Violating the Inviolable: Evolved Reproductive Prerogatives of Individual Women
Patricia Adair Gowaty
Abortion bans defy the inviolability of women’s reproductive decision-making, which was ultimately organized by the evolutionary rules of within-sex selection and sexual conflict during the hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution.
The current intensification of efforts in the US to curtail women’s reproductive rights is not just a horrific political moment, but also a profound evolutionary selection pressure with implications for all of humanity. Here, 1 describe why the modern efforts to criminalize women who seek medical abortion not only violate the autonomy of individual women but importantly increase the likelihood of deleterious evolutionary results for women, men, and children. In doing so, I connect key concepts of evolution with the insights of ancient and modern feminisms having to do with the political orders of societies, an effort I promoted in the 1990s when writing about the relationships between evolutionary ideas and feminism: I said then and observe now that “Women’s oppression is the first, most widespread, and deepest oppression...sexist oppression is fundamental to - is ‘the root’ of - all other systems of oppression” (1992, p. 219). Today I argue that contemporary efforts criminalizing abortion violate the inviolable and will reduce the lifespan and reproductive success of all - men as well as women. Women’s autonomy is an imperative evolved over millions of years of evolutionary sorting. This means that the criminalization of women doing anything to their own bodies is itself a crime against nature. Stopping gestation is a woman’s prerogative, not just because gestation is a function of her body including her autonomous decisions about her health, but because of the forces of evolution.
Humans are embodied mammals whose evolutionary divergence from reptiles and birds began hundreds of millions of years ago.
The defining adaptations of modern mammals are that females give birth to live young after a period of internal gestation, which is then followed by provisioning to otherwise helpless offspring of mothers’ breast milk from mammary glands that evolved from sweat glands. All mammal mothers including human mothers physiologically control (consciously or unconsciously) the viability of their progeny during pregnancy and before birth, and after parturition human mothers, as in all other mammal species, also routinely control the lives of their dependent progeny for varying amounts of time after birth. Evolutionary selection pressures determined the embodiment of autonomous female mammals. Thus, to understand the evolution of women’s autonomy as well as the ongoing selection pressures faced by women in misogynistic human societies, it is useful to be acquainted with the assumptions (the rules) of sexual selection and sexual conflict.
Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin (1858) described evolution by natural selection, emphasizing what have become known as the assumptions of selection. Natural selection is something that happens because of the phenotypic variants among individuals in a population that are favored or disfavored by environmental or social selection pressures thus “sorting” among individuals so that over time, the traits of “favored” individuals persist and spread (evolve), while the traits of those “disfavored” individuals sometimes disappear entirely - go extinct! Evolutionary fitness is measured as variation among individuals in their lifespan and the lifespan of their children.
Natural selection acting on within-population, within-sex variation in females organized the evolved reproductive traits of female mammals. In human females, evolved reproductive traits include: physiological adaptations associated with age at first menstruation; the subsequent timing and duration of menses; the management of sperm after copulation; timing of implantation of zygotes; the endogenous mechanisms of fetal loss including spontaneous abortion; and the control of developmental milestones during months-long gestation of embryos and fetuses. Selection and adaptation via social-cultural transmission of knowledge further legitimated women in traditional societies to self-administer plant-based contraceptives and abortifacients (Riddle, 1992). Once born, maternal prerogatives include the control of the fate of altricial offspring still dependent on mother’s breast milk as well as other milestones of “evolutionary fitness.” Just as in other mammals, when variation in women’s traits - morphological, physiological, behavioral, and cultural - occur, the opportunity for selection relative to those traits exists. Traits within-populations, within-a-sex that became “fixed” (more or less identical among individuals) indicate that in the past, these traits were “adaptive” - that is, associated with longer maternal life spans and healthier offspring.
Modern institutionalized patriarchy - a social system organized primarily for the benefit of male alliances bent on control of women’s sexuality and reproduction - confronts the fundamental rights of every woman to control her own body. Patriarchies can and do produce violent selection pressures that decrease the health, welfare, and lifespan not only of women and their children, but also of men. To understand the origins of women’s evolved autonomy one must therefore understand the evolutionary principles of within-sex selection and sexual conflict.
Within-sex selection is a type of natural selection that occurs among members of the same sex, in a given population of a species. Three assumptions must be met for any selection hypothesis: The first is about the variation in traits of individuals in the “level of selection”; here, the level of selection is within a given species and within a sex. The second posits mechanisms of selection, which impact individuals of a sex differently because of their traits. The third tenet is about “fitness” (length of lifespan and reproductive success of a given individual) that results from the traits because of the mechanisms of selection. Said another way: The three assumptions of within-sex selection are that individuals within a sex, say females, vary in traits that are affected by environmental and social constraints and opportunities, such that some females - because of their traits - live longer or have more or healthier offspring than other mothers. The “competitive” dynamics of within-sex selection among females in all mammal species has guaranteed that mammal mothers who remained in control of their own reproduction were more evolu-tionarily successful than those mammal mothers without control of their own reproduction. Within-sex selection is a process that results in greater or lesser fitness outcomes for some individuals compared to other individuals of the same sex because of their traits, and in the current context, our concern is about within-sex variants associated with any interference with an individual’s reproductive decisions.
