What does have to mean in this context, though? There is no supreme law that we have to do anything in this world. Who says that human beings have to keep on living? If we all died out tomorrow, who would be hurt? No one. Even God believers would have to concede that our extinction would ultimately be part of His plan. So why would it even matter?
Regardless of if society is for turning women into brood mares because they “like it” or because they think it has to, it’s obvious that such a society would be so different than the one we’re currently in but that to glibly dismiss the idea that would be few men willing to rape makes no sense. It’s like extrapolating the morality of our current society to the majority of people in Mad Max.
I’d more likely have long ago been killed for disagreeing. There would BE no better alternative permitted, because the monsters would be in charge. Would Hitler have listened to someone asking for better treatment of the Jews?
Well, to get everyone pregnant I can’t wait for them to decide to get around to it. Heck, some of these women think they should fall in love and get married first! So we require all women to have sex, repeatedly, until they become pregnant. If they can find their own man to do it fine, but if they don’t we’ll provide one. All non-pregnant women will be required to have sex very frequently until they ‘catch’.
This kind of necessitates them being kept in a compound, unavoidably so, if we want to ensure none of them are slacking and occasionally doing other things besides breeding. Of course this will make it difficult for them to find their own men, but we can offer them a nice selection of carefully screened willing partners to pick from. Or I suppose we could offer for the artificial insemnation option for a bit of variety, but that will increase costs, Ms. President.
Then, of course, we have to avoid them getting an abortion. Well, we already have this compound set up, if we keep them in there that should keep the abortion doctors away from them. Of course we also want to avoid ‘back-alley’ abortions, so they’ll have to be watched, at least in a basic manner. We should be able to avoid having to actually strap them down, unless they’ve been caught misbehaving before. In all cases we will do our best to treat them well and offer them good food, excercise, and entertainment options suitable to their pregnant state. (Non-pregnant ones will of course be too busy for other entertainments.) Certainly Schlafly will be removed from the payroll. Tyson and his friends may be kept around for their genetic material, but they will be strictly required to be gentle.
Female children will be inducted into the facility as soon as they are fertile and deemed old enough to successfully carry a child to term, the criteria for which I will leave to the doctors. When a woman ceases to be fertile (similarly determined), they will be released from the facility - though with no, um, ‘other’ skills, and no familial relations in their lives, it might be kinder just to keep them on, as employees helping to run the facility and raising the babies birthed. Boy babies should be released from the facility when they are old enough to be raised elsewhere and placed with surrogate fathers in the outer world to be raised and trained for the skills the rest of society needs, but it would probably be simpler to keep the girls in the facility. If we let them out, they might decide they’d rather not be part of the reproductive effort.
I think that will about to do it, Ms. President. Um, by the way, do you happen to be fertile?
(I’d like to note that I am evil. Though I may commit suicide as soon as I am confident humanity’s future is assured, if I still have morals by then. Also, let us note that this system I have proposed has no exit strategy - it is self-perpetuating.)
I seriously doubt it can be nicer than mine, given the stated requirement. And despite being as nice as I could make it, mine reduces women to nothing but vaginas.
You weren’t the one who seemed to be claiming there was a huge difference between the best and the worst possibilities, though, so I’d like to see his work.
Sure. Let’s look at another scenario in which one sex’s autonomy over their own bodies is taken away–in a more extreme fashion–in order to protect a society: war. Specifically, my proposal would be modeled after the World War II-era draft.
Women of childbearing age would be encouraged with propaganda and large financial incentives to enlist in the effort. Those who didn’t enlist would receive similar benefits when drafted. The government would work to create a social perception that the people participating in this effort were the great heroes of the age, figures on whom we should all model our characters; hopefully they’d dominate the next generation’s political leadership, in recognition of their sacrifice for the species. There’d be decent pay for participants in this full-time occupation, lifetime medical benefits, and some sort of major educational bill associated with it also. Some sort of limited conscientious objector status would be available, if at all possible. If not, there’d be prison time for women who refused to participate.
Women who didn’t have a particular male in mind as the father would have a variety of options: artificial insemination, one-night stands with their choice of a harem of gigolos, one-night stands with freelancers. Childcare would be completely paid for at all levels, as would prenatal care.
In short, society would re-engineer itself to recognize the sacrifice the women were making, would sacrifice many luxuries on their behalf, just as we did for the men whose autonomy was taken from them when they were forced to fight and risk death in World War II.
That’s the alternate scenario to the rape pits. And if you’d (the general you’d, not you jsgoddess’d) doom your sister to the rape pits because you were unwilling to see a difference between them and a OB-GI bill, I’m not sure you’re in a position to call anyone else a monster.
But, you see, that’s my whole reason for posting in this thread. I’m tired of cruising the Dope and seeing thread after thread of liberal-fest, where posters trip over themselves to prove that they’re more liberal than the last guy because that’s the only way to win the SDMB contest. At least in GD anyway. The OP started with the default assumption that pro-choice is the correct stance. It’s my duty to remind everyone in this thread that your political side doesn’t run this board. Had the title been “Pro-choicers: The human race nears…”, then I wouldn’t have posted at all.
