"Second, and as the rights critiques of the “public-private” distinction presaged, the libertarian rhetoric of the opinion has indeed focused attention on pernicious state intermeddling in women’s lives, rather than either the private sphere appropriation of women’ s sexuality caused by male sexual aggression, or the appropriation of women’s reproductive and parenting labor in that sphere, as the primary limit on women’s equality and liberty. Catharine MacKinnon warned in her early critiques of Roe that the pro-choice community ran the risk that it would further obfuscate both the fact and nature of private sphere sexual subordination by aggressively shrouding that sphere, and the subordination that occurs within it, in a constitutionally protected veil of laudatory privacy. The right to abortion, she argued, might further privatize the private by constitutionalizing it, and by so doing thicken the veil of privilege around intimate life, and therefore around the sexual subordinations that occur within it. Events have not proven her wrong to have so worried. The same is true, although she did not so argue, with respect to women’s labor, no less than women’s sexuality, and with respect to the economic sphere, no less than the sexual. Parenting is economic activity, as well as the consequence of sexual acts that may have been coerced. By insulating the private economic realm of parental choice against public critique and intervention, the economic deprivations occasioned by overly privatized parenting are further shielded against public intervention. The effect is not only the valorization of the “private” activities of sex and parenting, but also the denigration of the public sphere of politics. The public assistance that would be required to alleviate costs borne in private is cast as unwarranted intrusion into an exalted sphere of private economic life, rather than warranted assistance with an almost impossibly privatized burden."