When asked why Cecil failed to mention reproductive rights as a primary factor in infant abandonments, he said;
“Because it’s a secondary consideration. The primary factors are poverty and illegitimacy, as I said. Presumably if the woman weren’t poor, she’d have better access to birth control and abortion.”
Let me put this another way;
When considering this question;
Why were black people enslaved in America?
Which of these two answers carries a racial bias;
Inferior weaponry caused them to be easily overcome.
or;
Not all persons were granted full civil rights under the law.
This question really belongs in great debates, but in case you didn’t read a recent column
‘If there’s no built-in inequality between the sexes, as I’d hope most of us believe’
doesn’t set off my sexist bias alarm.
Let me put it another way;
lack of repoductive control is a primary factor in unwanted pregnancies among the rich as well as the poor. Poverty is a primary factor in deciding whether to place the resulting child in a nunnery or a foundling hospital, or are you postulating equal abandonment rates amoung the poor and wealthy, if so I’d like to see a cite.
I’ll admit that mysogynist is too harsh a term, (no harsher than Cecil’s style, to be sure…) However I do believe that there is a sexist bias in Cecil’s pronouncement. Perhaps it’s subconscious, like a freudian slip. But it’s there.
well, I think your slavery analogy is flawed, but to answer it directly, both of those seem simple statement of fact without a racial bias to me. Now, why did those facts exist is a different question, much like the difference between why there are unwanted pregnancies and why where some abandoned and others not.
I think the problem here, and I base this on what I have read from you in multiple threads touching on the same topic, is that you have strong feelings on the subject of women’s rights and you see many issue through that filter. I care a lot about how science is taught and presented to the public, this causes me to get very frustrated with the way things that relate to science are presented (herbalism is one that probably crosses both our tracks). But I can’t expect someone reporting on some new celebrity fad diet or program to mention the lack of double blind testing and ways to account for the placebo effect.
To go back to your analogy about slavery, Jarrod Diamond wrote a book discussing why Europeans were able to take control of most of the word. The immediate cause was the title of the book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. But that just brings up the question as to why Europeans had those things and not Africans or Australians. He spent a whole book trying to track it back to first causes, and many people think he left to many things out. What do expect from a single news column?
Sorry, that was directed at the OP (clicked Quote in wrong thread. She has presented the same argument about slavery in at least three threads now. This seems to be her hot button topic.
Neither one of those carries a racist bias. Now if one were to assert they had inferior weaponry because the people were of inferior quality, then that would be a racist assertion. But just to state their weapons were not of the same degree? No, that is not racist, that is factual.