-56).  Freedom basically implies a movement that is extremely limited in the pursuit of desires that are naturally given or necessary. 

   However, the assumption that all those who have property are equals is extremely problematic.  Many are forced to treat their bodies as objects of exchange such as workers are hardly equals in the property regime.  Yet

“A formulation of liberty that has as its opposite immanence, necessity, encumbrance, and external nature is not, of course, the only possible formulation of human freedom.  It is rather a notoriously bourgeois but now also evidently gendered formulation, and a formulation that depends upon and enforces a gendered division of labor in which women are encumbered while men are free, in which encumbrance and subjection by the body function as the permanent constraint on freedom” (Brown 1995: 155).

The problem is how to offer an interpretation of ‘autonomy’ “which neither assumes the original unity of the self of the humanist paradigm, nor ignores the needs of women”(Grimshaw, 105).  Despite the privileging of the unitary individual in both accounts of freedom, one cannot dismiss either account in a feminist context (Lovibond 1989).  Women in patriarchal societies require freedom from constraint, as well as, the freedom to make their decisions.  Both senses of freedom point to the communities inhabited by women and the need to reform their patriarchal character. 

However, a defense of such a freedom need not lead to its equation with property rights.  Moreover, it requires that the relation between individual and community be reformulated in an enabling way.  From the perspective of gender, this entails that the relation between the home and the world be taken into account in a constructive way.  The liberal notion of autonomy believes that to become autonomous, one has to leave the world of constraints. This is the home or the private sphere from which men emerge to become citizens.  As Pateman’s (1988)arguments above reveal, this whole idea of leaving home is based on the dichotomy between the home and the world that is riddled with exploitation.  However, Mies’s (1993) alternative arguments for a return to the home and community are also problematic; after all in a patriarchal society the home and community reinforce traditional gendered roles.  Further, the home too is not a haven of comfort for women in a patriarchal society.[14]  In this context then, rather than make a case for the home or for the world- both of which are characterized by exclusions- one would have to rethink their relation in a non-exploitative way.    Thus, freedom from a feminist point of view would have to take into account the social relations in which individuals are inevitably immersed (Lovibond , 1989: 9-10)

III

Rehabilitating Freedom

Reproductive freedom as the right to control one’s body can hardly lead to participatory and egalitarian relations in society given that:

(1)   It excludes the relations on which it depends.  Thus, the privileged woman’s right to control her body comes at the cost of the freedom of underprivileged women; consequently, those who are in a position to control their own bodies also control the bodies of others-albeit unintentionally.

(2)   It ignores that women’s choices are conditioned by their circumstances.  The conditions of dispensation govern certain choices, while those of duress govern others.  When the disadvantaged exercise control over their bodies it backfires on them as the instances of those who are subject to dangerous methods of birth control show.

(3)   It neglects the embodied dimension of freedom.  Choice cannot be seen as a mental event that which is exercised over the body.  For such an approach severs the relation between mind and body and ignores the opportunities for choice opened by embodiment.

The model of negative freedom construes the individual in the words of Dianna Meyers as a planner (2000).[15]  The goals are chosen and planned for by an individual in thought, so that there is no need for interaction with others.  Contracts facilitate the possibility of realizing goals that are already chosen.  To remove the exclusion of relations, circumstances and embodiment in such a model of freedom, an alternate paradigm that eschews the discourse of rights as control is needed.   The latter would turn to embodiment as a part of human subjectivity rather than as its property.  It is not an accident hence that most of the history of philosophy identifies thought with masculinity and materiality with the feminine(Chanter 1999,  362), so that the woman became synonymous with alien corporeality, in particular the reproductive body, of the conscious subject of thought (Butler, 1998: 37, 38).  Thus, though women are not subjects in the traditional sense of the term, they constitute its necessary conditions. Traditional philosophy’s notion of the body as a prison of the soul indicates exclusions characteristic of a patriarchal society. 

Embodiment/Social Relations: 

The body is hardly experienced as something separate from human subjectivity;   as Heidegger (1962).    puts it, one does not merely have a body, but one is bodily The body is never experienced as an absolute fact; but is already marked with cultural meaning when human beings begin to relate to it.  Thus, the woman’s body is marked by the cultural meaning of the word ‘mother’ that equates her with reproduction. (Butler, 1998: 38).[6]  An embodied situation, occupied by women in the history of philosophy, is characterized by a plurality of persons, so that no one individual can be said to have total control over it.  Hence, the woman’s femininity

‘[…] is determined by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself …”(de Beauvoir,1971: 725).  

The reproductive choices of women can be located in this knot between embodiment and social relations.   As we have seen above reproductive freedom can be hindered in myriad ways: Women could be denied or coerced into abortion; they could be lead to an exploitative relation with other women, while using contraception; they could be penalized for having more children than the permitted family planning quota by not being allowed to enter into politics; they might not be allowed to have children if they are single or underprivileged. 

In each of these instances, women face obstacles that prevent them from growing into creative human beings, rather than hindrances to their control over their bodies.   The basic problem confronting women is that as de Beauvoir observes their social structure does not allow them to choose motherhood or exercise their capacity to create- which is what reproductive choice is all about.