But the difference is that women will be pregnant anyway. The only way this scenario could happen would be if women stopped having sex. In that situation, I’d argue that it’s the women that hate the men and wish them to suffer, not the other way around. But that’s a tangent. My main point is that there is no incentive to rape/impregnate because some women will already be pregnant.
FTR, I don’t see contraception as the demarcation either. I said 8 weeks, where that sack of cells becomes a human. Tack on a few more for good measure if that makes it easier to understand where I’m coming from.
Really? “So many” guys? How many? It sounds like you’re just reaching for anything that supports your point and going “Can that conceivably be true? Yeah, sounds good.” and spouting it like it’s fact. Most men don’t think that way, and you know it.
Because the society isn’t turning them into brood mares. The society is saying “OK, we realize that most abortions of convenience are immoral, but we’ve allowed them til now because some abortions aren’t for convenience. But now we’ve got a big problem on our hands and sorry, those rape babies need to be born and those with complications are just going to have to roll the dice.” See? Nothing about brood mares or sex slaves or chattel or living zombies in there at all.
And if you think that stance is evil, I refer you back to the mercy-stranglings post.
My post was in direct response to Malacandra who did say society would turn women into brood mares. Sedated, artificially-inseminated ones, true. But brood mares just the same.
A quick glance at history shows that there is no shortage of men willing rape when social controls are no longer in place. Do you really think that once it’s legal to drag a woman kicking and screaming someplace, drug her, and penetrate here, that people are really going to keep observing social niceties? Every single war tells a different story.
Again, I think it’s instructive to look at how we handled a greater impingement on body autonomy: fighting the Nazis. In this situation, it was men, not women, whose bodies were commandeered; it wasn’t the act of birth, but the act of killing and being killed, that was demanded. Men who were forced into participation weren’t just asked to do those two extreme things, though: they were required to give up their autonomy in nearly every way, for years at a time.
This proposal, in this ridiculous hypothetical, is much less severe.
A similar hypothetical would involve fighting off an alien invasion that intended to wipe out our species. Would you rather see humanity die out than reinstitute the draft?
To answer your questions: if the survival of the species were at question, it would not be monstrous to reinstitute either a draft for war or a draft for childbearing. My proposal already said that limited conscientious objector status would, if possible, be available, for “women utterly repulsed by the idea.” My proposal already said that, if that were not feasible, prison would be the consequence for refusing to participate. As for fertile women with infertile husbands, I don’t see how this would be an issue, any more than lesbian couples would be an issue. Sperm banks are readily available for those who don’t feel like having sex with some dude outside of their marriage.
And in case there’s any doubt: just as I fully support extending the military draft to women, I’d fully support extending a childbearing draft to men were the technology available to do so. Hell, if it’s a crisis of food, I’d support extending an agricultural draft to everyone.
Again, I ask you: are you really unable to see any difference between the Tyson rape pits and this proposal, such that you’d leave your sister in the former rather than propose the latter?
I know you’re not for the draft, but I didn’t realize that you’d prefer to let humanity die than to reinstitute it. Am I reading you correctly, that if the draft had been the only way for the Allies to prevail in WWII, you would have preferred the Allies to have lost?
Nobody’s acknowledged the point that an aging population without a younger generation supporting the infrastructure would undergo horrific suffering that would dwarf the great atrocities of the twentieth century. That’s what would be prevented through this draft.
Really? If there is a superior army on the side of monstrosity than there is of volunteers on the side of decency, you’re good with monstrosity winning? Consider how many people the Nazis murdered before they were beaten (by an army containing large numbers of draftees). Are you seriously saying that it would have been better for the Nazis to continue their campaign of terror? I mean, without the intervention of the conscripted Allied army, they probably would have gotten the atom bomb at some point. Would you have wanted to be an African at that point?
I’m having trouble wrapping my head around how a cause is worthless if you can’t support it with an all-volunteer force. Preventing the Nazis from murdering every nonwhite on the planet seems to me like a pretty good reason to support military conscription.
Yes, it’s probably gonna end someday, as is your life. Are you therefore okay with someone killing you today, or failing to provide treatment for a preventable disease? The “it’s gotta end” is a specious argument.
And bringing new people into a world isn’t deliberate, purposeful cruelty. I can’t imagine what you mean by such a statement.
Exactly. In the real world, a society that legitimizes rape is going to be like every other society and situation where rape has been legitimized; a feeding frenzy where the worst, most barbaric men rape and brutalize women. On as large a scale as they can and as harshly as they can get away with.
Then you havent been paying attention. She’s obviously pointing out that any female children will be brought into the world only to serve as brood mares and sex slaves; as targets of abuse and contempt.
Based on what I’ve read from some books and references on slavery in the U.S., “accidental” strangling or suffocation and neglect (sometimes forced, of course) was extremely common in those conditions. One reference you can read part of online: Slavery in the United States
To be fair, it is suggested that poor nutrition, horrible living conditions, lack of sanitation, and disease may have contributed significantly to the infant mortality rates. One cannot, however, dismiss the idea that at least some of the time the parent deliberately prevented a child of theirs from experiencing life as a slave.