By Steve Chapman
Feminists' implant stance anti-choice
Feminists champion a woman's right to choose. They have always taken the position that the right to privacy includes the right to decide what happens to their own bodies.
They think such a personal decision should be made by individual women and their physicians, free from meddling politicians.
But this week, they changed their minds. Not about abortion. On that intimate issue of women's physical autonomy, they still believe the government should get out and stay out.
But when it comes to breast implants, they think women can't be trusted to decide for themselves.
An advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration, after holding hearings this week, recommended rescinding its 1992 prohibition on most silicone gel implants.
That ban was imposed amid charges that the devices were ravaging women's health, causing everything from breast cancer to lupus.
An avalanche of lawsuits pushed one of the chief manufacturers, Dow Corning, into bankruptcy, and other companies had to pay compensation for alleged injuries.
But in the succeeding years, we've learned that the panic was unfounded. One scientific study after another has found that silicone implants pose no
serious health risks.
In 1999, a committee of experts
commissioned by the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, which is responsible to Congress, issued a report saying the only real safety problems it found involve ruptures, infections and hardening of breast tissue - problems that also exist for saline implants, which were not banned.
The exonerating evidence ought to satisfy reasonable people. But when the government reopened the issue, the Feminist Majority Foundation objected: "Another generation of women should not suffer because the FDA has bowed to pressure from manufacturers and plastic surgeons."
The government, it said, "must protect women from silicone gel breast implants." The National Organization for Women raised the same alarm.
You thought medical choices should be left to patients and physicians? You thought it was a woman's body and a woman's choice?
When it comes to implants, those hallowed principles are nowhere to be found among "pro-choice" activists.
This is not entirely surprising. As journalist William Saletan notes in his new book, "Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War," pro-choice advocates figured out long ago from polling data that the best way to advance their cause was to appropriate the language of libertarians and conservatives.
Saletan, who favors abortion rights, quotes Kate Michelman, head of
NARAL Pro-Choice America, making the case in terms that could have been lifted from the National Rifle Association, advocates of drug legalization or Ronald Reagan. The Constitution, she said, protects liberty "by carving out those spheres of American life which are off-bounds to state regulation. It defines what we can do by telling the government what it cannot do."
So why is their approach so different in the case of breast implants? You can argue that implants are more dangerous than abortion and that individuals need to be protected from uninformed decisions.
But that's not the approach of "pro-choice" groups, which simply don't recognize that the freedom of women is even at stake here.
And they show no great concern about any health risks in abortion. When an 18-year-old California girl died last month after taking RU-486, there was no outcry against the abortion drug from feminist organizations.
It may be simply that, as Saletan says, "interest groups use whatever argument works in the case at hand."
It may be that feminist organizations see reproductive choice as a blow against male domination and breast implants as a concession to it. Or it may be that they are just confused.
But if they lose the fight over FDA policy, it will be largely their own fault. A lot of women who want access to breast implants think what they do with their bodies is a decision they should make with their doctors, free of government interference. Where did they get that idea?
* Steve Chapman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, 435 Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611; e-mail: schapman@tribune.com. |