  Hence, it is by freeing bodies from cultural norms that bind their bodies to their homes, their children and husbands that women can be free.  This does not imply control over the body but rather embodiment without slavery.  For this one would have to move beyond the self as a rational planner to someone who is creative, which takes into account both imagination and the company of others seriously.  

Freedom as Creation in the Company of Others<

If individuals are related to each other, they cannot act as planners who given themselves tasks to be accomplished in a cold-blooded fashion.  Instead, they would have to take the perspective of others both creatively and imaginatively in the decisions that they make.  Mies (1993) tends to equate the liberal notion of freedom as right over or control over body with self-determination or autonomy.  Although both Locke and Kant believe in a disembodied notion of the self, one cannot equate them.  Liberals for most part have the view of the self as a rational planner- this is precisely what has worked against women’s issues.  In contrast, the Kantian self is not someone who plans in a cold-blooded fashion, but is imaginative:  Freedom consists in imagining the point of view of the other, lending itself to a feminist interpretation.

The Kantian model of autonomy breaks away from the control paradigm of freedom by opening up the space for social relations.[17]  The autonomous will creates (and does not plan) by imagining the perspective of others.  In his Groundwork for the Metaphysical Foundation of Morals, (1983 (1785)  Kant argues on behalf of the principle of universalization; a course of action can be free if and only if others are also in a position to pursue it.[18]  This in turn will happen according to Kant only if others are treated as ends in themselves   Kant connects autonomy or freedom as the independence from personal vested interest which simultaneously involves pursuing an action that all others could also pursue and treating all other human beings as ends-in-themselves. 

 In the words of Arendt (1982), freedom lies in enlarging one’s perspective by imaginatively engaging with the perspective of all others:

“To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting” ((1982: 42-43). 

Thus, autonomy for Kant consists in imaginatively putting oneself in the shoes of the other, which is possible only when human beings are related to each other.  But he does not give any place to gender, so that adopting the standpoint of the other remains a thought-exercise of a disembodied individual.  The Kantian alternative could be reconstructed in a way where dialogue would replace thought experiment.  This reconstruction would facilitate gender equality and political participation would have to start with the premise of embodied individuals enmeshed in social networks. 

In a patriarchal society, women are defined in terms of their reproductive capacity  indeed, it is forcibly imposed, so that women are unable to take up motherhood in freedom.  To quote Simone de Beauvoir,

“ [...]If this is a heavy charge, it is because inversely, custom does not allow a woman to procreate when she pleases”(apud Moi, 2002:1026).

 It is precisely this that is responsible for the problem of hierarchical relation that is sparked off between women when some women attempt to exercise their reproductive choice.  The privileged woman who uses contraception based on the exploitation of underprivileged women who are distantly located is not really free.  For she treats others as means to ends, rather than as ends in themselves- albeit unintentionally.  She does not imagine the bearing that her freedom has on other women when it is exercised in a patriarchal society.

 The underprivileged woman who consents to becoming a subject of contraceptive research does not exercise freedom either.  Both are not free because both are members of a patriarchal society which even discriminates against fetuses on the basis of gender.   Women are not free, when they are denied political participation because of their quota of children exceeds population control norms; they are not free when they are denied abortions; nor are they free when they are forced into abortions by population control policies.  Each instance where reproductive freedom is fettered has to be comprehended against the backdrop of a patriarchal society where women are seen as reproducers of male property. 

The social individual who is embodied and imaginative has immense room for egalitarian reproductive choice.  Habermas observes that the greater the individuality the greater one’s social embeddedness: thus, there is a “double bind” between the individual and society. 

“The farther individuation progresses, the more the individual subject is caught up in an ever denser and at the same time ever more subtle network of reciprocal

dependencies and explicit needs for protection.  Thus, the person forms an inner center only to the extent to which she simultaneously externalizes herself in communicatively produced in interpersonal relationships.”(Habermas, 1989/90: 46). 

Hence, individual identity is vulnerable.  Moralities are meant to safeguard this vulnerability by creating conditions in the larger social order that would not dissipate the individual (Ibid).  Individuals can be protected simultaneously with the web of relationships in which they inhabit.  If one were to “freely choose maternity”(Moi, 2002: 1025) the child becomes a commitment(1027).  As Moi observes, reproductive freedom is not about childlessness, but a ‘liberated maternity’ or ‘la maternité libre’(1026).

 Thus, women in India can truly choose maternity only if they exercise their right to accept or refuse children under social conditions that are equal.[19]   This in turn involves interpreting the mother as a creative actor rather than a reproductive machine; as a creative actor who gives birth to innovations, with both her denials and affirmations, she enhances life.

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Biography:

Kanchana Mahadevan is Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Mumbai. She researches and publishes in the areas of feminist philosophy, critical theory and political thought. She also works in the interdisciplinary fields of aesthetics, Indian diaspora and film-philosophy. Her book Between Femininity and Feminism: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives on Care (published by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research in collaboration with DK Printworld New Delhi, 2014) examines the relevance of Western feminist philosophy in the Indian context.

  Notes