Re: Babes on doorsteps...I THOUGHT I smelled a rat in that straw man!

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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To heck with the ‘human life’ debate…What about this other straight dope article recently published about foundlings on doorsteps…I’m AM surprised that Cecil didn’t make the connection between this phenomenon and patriarchal insistence on men’s control of women’s bodies…Perhaps i really should have taken him to task for this instead…

“Italy has even brought back a high-tech version of the foundling wheel at Casilino Polyclinic hospital in Rome, where mothers can drop off unwanted infants using an ATM-like booth. Not a pleasant thing to contemplate, but it sure beats the Dumpster.”

…because this is the ugly alternative to women’s unalienable right to her own reproductive functions. Here’s a snippet from ‘The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets’, by Barbara G. Walker…

“The ancients generally viewed abortion as a woman’s private buisiness, in which no man had any right to interfere. As Hartley put it, “Each woman must be free to make her own choice; no man may safely decide for her; she must give life gladly to be able to give it well.”
But with the rise of patriarchal religions, especially among the Greeks, came a belief that a father’s semen conveyed the soul to the fetus. Men feared for the safety of any of their body effluvia, lest scorcery might damage the living man by damaging what was once a part of him. St. Thomas Aquinas held this same opinion, since he asserted that semen was the vehicle of souls. It was a logical extension of this notion that abortion should be outlawed, not because it was dangerous to women, but because it was thought (magically) dangerous to men.”

And; “The church interpreted the fable of Genesis as God’s mandate to compel women to bear as many children as possible, even at the cost of the children’s or the mother’s physical health and welfare. Men refused to deal with the problem of over-production, and women were forbidden to do so, by the church’s tradition.”

But Cecil does not even mention the lack of birth control or safe abortion alternatives as being the cause of abandoned babies, instead, he says;

“Why were — are — kids abandoned? Mostly for the reasons you’d expect — poverty and illegitimacy.”

…so basically he says that it’s because pregnant welfare teenagers can’t find a man to marry.

Geez…now that i think of it…this is the real mysogynistic slap in the face.
—Cecil?

Link to Column: Did people actually abandon babies on doorsteps? - The Straight Dope

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that’s a hell of a jump. Cecil doesn’t say that they’re on welfare, unmarried, or teenagers. Nor that poverty and illegitimacy are both present in a given case.

the question being addressed was whether or not babies were commonly left on door steps and if looney tunes were effected by this, not the causes of it, which could easily fill another column.

If you assume anybody who doesn’t bend over backward to absolve a woman must be a sexist misogynist, you will see sexism and misogyny where they don’t exist.

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Oh, please. Failing to mention that access to sex education, birth control and abortions has an effect on numbers of unwanted infants shows either ignorance, or a mysogynistic bias. I want to clear things up here. And fight ignorance. I want to know…Why weren’t these factors mentioned?

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How much evidence have we really got about what people thought about reproductive issues before the ancient Greeks? (how much of ANY sort of records have we got before the ancient Greeks?)

IOW: Cite?

In fact - the ancient Greeks themselves believe that the soul of a person was transmitted through semen (and women were simply an incubator) - didn’t they? And they allowed and encouraged exposure of unwanted infants (and were pretty patriarchal to boot). So the various threads of your OP don’t seem to hang together.

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It’s called anthropology, or even, archaeology, and no, there has been no evidence found anywhere of orphanages in pre-patriarchal cultures.

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So how does that make your case that “The ancients generally viewed abortion as a woman’s private buisiness, in which no man had any right to interfere”?

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That is Hartley’s case. I quoted it from Barbara Walker’s 'Encyclopedia of Women’s Myths and Secrets. I think it might be of interest to delve into another history of this issue, since there are a myriad of histories in the world, not only that of western patriarchal culture.

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again perhaps because that wasn’t the question being addressed. You might also note that Cecil made referrence to stories from the bible and the founding of Rome, and stats for the 1700 and 1800’s, perhaps sex education and birth control are only really factors in the modern world, and failing to mention them is something less than proof of misogyne

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Nope, sorry. I CAN ask about statements in print. And sex education and birth control predate patriarchal culture.

