ABSTRACT
Both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, feminists have been concerned at the inability of the concept of equal rights to address the realities of women’s unequal treatment.1 In general, their concern has not been to attack the achievements of equal rights campaigners. Rather, what is involved is a well-documented awareness that the ideology of equal rights has severe limitations for feminist politics, limitations stemming from its failure to recognize the implications of significant differences and divisions between females and males, between men and women. This line of argument can be, and has been, pursued in a variety of legal contexts, but it has peculiar appeal where reproduction in general and childbirth in particular are at issue. Here, the argument continues, is an obvious case where the differences between men and women, notably but not exclusively in relation to the capacity to give birth, point to the need for legislation which accords special rights to women.
