I’m unsure about “absolutely no autonomy over your body”. It could well be that after you’ve borne the statutory four healthy children that represent your Duty to the state, you receive the automatic right to sterilisation (tho’ you might not need it) and full citizenship rights. And it could well also be that female citizens would call as loudly as anyone else for female precitizens to do their Duty.
To hope for? A future when, as in the legendary past, reproduction will no longer be repugnant to women, but a source of joy and pride. Then - for men also deplore this vile, necessary Duty - women would once again take their rightful place as equals, or possibly a few percent more than equals in the name of centuries of oppression.
Or, the heck with it, if men were truly as hateful and contemptuous of women as it apparently comforts Der Trihs to think, a little genetic engineering could attach a recessive “stupid docility” gene to the X-chromosome, and you’re done and dusted. Only the recipients of two copies of the gene are stupid and docile, naturally. Now there’s horrible if you like.
Only monstrously evil men would behave in such a fashion. They wouldn’t “deplore this vile, necessary Duty”; they’d glory in it. They’d gloat over it, probably throwing in beatings and other forms of abuse. We are speaking of a situation designed to weed all good men out of the species.
Don’t distort what I’ve been saying. The point I’ve made repeatedly that the premise of the OP pretty much requires that men be hateful and contemptuous of women. Because otherwise they wouldn’t indulge in mass rape and forced impregnation.
As for using genetic engineering to reduce women to domestic animals; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a society like the one hypothesised here wouldn’t do just that or worse. An evil society is going to act in an evil fashion; I’m sure that the pre-Civil War South would have done something like that to blacks if it could have.
Are you going to do your duty by raping and impregnating an unwilling woman?
Maybe she’s tied down and struggling. Maybe she is drugged in a medical facility. Maybe you can choose whichever best “inspires” you to do your duty.
I imagine the prettiest would be taken by the leaders. There would have to be some kind of system to decide who gets to rape which class of woman. Since we’ve already thrown well-being out of the window, I imagine we’d probably start raping them as soon as they are able to bear children. Would the 15 year old cost extra?
Remember guys, your wives and daughters and sisters are not immune from this. When they come around for your daughter, are you going to help them handcuff her? Or are you just going to shrug and watch them do it? Are you really going to feel that it’s acceptable because it’s for the good of humanity?
Go ahead, picture it. Because we are all picturing this happening to us.
This doesn’t smack even a little bit of white woman’s burden to you? I mean, maybe you’re right, but I’d kinda want to hear from some Saudi women before reaching that conclusion.
I read an essay awhile ago by some women’s group in eastern Africa. Their message was essentially: “To the white women who are trying to stop female genital mutilation: back the fuck off, let us handle it.” They found the attitude of Western feminists to be astonishingly matronizing and unhelpful.
I suspect that if the crazy scenario in question happened, you’d have nearly as many women as men calling for a ban on abortion. It’s not like the pro-life movement currently is exclusively men.
How did the jump from 'Abortions are banned" to “Women are treated as cattle, raped, tied down, forced to act as brood mares for the state and slaves to their husbands” occur?
Sorry guys, but there are a LOT of very nice guys who would never dream of raping/beating/enslaving a woman and yet still believe abortion is wrong, and probably even more women who feel the same way.
I rather expect that most of them would change their position after the first dozen or so rapes.
And anti-abortion women are notorious for being hypocritical anyway; they’ll turn right around and get one when THEY need one in the “The only moral abortion is my abortion” phenomena.
Actually, I was thinking of The Affront from Excession, who genetically engineered their females to suffer as much as possible during sex out of sheer sadism.
For one thing, the subject is “The human race nears extinction–is forcing a woman to give birth acceptable?” That directly leads to the subject of rape, since just forbidding abortion won’t make a woman pregnant. And second, being anti-abortion logically leads fairly directly to approval of rape, since in both cases you are asserting that a woman’s body is yours, not hers to use as you will.
Nice guys aren’t anti-abortion any more than they are pro-slavery. Being anti-abortion is right up there with being a rapist for disqualifying you as being a nice guy.
Guess we’ll have to disagree on the point then. Unsurprising, of course. Many pro abortion folks seem every bit as rabid as anti abortion. Makes for difficult discussion on the subject.
You’re joking, right? And I’m the disgusting one? I’m the one that hates women?
No it doesn’t, because the OP only posits forcing women to birth children they’re already pregnant with. You’re the one that keeps turning it into rape, brutality, and tying women down to be breeding slaves.
