On the prison of delayed fertility*

The right to choose death vs. life imposing choices

By Denis G. Rancourt

In this note I suggest that the mainstream political thrust of “right to choose” proponents is harmful, as viewed in a meta-picture of society.

In the First World, the system separates us from ourselves and from each other. It’s more than atomization. It includes ionization, loss of self.

School is a major instrument. We are made obedient but also made sterile for use in non-life tasks. We are conditioned to delay entry into adulthood, into responsibility, into participation and into meaning.

We are barred from creation of life as discovery of self and conditioned to view procreation as a disaster in our reproductive prime and as an optional distraction and luxury in our reproductive decline.

The system needs dedicated managers and workers who only reproduce to replicate economic extraction. There is no time or space for self-discovery and self-organization.

We are conditioned into a death culture where our imposed primary purpose is to serve the exploitation machine.

Where life gave life which sustained life, now death is manufactured in order to serve death.

The First World is the land of the walking dead. No community, no nature, no self.

Walk off the plane in the developing world and step into life creation, bonds, vibrancy, family and community. Only military onslaught and sustained merciless economic predation can destroy a life-based people.

By comparison, the death-based people that we are fall prey to depression, futility, emptiness, pharma-cure, consuma-cure, entertaina-cure, and the rest. We don’t have a chance because we have been designed to be dead – in order to be manageable and malleable.

And the design must be strictly enforced. Rebellious teenage parents must pay the price and suffer the system’s wrath: Economic punishment, child removal, societal exclusion, stigmatization, isolation …

There may as well be prison walls keeping us from our own fertility; and in addition there is technology – the pill, the abortion, surgical intervention, and the food we eat.

And on the privileged left there is a mental environment industry to justify the prison: “A woman’s right to choose.” A woman’s right to be fairly exploited and oppressed equally to men.

The right to life movement is in part an earnest revolutionary impulse against the culture of death, the culture of the market; the expanding and globalizing market that destroys traditional family types centered on procreation.

The life vs. choice debate confronts more traditional modes against corporate-oriented organization. It is a fundamental battle touching the heart of the single most important defining characteristic of any culture: The culture’s reproductive paradigm.

The “right to choose” in the mainstream is a misguided political venture and a harmful slogan that preserves class inequality. Does woman choose to be in a culture of delayed fertility or is this an unquestioned given defined by market forces?

As radical choosers know, the right to choose must be the right to choose economic and class justice; before it makes any sense beyond accommodating middle class death management for dedicated house slaves to the system.

There is no choice without personal safety and healthy conditions. And there is no choice in a prison.

I agree that a foetus that cannot survive outside the womb can be subjected to choice and that women have not had choice and that an individual should be allowed to choose his/her own death but the best way to gain all these choices is to take down the prison, starting with the prison of delayed fertility.

*This essay was inspired by the autobiography of Assata Shakur.

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