That Problematical Area
I do not discuss the Virginia bill here in order to engage in the debate about the intensity and breadth of current legislative attempts to restrict access to and the provision of abortion, although that is certainly the context in which I write this essay. Rather, instead of letting the Virginia bill entrench the discourse as it stands, I want to use it to focus attention on the potential shifts in location and register it suggests. What is interesting about McDonnell’s statement, for example, is how his use of the word “invasive” paired with the idea of consent seems to validate the argument against the bill that requiring a transvaginal ultrasound is tantamount to state-mandated rape (while sidestepping the corollary that the state should not be in the business of passing any politically motivated healthcare mandates that are not medically necessary).
Activists and advocates also used phrases such as “state-sanctioned rape” and “state-sponsored rape” to describe the Virginia bill; what was surprising to me was how quickly those phrases spread to mainstream publications like The New York Times, Slate, and The Guardian.17 Images of the transvaginal ultrasound transducer—a long, thin phallus-shaped object inserted into the vagina—only supported the rape analogy, while the fact that a condom and lubrication would be used on the transducer reinforced the perceived link between the procedure and sex.18 Considering that the procedure was to be mandated against the will of the woman or her doctor in the name of informed consent, it is no wonder that women and media critics likened state-mandated use of the transvaginal ultrasound to forcible penetration or rape.
The rhetorical linking of abortion and rape was furthered by Representative Todd Akin’s (R, MO) assertion in August 2012: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”19 Akin is far from alone in these beliefs, nor was he the first legislator to say so publicly. As far back as 1988, Pennsylvania State Representative Stephen Friend, a Republican, stated that “the traumatic experience of rape causes a woman to ‘secrete a certain secretion’ that tends to kill sperm.”20 Both men made these outrageous statements in attempts to undermine the already conservative argument that in cases of incest and rape, abortion should be legal and covered by Medicaid. The male legislators’ belief in the female body’s ability to “fix” the situation through some sort of magical, natural contraception reveals a vast ignorance of female reproductive anatomy. This linking of rape and abortion, as well as the slippage between transvaginal ultrasound and rape, also reveals an important political distinction between the vagina and the uterus, sex and pregnancy. We see the great lengths to which Akin and Friend will go in order to maintain a rhetorical separation between the vagina and the uterus: the vagina can (but should not) be violated, whereas the uterus is somehow closed off and protected from the vagina, giving it a different physical and political status.
This idea of the uterus as a space inside—yet somehow separable from—a woman’s body, a place for safekeeping of an “unborn child” over which the state has jurisdiction, has been reinforced by anti-abortion propaganda and US law alike. Jennifer Doyle, in analyzing a billboard depicting a full-term fetus with the slogan, “It’s not a choice; it’s a child,” observed how “the personification of the fetus in the womb as a visible subject, distinct in its identity from the body that contains it” causes “the pregnant woman [to disappear] into an amorphous and undefined background.”21 In this view, the female body is nothing but a (invisible) vessel; all eyes are focused on the fetus, seeming to exist on its own, 2001: A Space Odyssey-style.22 Moreover, Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973 acknowledges that the state has a legitimate interest, which increases as pregnancy advances, in protecting “the potentiality of human life.”23 Even pro-choice slogans have admitted such a view of the uterus as a room that feminists wish the government would stay out of (“US out of my uterus!”).
While the uterus has been deemed to fall under legitimate state interests, Governor McDonnell’s use of the word “invasive” in his statement urging the Virginia legislature to remove a transvaginal ultrasound mandate reveals that the vagina is not subject to the same sort of regulation.24 This clarification between uterus and vagina is an incredibly important discursive distinction. Choice, consent, coercion, and force are still legitimate political and material claims of the vagina, and McDonnell’s statement admits the state must tread carefully here. What this exposes is that politically and rhetorically, the vagina is still a place that is not owned, or that is at least still under contestation, and that women are still perceived as having some agency over that part of their bodies.
Kate Beckinsale: Being a woman means having a vagina. But, it doesn’t mean we want to have control of it.
Andrea Savage: They’re gooshy and they secrete things. Have you ever really looked at it? It looks like an unshaven clown.
Judy Greer: They’re actually kind of scary. They’re like a black hole. Like a massive black hole that lures thousands of stars into its unrelenting gravitational pull. No, no, n-n-n-no. Not thousand. Just one. Sorry. I messed, I messed that up. It’s one star. It lures one star.25.
With this exchange, the comedians argue that, unlike the uterus, the vagina is not a safe, comfortable place for the government to be. It’s wet, for one thing. Playing on stereotypical fears about the vagina, Greer’s “black hole” line not only contrasts strikingly with the fetus-floating-in-space image referenced above, it also lays bare the taboo of a sexually active woman and calls to mind the vagina dentata, with all its implications of a voracious and terrifying female sexuality. The uterus means pregnancy and motherhood while the vagina means sex.