Sexual conflict is selection that occurs when the reproductive interests of individual females and males disagree. In current misogynistic societies, the focus is on the wins and losses of one sex compared to the other sex; accordingly, in discussions of “the battles of the sexes,” it appears that the contestants are a given woman and a man, a given female and a given male (e.g., a woman who was raped and the man who raped her). However, in an evolutionary context, the selection dynamics are between individuals within a sex, among males on the one hand who do and do not rape and, on the other hand, among females who are able to avoid being raped and those who are unable to avoid being raped. Aggressive and coercive sexual conflict is not just about the outcomes - for example, of an aggrieved woman or a violently neutered man (the way we look at rapacious men and angry “castrating women” in the context of crime and litigation). It is about a male and the other males in the population of males and, simultaneously, about a female and the other females in the population of females.
The 19th century evolutionary logic of Darwin and Wallace, then, still holds: Whenever available variation exists among females, the opportunity under sexual conflict for the evolution of female resistance exists. Female resistance might always start with one resistive female, but as the recent #MeToo movement demonstrated, resistance can catch on and spread, and thus demonstrating that “sisterhood is powerful.” Similarly, evolutionary logic teaches that whenever available variation exists among males, the opportunity under sexual conflict for the evolution of coercive, deadly males exists. What remains interesting from an evolutionary perspective is that not all females are resistive and not all males are coercive. In fact, despite the almost universal control that most mammal females have of their own reproduction, it is remarkable that a hallmark of modern human societies is parental collaborations, which bring up questions about the origins of monogamy. And, thus, we might ask what the fitness outcomes were - among females and among males - in the evolutionary transitions to so-called monogamous marriage. Rape and male coercion of females may have been a defining selection pressure biasing social organizations in many (most) modern societies. How did all that happen?
Millions of years of selection among females in mammal populations has produced the complete, utter (nonautonomous) dependence of young on their mother’s ability and willingness to gestate. This means that, from a natural selection perspective, abortion is solely the prerogative of an individual woman. It is her choice and her choice alone to end a pregnancy. In addition it is the inviolable prerogative of a woman to resist the sociallpolitical forces that restrict her options; her right is to use her body as she pleases. Autonomy is embodied in each human individual; autonomy of women is embodied in the hundreds of million years of the evolution of female mammals. And it appears that among the 10,000 mammal species in the world, conspecifics appropriating the bodies of females is rare, perhaps a novelty among mammals. Diminishing female autonomy through religious edict and civil law is a patriarchal imperative, and, it is an abomination against nature that likely will continually reduce the lifespan of women and their offspring.
The evolution of women’s resistance to others’ control is a relatively obscure topic in evolutionary biology. Women’s resistance to other’s control - whether conscious or not - is a counter-selection pressure against the patriarchal domination of societies. And, that puts questions about the evolutionary origins of patriarchy under a light: What ancient selection pressures favored male control of female reproduction and women’s resistance?
Speculations Abound
For example, could the differences between females and males in dispersal patterns have set up patriarchal advantage? In some primates, including humans, dispersal patterns of daughters and sons differ with sons tending to be more philopatric than their dispersing sisters. Philopatric sons live with or near parents throughout life so that male relatives readily formed coalitions. In contrast dispersing daughters set off as explorers, perhaps seeking strange males for “one night stands” or coalescing with other females to form new groups, aiding discovery of new resources, not to mention longterm bonding with novel males, which is a breeding tactic enhancing the health of offspring producing reproductive success benefits for mothers and fathers. The higher primate tendencies of stay-at-home sons and adventuresome, wandering daughters might mean that it was women who began the dispersals of humans around the globe, away from parental confines. These dispersal patterns meant that males more likely “owned the land” and were buttressed in their power by confederacies of male relatives.
Women’s evolved autonomy powers resistance to patriarchy and male control of women’s reproductive decisions. Patriarchal control handcuffs the development of societies, guaranteeing brutality that shortens lifespans for women, children, and men.
In October 2019 US District Court Judge Myron Thomson blocked Alabama’s near-total abortion ban saying:
Alabama’s abortion ban contravenes clear Supreme Court Case precedent. It violates the right of an individual to privacy, to make choices central to personal dignity and autonomy. It diminishes the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions. It defies the United States Constitution.
The Judge’s ruling is consistent with evolutionary principles.
For Sources and Further Reading
Darwin, C., & Wallace, A. R. (1858). On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Zoology. 3, 45-62.
Gowaty, P. A. (1992). Evolutionary biology and feminism. Human Nature, 3, 217-249.
Gowaty, P. A. (Ed.). (1997). Feminism and evolutionary biology: Boundaries, intersections, and frontiers. New York: Chapman Hall.
Hrdy, S. B. (2000). Mother Nature: Maternal instincts and how they shape the human species. New York: Ballantine Books.
Hudson, V. M.. Bowen. D. L., & Nielsen P. L. (2019). The first political order: How sex shapes governance and national security worldwide. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lerner, G. (1986). The creation of patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Riddle, J. M. (1992). Contraception and abortion from the ancient world to the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
