Comments on: You have a right to behave how Feminists For Life has decided you must

by: oenophile

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:31:35 +0000

Re: discrimination based on location.

Picture a six-month post-conception baby. Some states will allow for abortion at that stage. If the woman has to deliver early, the baby will be in an incubator in a NICU. Anyone who goes into that NICU and kills the baby will be charged with murder. Why not charge the person who goes into the womb to kill the baby? The basis of the distinction is location.

And it is often the result of a more insidious form of discrimination: the lack of resources and support that pregnant women need and deserve.

As usual, Foster says this as if there’s a pro-choicer out there who would disagree. That’s why the term is “pro-choice“. We are all for women who don’t want abortions having the choice not to have them. Luckily for use, Foster ratchets this up to a whole new level of silly.
You’re actually complaining about this??? Please. She’s calling for more support for pregnant women, so they can make the CHOICE that many of them would make - to carry their babies to term - instead of having unwanted abortions.

The only way that you can disagree with her sentiment is if you consider abortion to be a more valid choice than carrying a baby to term. Some of us think that “pro-choice” should mean more than abortion. You know, things like maternity leave, flexible work schedules, child support, enforcement of child support laws, and having universities that allow women to continue their educations despite pregnancies.

by: oenophile

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:23:37 +0000

Right now, men have a legal right not to have someone else commandeer their body for nutrition. So, if you’re for equality, then you assume that women should have that right as well.
Distinguish between legal rights and biological realities. We don’t, for example, force women to give blood and not do the same for men. Laws can’t change biology.

by: Sour Kraut

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:04:36 +0000

They want to return to an era where middle class professional men had charming, educated wives who had no other job but to dote on husband, children, and home.

Bingo.

See Julia Stiles’ character in “Mona Lisa Smile.”

Women who delay marriage and childbirth until they establish careers have more bargaining power inside the marriage.

Also true, which is why FFL is pushing so hard to start the breeding earlier, because being an uppity woman is so unladylike. The even uglier undercurrent to this is, if a woman doesn’t have that kind of bargaining power in her marriage, what does she have to rely on?

I can’t help but wonder if the reason Patricia Heaton is captain of this particular wingnut flagship has something to do with her TV alter-ego. Her character doesn’t seem to have much going on besides The House and The Kids, and she mainly negotiates her relationship with her husband by being a frigid, relentlessly hectoring shrew who rations out teh sex on a punishment/reward basis. Is this the kind of message FFL really wants to steer women to? “Forget the career and independence, ladies, here’s how you really take charge.”

by: Patsy

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 17:16:03 +0000

So the other 30% have shown enough responsibility to deserve their legal rights? Nimrod. Here’s a feminist idea: MYOB.

by: has_te

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 11:51:42 +0000

This probably pretty old hat but…

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most the patriarchal blowback against
feminism (as a force of its own…not JUST women’s rights)
isn’t actually a fear thing.

Said another way, that ‘feminism’ isn’t threatening so much as a
movement as it is testament to the inherently false confabulation
of the patriarchal mode, belief system, what it stands for …
Revealed in its starkity….as inherently weak.

C’mon, gimme a break…some of us are just slow.

by: Kyra

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 22:35:36 +0000

discrimination by location

Discrimination by location? Discrimination by LOCATION! If this is a valid argument of anything, I’m moving into one of the guest bedrooms at the White House. Permanantly. What? Of course I can do that—if people try to kick me out, it’s discrimination by location! Oh, and I’ll have a Lamborghini from some random import dealership while we’re at it, and noooo, you can’t arrest me just because I’m in your car here!

Gods, they’re dumbasses. Rape charges could be explained away as “discrimination by location.” Trespassing, some forms of stealing, and I suppose we should open up all the prison systems in the country, ‘cause objecting to convicted criminals being outside the prisons rather than inside the prisons is just discrimination by location!

And for that matter, criminalizing abortion is discrimination by location—it would punish a woman for removing herself from the area around the fetus.

“When women think they have to lay their bodies down or swallow a bitter pill for an abortion in order to compete in the workplace or make their way in the world—that is not feminism.�?

How about when women think they have to “lay their bodies down or swallow a bitter pill for an abortion” in order to NOT BE PREGNANT?! (Will they ever get this bit? My money’s on “no.”)

And, nothing wrong at all, I suppose, with women having to lay their bodies down and give birth to an unwanted baby after spending months supporting the creation of said unwanted baby?

by: paul

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 21:28:37 +0000

By focusing on women in college they also target a group of women who (in general) are more likely to be able to take care of themselves and a baby, and who have (once again, in general) social/family support networks that will reduce the odds of really bad outcomes. So you’re less likely to get the stories that go “FFL convinced me to have this baby, but I’m living in an abandoned tenement so its hand were chewed off by rats” or “FFL convinced someone down the street not to have an abortion, and a couple years later she put her kid in the oven.”

(No neither of those scenarios is particularly common, but it’s going to be more common among non-middle-class, non-college-bound women who are troubled enough to give in to the blandishments of FFL and those like them.)

by: Sara

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 20:00:35 +0000

bewilderness, that’s exactly what I was going to say. If the FFL would get off of their lazy asses and make raising children easier, then maybe people wouldn’t be so interested in abortion. Duh.

by: mythago

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 13:21:58 +0000

They want to return to an era where middle class professional men had charming, educated wives who had no other job but to dote on husband, children, and home.

Bingo.

After all, notice her pitch: It’s unfair and terrible for women to be forced to make choices about their families because a man is giving them orders. Young, educated women with careers certainly agree with the idea that their bosses shouldn’t be able to fire them for getting pregnant, and they shouldn’t have to meekly submit to an abortion because child support would cramp their boyfriend’s style.

And educated, privileged women are probably less likely to be put off by her punchline of “So nobody should be allowed to have abortions ever!” They’ll be able to get theirs, of course, having money and privilege, and anyway That’s Different.

by: Amanda Marcotte

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 13:03:00 +0000

Erica, I think they focus on college girls for two reasons: 1) They want privileged people to breed more. 2) As I’ve stated before, I think they think this is a good way to return to more male-dominated marriages. Women who delay marriage and childbirth until they establish careers have more bargaining power inside the marriage. (In fact, I’d bet, for instance, that brides who have established careers are likelier to keep their own name.) But if you get pregnant in college and marry your boyfriend, the allure of dropping out of school or your career track and letting him support you is strong. They want to return to an era where middle class professional men had charming, educated wives who had no other job but to dote on husband, children, and home. They claim otherwise, but look at their actions, not their words. They claim they want to help poor women and single women, but the vast majority of their activism is aimed at convincing privileged college girls to start having babies at 18 and 19 years old rather than wait until they’re 30.