The right and authority of women to have control of their reproductive functions is of central and vital importance unless we are to have men and women polarized against each other as adversaries, and subordinate women to men (patriarchy). We’ve already done that and are only now coming out of it. Trying to push us back to that (whether that’s the deliberate intention or just a side-effect of simplistic moralizing about “right to life”) is a sin of the grossest magnitude and it’s about time some of you self-righteous opponents of abortion realized we have no intention of conceding the high ground: you aren’t standing on it!
The fallout of sex is sufficiently destructive to women that women do not engage in sex except in situations where they obtain from their arrangements with men a safe environment in which to become pregnant, against a social backdrop in which being pregnant is massively unsafe by default. Because men tend to seek sex without necessarily seeking or desiring reproduction, let alone the hassle of providing a safe environment in which for someone to become pregnant (an expensive proposition), this creates an antagonistic, adversarial dynamic between men and women.
Because women are dependent on men to create this environment, and since, due to the adversarial situation, women cannot trust men to behave as equal partners on the basis of apparent good intentions, women are situated by necessity to ignore a good portion of what they find sexually appealing and cute, and to concentrate in a utilitarian and practical way on what they find situationally safe.
Because that effectively strips women of the majority of the spontaneous and sensuous aspects of sexuality that make sexuality enticing to people in the first place, and, again, because of the adversarial situation, that situates women in such a way that they have every reason to trade on men’s attraction to them for what they can get for it. If for a given individual woman there is an active wish to reproduce and be a mom, this may equate only to seeking out a man who can provide a good environment in which for her to safely become pregnant; otherwise, she would have to get more out of it to make the exchange desirable to her, whether it be the personal pleasures of additional wealth or social status or the opportunity to paint great paintings undisturbed or whatever.
Men, because this situation understandably leads them to feel sexually manipulated by women who use men’s appetites for sex to get what they want without having much feeling for the men, and because the situation is already adversarial in general even aside from that, have every reason to increase women’s dependency on men, if they can, to make it as difficult as possible for women to meet even their own needs without men’s help, which gives women additional incentive to want to have a man. And to the extent that pregnancy is an encumberance and a handicap when it comes to securing resources, men as a group are able to realize a substantial portion of this precisely because enough women are pregnant enough of the time that men in general end up controlling the majority of the resources.
Then you get this situation: younger men coming of age sexually are less in control of those resources than somewhat older men, who therefore hold the key to the younger men being able to gain access to sexual experience if the women aren’t amendable to it except with men who bring resources with them. The older men can make the younger men work very hard for them in ways they might not otherwise, and the younger men put up with treatment that they would not otherwise tolerate, in return for the younger men receiving the transfer of some of the material assets the older men control, which the younger men then use as collateral to negotiate arrangements with women, who cannot afford to do otherwise.
And men and women do not like each other very much, and social structures become oppressive because there is so much room for exploitation and manipulation. People put up with all kinds of societal shit they’d have too much common sense to tolerate if they weren’t spending 90% of their energy trying to make love and romance work in a world that has effectively hijacked sex and made bad use of it.
This is a horribly sinful world, an abomination in the eyes of God, if you will. We have, in large part, been there, and been there for millenia on end, and now we are coming out of it.
And we ain’t going back. Part of not going back is making sure women don’t have to be pregnant except when they want to be. The biggest part of that is birth control, but the “safety belt” of access to abortion when the woman feels it to be necessary is an essential part of it, too.
You think it is a greater sin to kill an annual quantity of unwanted fetuses and embryos in order that women can cease to be pregnant in situations where they find that necessary? Think again. Your idea of sin is very small and trivial. I don’t think you have any comprehension of how big sin can be. Patriarchy is a vast and ugly evil thing, and before I will see you push us a few steps back into it I will cheerfully help perform abortions with my own personal bare hands, legally or if necessary illegally.
And I will do so with the conviction that what I am doing is absolutely, positively, a morally correct, even morally vital, thing.
