Privacy Reconsidered
摘要
This chapter offers a feminist redemption of privacy as a crucial part of the rationale for abortion rights. After examining the history of privacy as a legal and philosophical concept, it assesses Jean Cohen’s feminist articulation of privacy as a special kind of decisional autonomy with a strong connection to the intimate domain. Cohen does make a powerful rejoinder to feminist and communitarian critics of privacy, but her account of intimate decision-making is limited by its rationalism. Thus, the chapter supplements Cohen’s account of privacy as decisional autonomy with Drucilla Cornell’s account of the imaginary domain and Iris Young’s account of the felt experience of pregnancy to offer a less rationalist description of the decision-making process around abortion. Ultimately, privacy appears as a powerful safeguard for a crucial process of self-imagining that has all too often been denied to women.