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And I can postulate a reasonable answer that doesn’t include sexism, such as it wasn’t the point of the column and there are only so many words available per column

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Have it your way. But sexism IS an issue here, because a lot of people, including myself, were offended. And I’m asking Cecil why an important factor was ommitted. Not you.

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I don’t understand where the misogynistic bias comes in. Seems to me that saying babies are abandoned because their fathers won’t claim them (illegitimacy) is anti-male, not anti-woman. Surely citing poverty is anti-poverty, not anti-woman.

Not *good *birth control, far as we can tell. I’ve been an herbalist for nearly 10 years, this is an area of particular interest to me, and there’s NOTHING prehistoric that I’d rely on, that’s for sure. Probably the top contenders (after lactation on demand) had an efficacy rate around that of a diaphragm without spermicide. Infant exposure has at least as long and illustrious a history as pessaries and turtle shells.

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Now that we have somebody who actually knows something in the thread :wink: - was there such a thing as a workable abortion method before modern times? Apart from infant exposure after birth (if you count that as an ‘abortion’ method)? Because I get the impression that the only things available to ancient women would be in the category ‘stupidly dangerous drugs that could also make YOU dead’ - which would seem like a very good reason not to do it!

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Planned parenthood, for example, has worked hard to ensure that most children born are loved and wanted. To dismiss their work, and therefore, the work of feminists in reclaiming their reproductive rights, is ignorant. I’m fighting ignorance. As to the other issue, there were millions of orphans actually killed in victorian england, in ‘foundling’ homes, by what were known as ‘killing nurses.’ This is better?

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Oh, sure. The most common ways were to irritate the uterine lining with caustic chemicals (ammonia, herbs, alcohol) or physical irritants (like bits of bone or wool wrapped dung) so that the lining would slough off and take the fetus with it. Very much like today’s IUDs, actually. There are also bone and shell scrapers which we think were used to do basically a D&C, scraping off the uterine lining.

Girls today often use a classic method: falling down the stairs, out of trees, off walls or having their boyfriends punch, kick or beat them in the abdomen. I assure you those aren’t new techniques.

There are also herbal abortefacients, which mostly work by either drastically lowering the progesterone level in the body, causing miscarriage, or by making the woman so sick she nearly, but not quite, dies, and the fetus dies and a natural miscarriage takes over. That’s definitely into the “stupidly dangerous drugs that could also make YOU dead” category, but when the alternative was increased risk of death in childbirth, losing your milk and therefore your current child, or being beaten or even killed by an angry father/boyfriend/husband/mother/village for being pregnant out of turn, the risks were calculated a little bit differently than today.

bmoreluv, I’m sorry, I’m *really *trying to follow you, but I’m lost again. What does Planned Parenthood have to do with it? Who is dismissing their work, and why? And what about killing nurses?

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Also…“Transition from matriarchal to patriarchal societies usually destroyed the natural mammalian system of birth control practiced by animals and primitive people: women used to refuse sexual relations during pregnancy and lactation. This system is still followed in certain parts of the world. Patriarchy everywhere sought to change this. In pagan times, women used some fairly effective birth control devices, ranging from vaginal sponges to abortifacient drugs.”

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Can i just get an answer here why access to birth control and abortion was not mentioned in this article about hordes of abandoned infants? I don’t think this is so hard to understand, unless y’all really are a pack of pig-headed men.

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OH! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we were reading a book of myth. “Pagan times”? Seriously? Is that the one where we were all herbalists and midwives and sat around embracing our fat stone goddesses in peace and harmony until the nasty brutish men from the North came with their Sky Gods and made everything all icky with their witch trials and the burning times and 9 million Wiccans killed in a holocaust hundreds of years before their religion was invented by a horny Brit?

It’s myth. Myth myth myth. It’s there in the title. Myth. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there’s NO evidence of some gynocratic utopia ever on earth. None. Zip. Nada. It’s a sweet story we tell one another while we share a bottle of mead at the bonfire at Summer Soltice, and it tells us a whole lot about who we are as people and what we want to create in the world, but it has about as much bearing on reality as that sweet little tale of the Ark and the rainbow.

WhyNot,
Herbalist
Neopagan
Wymmyn

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(bolding mine)

Eschewing sex during pregnancy and lactation was something they did during mediaeval times.

Mediaeval != Matriarchal, as I’m sure is obvious to most people.