Thoughts on the Abortion Taboo: Displacement of a Failing Incest Taboo?

Abstract

The author suggests reading the forces culminating in the Dobbs’ decision and the dismantling of Roe v. Wade as the expression of an “abortion taboo,” which represents patriarchy’s refusal to concede to—and its failure to achieve—the incest taboo. The incest taboo, in turn, reflects a weakened paternal law, the failure of which pivots on an archaic and pervasive repudiation of the non-unitary feminine. The abortion taboo performs the labor of annulling (sexed/feminine) difference, on the manifest level advocating reproduction and the life of the unborn, while—latently—insisting on the reproduction of the (White-hetero-masculinist) same, thus reaffirming incestuous relations and their frozen temporality. This essay highlights the signifying and politically liberatory potential of the vaginal, which introduces uncanny contradiction and is disruptive of patriarchal sameness, as well as bearing accountability to a law beyond the paternal: feminine law.