Thousands of people per year have feet and legs amputated as a result of diabetes. If you were to show the photos of the bloody amputated limbs to most people, they would find them equally disgusting and disturbing; that fact does not mean diabetics should be prevented from having amputations. This pro-life tactic is has no significance from a value of life standpoint, adds nothing to legitimate debate, and is solely meant to shock and disgust. Those who employ it are little better than pornographers.
I am trying to find a site for this, but until then, I will just hope that someone else has heard this and can back me up. (I sold my Bioethics textbook.) One of the main reasons that photos of aborted babies are such an unfair propaganda tactic by pro-lifers, is because they are of babies aborted via dilation and extraction. Granted, this is a very gruesome procedure involving extracting the fetus after first collapsing its skull, but it is a late-term abortion and is not performed unless the mother’s health is at risk.
To use these pictures from this situation to campaign against elective abortion is unacceptable. It is perfectly fine for someone to hold different beliefs and try to convince others of them, but not by lying.
I don’t think individuals owe society a damned thing with regards to reproduction. It’s entirely a personal matter to choose whether or not to reproduce.
As uncomfortable as I am with sex selection, I think the problem is better addressed by means other than outlawing it entirely. The root cause of the problem is misogyny, the valuing of women as being worth less than men.
Sex selection is a problem in East Asia precisely because of societal attitudes about women. Even though women in the U.S can do the same thing with their pregnancies, they are much less likely to choose to abort a fetus for being the “wrong” gender. The governments of those countries should work to educate their population.
Perhaps not directly, but I do think all individuals have some responsibility to the next generation. However, I think that responsibility is fulfilled by paying taxes.
I’m not. I do have anti-abortion sentiments under certain circumstances, although never attaining “vehement”. Meanwhile, a first-trimester abortion doesn’t disturb me in the slightest, emotionally aesthetically or otherwise. It’s akin to the difference between toppling a majestic sequoia tree and plucking up a sequoia seedling with your fingers.
Ischaramoochie:
I think that’s an excellent idea. And the mother is the one who “cuts”, at least in the symbolic/legal sense, so it remains her decision.
Meh. Them’s some jaundiced views ya got there, AHunter3. Still, your stall’s pretty clearly set out: Patriarchy is the biggest, worstest, evillest evil there ever was, and any and all countermeasures against it are therefore justified and indeed vital in the interests of everyone. Not just those who are outspoken against patriarchy, not just women even, but everyone. Okay, that’s the terms of the debate nice and plain, at least. Let’s get to it.
If this means that, in general, society frowns upon women becoming pregnant with no means of support, but actively encourages means of support to be made available, then well and good. In Western society in recent centuries, this has tended to mean that, while men who get women pregnant are physically able to run away from the consequences, they have been discouraged from doing so. A “good girl” doesn’t put out too easily, but a “good boy” sticks around if he gets a girl into trouble.
A terrible over-simplification of what men want. Men have at least two different reproductive stratagems wired into them: Make as many women pregnant as possible; or make one woman pregnant and invest heavily in the resulting offspring to maximise their chances of survival. The dynamic is neither antagonistic nor adversarial in the second case, but a practical demonstration of the biological superiority of cooperation.
You have not demonstrated the existence of “the adversarial situation”. I’m not sure what you’re alluding to by “behave as equal partners”, but if you mean by this that women cannot trust men to provide for the results of the pregnancies they’ve carelessly started, this is not in general the case - though it might be some of the time. If the latter half of your statement means that “women are obliged to balance inclination against necessity”, then whoop-di-do. So do all of us, more or less. That’s why I’m holding down a job that will pay my mortgage and feed my children, instead of saddle-tramping my way around the world on a motorbike.
You mean “Women can’t just hop into bed with anyone who takes their fancy, and so have reason to whore themselves for personal gain”. True to an extent. However, having every reason to do something does not equate to a shred of justification for doing it. I have every reason to rape the first healthy and attractive young woman I see if I think I can get away with it: At the least I may get some pleasure from the act, and I may even succeed in propagating my genes at negligible cost to myself. I would, however, be flagrantly evil in acting according to this reason.