Except the OP doesn’t say anything about making women pregnant. You’re adding that yourself.
Noooooooo, we’re asserting that the baby’s body isn’t hers to do with as she pleases. You know, the same way it is after the baby’s born? It doesn’t logically lead to approval of rape, because before pregnancy, there is no baby to protect. After week 8 (IMHO), there is a baby.
No matter how much you yell and stomp your feet about it, we force women to do things all the time. Women can’t kill people. Women can’t steal. Women can’t commit fraud. Women can’t run red lights. No matter how much you insist that pro-life people want to enslave women, it’s really about that thing inside her that has an independent heart, liver, brain, fingernails, etc. It’s about protecting that thing that feels pain and responds to light and sound.
You love to toss out these strawmen (“The other side likes rape. Rape is bad. Ergo, they are bad. QED”) but you’re not fooling anyone.
It seems to me that the opinions of those who are anti-abortion anyway are kind of superfluous in this thread since the specific hypothetical in the OP is irrelevant to them.
Yeah, and I’d consider them self-hating or just trying to fly by under the radar and not attract attention to themselves if they did. Would you argue that maybe slaves in the antebellum South were fine with their lives?
Fair enough. Do you believe it’s possible to ethically hold a different viewpoint regarding personal control over your financial resources?
We are in accord on this point.
Either education is a right which can’t be denied, like personal autonomy and right to determine if you bear a child or not, or it isn’t. Can you imagine being asked to show your shot record before you could vote? What about showing a shot record before you could join a protest march? If education is a right in the US, then access shouldn’t be made conditional on a medical procedure a person may or may not want. If personal autonomy can’t be restricted by forcing pregnancy, then how can access to education be restricted by forcing vaccination?
Presumably estrus and pregnancy were more tightly coupled in our primitive ancestors, as they are in our cousins and other animals. Estrus was pretty much the only time you had sex, so the correlation between sex and pregnancy was easier to make.
Regardless of the Devil’s advocate position I’ve somewhat staked out here, I’m on record as saying that if the human race loses the drive to breed then we should die out rather than force individuals to perpetuate an obviously broken species.
I like your sentence “Do you not love your grandchildren if in the future your children had them?”, because it exemplifies the absurdity of the point you are making. Do I now love the grandchildren I might have? Wait, what about the ones I won’t have? Am I supposed to love them, despite the fact that no matter what happens they’ll never exist? And how do I tell them from the ones that will exist?
Here are your choices:
Option 1: Be constantly wracked with horror at the billions of your ‘potential’ grandchildren who will never see life (The redheaded androgyne with webbed hands and six toes on his/her left foot named Superfly? S/HE WILL NEVER SEE LIFE!!! NOOOOO!!!) -
Option 2: Don’t worry about them until they, uh, happen. And anybody who doesn’t get born doesn’t get a second thought. If they don’t happen, then no worries.
Option 3: Vaguely want progeny.
You’re advocating option 1!
About wanting humanity to exist and be happy forever - the answer is of course I do, vaguely. But not at all costs. And this is where you go off the logical rails again - since when does existing mean being happy? While the hypothetics in this thread have moved around some, among them is the rapist humanity, complete with bondage and drugging and random, pointless beatings! I dunno about you, but that doesn’t meet my personal definition of “continue to exist, delight, and be happy”. So asking if we’d want that is like asking “But wouldn’t you pay $10,000 to own a lamborghini?” when we’re debating the merit of paying $10,000 to buy a bicycle with the brakes rusted off.
Granted the hypothetical has shifted and once again Der Trihs has raced off into the land of frothing hyperbole. (I wish he wouldn’t do that.)
But, looking back at the initial scenario, what are we actually dealing with there? It’s asking wether we’d banning all abortions due to the catastrophe, not due to an ideological belief that the blastocyst is a sacred soul.
It’s recently been drilled into me that there are basically two types of pro-choicers, the “It’s my body, dammit!” group and the “It’s not a baby, dammit!” group. (The latter being the lower bar - while people may hold both beliefs, they can be divided based on whether the non-personhood is a necessary condition for acceptability of the abortion.)
To the “It’s my body, dammit!” group, telling them they can’t abort is an intolerable infringement on their freedoms, comparable to various other atrocities. It’s apparently natural for them to think that to be willing to restrict their freedom in this way, you must necessarily be a horrific antimoral monster. This, of course, is always helpful in maintaining calm, hyperbole-free debate.