To be blunt, the failed Virginia transvaginal ultrasound language and critiques of it like the Funny or Die sketch expose the fact that for the United States to be in a woman’s uterus (to pervert the common pro-choice slogan), it has to pass through her vagina. The final image of the video, an animated scene in the style of the opening credits of I Dream of Jeannie, shows a woman’s long, shapely legs in stilettos. In voiceover, Greer exhorts women to “Open up your legs and let the government in” as a photo of Mitt Romney, mouth open mid exclamation, shrinks down and zooms up between the animated legs. “Lie there and enjoy it while politicians screw us? Yeah, right!” seems to be the final message.
Oklahoma State Senator Judy McIntyre (D) expressed a similar sentiment when she was photographed at a February 2012 rally holding a sign that read: “If I wanted the US government in my womb, I’d fuck a senator!” The Senator was protesting a “personhood” bill that at the time had passed the Oklahoma Senate and was being considered by the House. (It later failed to be brought to the floor of the House for a vote.) McIntyre was quoted in The Huffington Post about her choice to hold the sign, saying, “I saw a sea of signs that caught my eye, but this one in particular—I loved its offensive language, because it’s just as offensive for Republicans of Oklahoma to do what they’re doing as it relates to women’s bodies. I don’t apologize for it.”26
- For examples by activists and advocates see “Guest Post: A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds,” on the widely-read Whatever blog, available at http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/03/20/guest-post-a-doctor-on-transvaginal-ultrasounds/ and “State-Sanctioned Rape: Trans-Vaginal Ultrasound Laws in Virginia, Texas, and Iowa” on RH Reality Check, available at http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/02/15/government-sanctioned-rape-in-state-virginia-and-texas). For mainstream journalism examples see: Nicholas Kristof, “When States Abuse Women,” The New York Times, 3 Mar. 2012. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/kristof-when-states-abuse-women.html?_r=1&; Dahlia Lithwick, “Virginia’s Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an Abomination,” Slate, 16 Feb. 2012. Available at http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/02/virginia_ultrasound_law_women_who_want_an_abortion_will_be_forcibly_penetrated_for_no_medical_reason.html; Carlene Thomas-Bailey, “Women say no to ‘state-sponsored rape,’” The Guardian, 20 Feb. 2012. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2012/feb/21/abortion-women-state-sponsored-rape. [↩]
- MedLine Plus, “Transvaginal ultrasound.” [↩]
- John Eligon and Michael Schwirtz, “Senate Candidate Provokes Ire With ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comment,” The New York Times, 19 Aug. 2012. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/us/politics/todd-akin-provokes-ire-with-legitimate-rape-comment.html. [↩]
- John M. Baer, “Freind’s Rape-pregnancy Theory Refuted,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 March 1988. Available at http://articles.philly.com/1988-03-23/news/26277205_1_freind-woman-secretes-luigi-mastroianni. [↩]
- Jennifer Doyle, “Blind Spots and Failed Performance: Abortion, Feminism, and Queer Theory,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 18.1 (2009): 32. [↩]
- Stormer 2008: 648 argues that the aesthetics of what he calls the “prenatal sublime” work to “fashion a rhetorical commonplace, life, within the pregnant body.” [↩]
- Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, Section IX (S. Ct. 1973). Available at http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0410_0113_ZO.html. Accessed 20 Dec. 2012. More fully, the decision states: “The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy. She carries an embryo and, later, a fetus, if one accepts the medical definitions of the developing young in the human uterus. See Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary: 478-479, 547 (24th ed.1965). The situation therefore is inherently different from marital intimacy, or bedroom possession of obscene material, or marriage, or procreation, or education, with which Eisenstadt and Griswold, Stanley, Loving, Skinner, and Pierce and Meyer were respectively concerned. As we have intimated above, it is reasonable and appropriate for a State to decide that, at some point in time another interest, that of health of the mother or that of potential human life, becomes significantly involved. The woman’s privacy is no longer sole and any right of privacy she possesses must be measured accordingly.” [↩]
- This is not to say that the vagina has not been subject to other sorts of government regulation, including antimiscegenation laws and obscenity laws that regulate the sale of sex toys, not to mention laws that police other bodily orifices, such as antisodomy laws. [↩]
- “Republicans Get in My Vagina,” Funny or Die, 5 May 2012. Written and directed by Andrea Savage. Available at http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/87be7156f5/republicans-get-in-my-vagina [↩]
- “Woman Kept Off American Airlines Plane For Allegedly Offensive Shirt,” The Huffington Post, 24 May 2012. Available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/24/woman-kept-off-american-airlines-plane-for-allegedly-offensive-shirt_n_1541972.html. [↩]