A false dichotomy. A woman may opt to be a wife and mother. If she does not, she may opt to prostitute herself for material gain, but it is not incumbent upon her. Absent effective contraception, the opportunity to paint is questionable compensation for the risk of pregnancy. Given effective contraception, she has no overriding need to seek anything over and above a fair exchange of physical and emotional comforts.
Speaking as a man, I don’t so much mind being sexually manipulated by someone who has not much feeling for me, as I do if she then fails to make good on the implied promise. Still, it’s true that one reason I wouldn’t go near a lap-dancing club is that I have no interest whatever in forking over hard cash in exchange for feigned sexual interest. The rest of your argument is starting to look tenuous, though. There is no real need, reason or no, for men to seek to increase women’s dependency on them. The dependency already exists, for the reason cited - because pregnant women make poor providers - just as hen birds sitting on eggs depend upon cocks to bring them food. It’s a stretch to imply that this situation is deliberately brought about by the males in response to female sexual manipulation.
But older men would control a larger share of the resources than younger men whether or not the younger men were driven by sexual desire. A man who has had thirty years of thriftily accumulating more than he needs to spend will necessarily be wealthier than a stripling just embarking on his own accumulation. Nor is accumulating wealth a bad thing. The young men presently working in the sawmill I have built over thirty years of toil will one day own his own mill, or his carpenter’s shop, or his firewood-delivering company, and the community as a whole benefits from ready supplies of timber and furniture and fuel, which they would not have if I had not stockpiled my wealth and employed labour. It’s not a zero-sum game. And the young players are not necessarily in thrall to a desire to get laid, but have other ambitions as well.
Pish. I believe that your view of the relationship between the sexes is excessively pessimistic. Anecdotal evidence suggests that men and women do, on the whole, like each other quite a lot. For the rest, I don’t buy your case that all the world’s misery comes down to sex. It’s got too many holes in it.
IIRC the opposite of Appeal To Tradition is Appeal To Novelty: “What we have now is not what we had before, therefore it is better.” It’s a fallacy.
Tush. Part of it is birth control. A bigger part is the improvement in medicine. My great-grandfather was one of nine children, three of whom lived to breed. 130 years on, I confidently expect my two sons to survive to reproductive age. The “safety belt” of access to abortion is not necessarily at all relevant. Pro-choice advocates have sometimes stated that “Abortion should be safe, legal and rare”. Well, but if it is rare enough, then the societal impact of the occasional woman who must endure a pregnancy she did not want is small enough that it does not justify the availability of abortion.
Well, but at least you do not shrink from the word “kill”, for which I commend your integrity. However, yes, I do think it a greater sin.
Patriarchy is the system on which the entire civilization in which you now live in reasonable comfort was founded, and I believe that you can call it “a vast and ugly evil thing” only on ideological grounds. As far as I am able to understand the case you have made against it, you object to a system that allows older men to accumulate wealth - since younger men must do what older men want to get a share of it, and need that share to bribe women to have sex with them. I think your case is flawed; also, the alternatives are not clear. Force older men to hand over their accumulated wealth? Then they will not go to the trouble of accumulating it, when it is easier not to do so, and there will be no spare wealth to invest in the next generation.
Additionally, you do not demonstrate how available abortion will necessarily bring about the Utopia you desire. Freeing women from unwanted pregnancy means that they need not sexually manipulate men into giving them what they want? Well, but if they are so disposed, they can manipulate out of greed rather than need. The only difference between a whore who fears pregnancy and a whore who does not is that the latter can turn more tricks. Do not pretend that you are motivated out of sympathy for young men who cannot get laid except by the good will of women and old men. Your solution does not address their concerns.