To the “It’s not a baby, dammit!” group, there is a line between “baby” and “not baby”, and we see the question as asking whether pre-baby substances should be protected and encouraged towards becoming babies. There is little difference between fertilized and unfertilized eggs in this view - what is under discussion is not a baby, but the raw materials for making a baby. So, for us (I’m one of these), it’s also a short step between banning abortion and enforcing impregantion. We don’t see conception as a meaningful demarcation in the abortion debate, so if you’re all into pushing the raw materials into the later steps of production, there is no logical reason you’d allow that womb to lie fallow.
So basically, the entire target audience for this question sees the answer as being “If things are bad enough to ban abortion, then it naturally follows that forced impregnation/rape will soon follow.” (After that, division arises between the group that thinks that the point is hurting women (:dubious:) and the group that thinks they will be treated like fragile china dolls.)
I dunno, I was just speculating on conditions that might make me reconsider my stance. I put such speculation in the same category as considering what evidence would I need to re-evaluate my atheism or my belief in evolution. I can indeed imagine that such evidence might exist, though it would have be pretty compelling.
Fact is, people who hold a belief that they’ll cling to no matter what, under any conceivable conditions, even 'til death and beyond… well, they make me kinda nervous, truth be told.
In this particular case, it’s not enough that the state will simply withhold/outlaw abortion. I guess this is too benign. In order to really work up a good froth, there has to be hypothetical assembly-line rape and women in chains and, why not, women lobotomized into being docile breeding stock. Then nobody will have any doubt who the bad guys are!
Only by a narrow definition of “good” that values “a woman’s right to choose” above all else.
Believe me, it is never necessary to distort what you say. I’m talented in my way, but it is beyond my humble capacity to parody you.
Nope, you don’t have to be hateful and contemptuous of women; you just have to appreciate that women’s rights qua women’s rights don’t trump the right of the species to survive. When an alien mind-control ray or mutant virus has robbed every woman in the world of her every ounce of good sense, you can either exercise the option to be the sole remaining sane sex, or you can wring your hands at the horror of it all and go gently into that good night; but if your good sense revolts at the latter course, it doesn’t make you evil.
And I’m sure you feel that anti-abortionists would do the same even now, even in the absense of the threat of extinction, but just because you’re sure of something doesn’t make it a fact.
Did I see any horror from you upthread at the prospect of women being prepared to strangle newborn children if they couldn’t get their own way by any other means?
Well, picture away. I can tell you’re enjoying it; everyone needs a good dose of victimhood every once in a while.
I expect it would be quite hard to get enough willing men to rape drugged or manacled women, and I expect, on the whole, we’d do our best to make the whole process as painless and untraumatic as possible, which probably means artificial insemination and plenty of sedation, which appears to be necessary in this scenario to prevent you from self-harm or infanticide among others. At least you don’t then have to worry about some brute of a man obtaining sexual gratification at your expense, nor a hideous social order apportioning pretty girls to the most deserving, most brutal men; and the part about raping 15yos is entirely your own invention, but like I said, go ahead and enjoy yourself.
It’s she, and I know you didn’t assume these things would happen. But I think when you start with the premise that a woman’s right over her body is not absolute, how can you control those other things from happening? There are already so many guys who seem to think that women should dress/act according to how men think. When you’ve already taken away a woman’s right to do what she wants with her body, why do you think that guys like that will say, “Okay, well, forced pregnancy, but nothing else!”?
But I just don’t see why. Women deciding en masse they don’t want to have sex isn’t going to make any one who’s living die–it just means we won’t have any new people. How can you mourn for someone who doesn’t exist?
It is a horrifying picture–but it’s in reaction to what would be a horrible situation. I think the idea of a slave strangling her own child rather than let it grow up to know only slavery is horrible but not because the mother is a bad person–because she’s been put into this living hell. It’s understandable to me. Why would you want someone you love to grow up in a situation like that?
That’s what makes it so scary. That you think you’re being so great by making it “painless” and “untraumatic.” It’s like kidnapping someone and saying how awesome you’re being because at least you’re not raping them at knifepoint and you’re giving them all the free stuff they want.
In this case, if the woman didn’t want pregnancy, artificial insemination would be tantamount to rape. And sedating us so we don’t try to obtain abortion? That’s not condescending at all.
As for the rape of 15 year olds and so on…why would that be so bizarre? Again, even in our own country, we have societies where men prey upon very young girls. And this is without the pretext of “saving society.”
