“To many men, each aborted pregnancy is the killing of a son—and he is the son killed. His mother would have killed him if she had had the choice. These men have a peculiarly retroactive and abstract sense of murder: if she had had a choice, I would not have been born—which is murder. The male ego, which refuses to believe in its own death, now pushes backward, before birth. I was once a fertilized egg; therefore to abort a fertilized egg is to kill me. Women keep abortions secret because they are afraid of the hysteria of men confronted with what they regard as the specter of their own extinction. If you had your way, men say to feminists, my mother would have aborted me. Killed me. “… I was born out of wedlock (and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor), ”Jesse Jackson writes in fervent opposition to abortion, “and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me.” The woman’s responsibility to the fertilized egg is imaginatively and with great conviction construed to be her relation to the adult male. At the very least, she must not murder him; nor should she outrage his existence by an assertion of her separateness from him, her distinctness, her importance as a person independent of him. Theadult male’s identification with the fertilized egg as being fully himself can even be conceptualized in terms of power: his rightful power over an impersonal female (all females being the same in terms of function). “The power I had as one cell to affect my environment I shall never have again, ” R. D. Laing laments in an androcentric meditation on prebirth ego. “My environment” is a woman; the adult male, even as a fertilized egg, one cell, has the right of occupation with respect to her—