Even so will the extremist pro-lifer who will cheerfully kill you with his or her own personal bare hands, legally or if necessarily illegally, rather than allow you to murder another defenceless unborn. To my great good fortune, I am in neither your shoes nor theirs.
I think you assume too much. Not all people see them as “products” and are unmoved by such images. I’m pro-choice, yet I find those photos disturbing. In other words, my mind is “untrained” (whatever that means to you)
Many medical procedures (with far less controversy attached to them) and natural events can lead to “products” that photograph dramatically. I find a photo of an amputated arm disturbing. As do I a picture of a fetus which died in utero of natural causes. My reaction has nothing to do with the reasons those things were removed or died, or my beliefs about medical procedures. Nor do I believe seeing that stuff is the only way someone can be “informed.”
yep. plus the fact that it settles issues such as “where does the body of the mother end and the fetus begin?” since it establishes that the physical, and hence, legal distinction of mother’s body and child’s body would be at the point of detachment. it would also be a symbolic affirmation from the mother that she grants physical autonomy to the child and forfeits her claim to it as part of her body.
not sure about the mother cutting the cord though… some are unconscious during the labor process. there’s no point in waiting for her to wake up. maybe the husband can help here. since the fetus would still be part of the mother’s body during this time, it would be the husband who would have a say. else, it would fall on the hands of the doctors
Yeah, therefore the “symbolic” part of it. She could cut something that represents the umbilical cord in lieu of being conveniently able to snip the real one. She indicates she’s ready and the baby is brought to her to hold, count fingers/toes, etc., and she signs something and the baby is officially pronounced a “live birth”.
Malacandra, I am not ignoring you. You put some attention and consideration into your post and it deserves the same for a response.
This may not be the most ridiculous argument I’ve ever seen in the abortion debates, but it’s in the top 5. Let me see if I’m getting this straight:
An infant is delivered. Consequently, the horrible dangers looming over the mother’s head inherent in childbirth, those hazards so many pro-choicers point to as justification for abortion, are no longer an issue. The infant is attached via an umbilical cord, which will need to be severed regardless of the mother’s choice.
So, despite the fact that the child is delivered and effectively outside the sacred boundaries of the mother’s body, despite the fact that any danger that abortion could presumably have ameliorated no longer exists, that child is not a “legitimate individual” until the mother cuts the umbilical cord. Why? Because, um, well, 'cause if the, er, well, it’s on account of the…symbolism involved. Yeah, that’s it. It provides a necessary symbolic aspect to that breathing, delivered baby’s “personhood” while simultaneously allowing the mother to make any abortion choice she would prefer.
I say we permit retroactive abortions. Make it a symbolic ritual on the child’s 17th birthday. If things aren’t working out, the mother gets to cut a string that drops a piano on the kid’s head, like in Warner Brothers cartoons. Or it can be an anvil. Let’s the individual states decide, I say. The splintering wood and deafening crash mark the symbolic moment when the kid is deemed “not a person.” After all, who is anyone else to restrict the mother’s choice to do so? And the 17th birthday is a clear, understandable boundary prior to adulthood. I can’t wait for the religious right fanatics to find fault with this clearly reasonable position.
Just out of curiosity, can you clarify what you mean by “out of control”? Within the context of an abortion debate, my feeling would be that abortion gets “out of control” when it become the default response to pregnancy and population growth falls below a level necessary for a nation to sustain itself.
Has this happened in the U.S.? I know birthrates have fallen dramatically in recent decades, but does the U.S. face imminent or short-term disaster as a result? As for China (and India), female infanticide is hardly new and sex-selection abortions simply make the process more efficient. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next twenty or so years, though I’d be hard-pressed to feel any kind of sympathy for the men who can’t find mates.
You’re right, we totally should. Now, I don’t know about you, but last I checked I don’t have the right to chop my mother up against her will to save my life.
well for starters, the proposition was based on existing legal bases; meaning, morality is out of the question here. but if you want to start with the moral talk… sure, i can dance with you!