We must ban the pill or this woman could blow up a major American city in the next 10 minutes!
Zuzu has a post up about Michael’s weekend post here about genetic testing and abortion. We’re all roughly on the same page with regard to the ethical problems that arise from this issue, which is that said problems are best attacked not by limiting reproductive rights but instead educating people about disabilities. Zuzu summarizes:
Let me state for the record that I support abortion at any time up to viability for any reason whatsoever, from birth defects so serious that the child will be dead moments after birth to wanting a child of a different sex to not wanting to raise a child with Down syndrome to wanting to fit into a prom dress.
Why? Because I trust women. I trust them to know what’s right for their own lives.
However, that’s not to say that I can’t also believe that we, as a society, need to change the conditions that lead to abortions in the first place. And that means comprehensive sex ed, it means contraception, it means emergency contraception. But it also means strengthening the social safety net so that women of limited means can afford to have a child, and it means changing the way that we as a society think about the disabled and the different (and, in the case of widespread sex-selective abortions, about the value of women and girls). When people are confronted with the news that the child they’re expecting will be born with a disability, it can make all the difference in the world if they know that they will have resources available to help them, not just when the child is young and in school, but long after the parents have left this earth.
Because I am at one with the deep-seated need in many people to pass judgement on others at the drop of a hat, a trait that is apparently common to people on the internets, I did quarrel with the idea this trust thing. It’s not really a disagreement with Zuzu at all, but more that nit-picking that is the second favorite habit of internet denizens, after passing harsh judgements on strangers with shallow knowledge of their situations. Quoth myself:
I don’t trust all women to make the “right� decision—let’s face it, someone who is wealthy and aborting a pregnancy because of Down’s and is worried about what the neighbors will think is being an asshole—but to me the overruling principle is freedom. Most people will do the right thing if given the freedom (and implied respect) and the tools to do so. That a handful of people will fuck it up does not change the fact that the overall social good is generally better served by liberty than by not-liberty.
I appreciate the rhetorical effect of saying that you trust women. It’s a direct assault on the underlying sexism of anti-choice legislation, which generally presumes that women as a whole are too stupid to make their own decisions about something as basic as when and how their reproductive organs should be used. I do have my concerns about the limits of the statement that women are to be trusted to do the right thing, though, because it almost encourages anti-choicers to seek out that one woman out there who’s really pushing it with the eugenics.
So while agreeing about the usefulness of the trust rhetoric, let me go a step further and say that it’s sad that it’s even necessary to use language like that. Freedom is not contigent on universal good use of it, or it’s not really freedom. The most popular example of this principle is with freedom of speech. If people were to have their right to free speech pulled because they said repugnant things—think the KKK on some hate march—then we don’t have free speech. Same with reproductive rights. You don’t really have your rights if they can be snatched because other people dislike your reasons.
Anti-choicers who resort to hypothetically selfish women who have to have their rights stripped in order to prevent them from making unpopular decisions are making a bad faith argument anyway. They’re not interested in commandeering women’s basic bodily autonomy in order to bolster disability rights. In fact, the opposite—the most vocal proponents of eugenic movements are against abortion rights. Check out this latest exhortion to white women to have more babies in order to maintain American hegemony from anti-choicer Rebecca Hagelin,for a typical example. Granted, pro-eugenics people try to skirt the charge by only advocating “positive” eugenics, but the sentiment is still there. Exhorting white women to have more babies and seeking out legal methods to force that to happen aren’t linked by mere coincidence.
Rhetorically speaking, invoking the hypothetically horrible woman who has an abortion to fit better into a prom dress or whatever reminds me of nothing so much as the pro-torture arguments being trotted out by conservatives and illustrated weekly on the show “24″. You know the argument—”What if there was a bomb about to go off and you had to torture someone to get the information in the next 10 minutes?” If you concede that it might be okay to torture then, apparently then you have to tolerate secret prisons across the world and routine torture of prisoners and the suspension of habeas corpus.
All which is to say I can’t wait for a very special anti-choice “24″, where Jack only has 12 hours to get some critical anti-abortion bill passed through the legislature and signed by a governor before the solitary 18-year-old who’s 8 months pregnant and wants to abort to keep her somehow still-slender figure actually gets her abortion.
90 Responses to “Hypothetical selfishness is irrelevant to the reproductive rights debate”
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Great post. I am also a really big fan of the point that if a woman is getting an abortion for a really shallow reason she probably shouldn’t be raising kids anyways because she would make a bad mother.
“All which is to say I can’t wait for a very special anti-choice “24″, where Jack only has 12 hours to get some critical anti-abortion bill passed through the legislature and signed by a governor before the solitary 18-year-old who’s 8 months pregnant and wants to abort to keep her somehow still-slender figure actually gets her abortion.”
Best. Idea. For a TV show. EVAH.
aimai
You say Zuzu say:
This is one of those statements that sounds great in theory, but a lot of problems arise once you start looking at the details. At what point is it a legitimate exercise of society’s right not to support problematic or irresponsible behavior to say “No, you can’t bring that child into the world, because it’s going to spend many long years unable to have any significant quality of life and presenting a real burden to the taxpayers”? You could argue that the total overall cost is insignificant compared to the amount we spend on weaponry, and you’d be correct, but that doesn’t invalidate the question.
At what point does it simply become cruel to the child to bring it into the world if it’s doomed to a life of suffering? Simply allowing everyone total freedom in such regard would probably work for the majority of reasonable people, but what about the flaming narcissist who wants the taxpayers to support his/her dream?
Who gets to draw the line at what constitutes a societally-manageable “disability” and something that really is better off dead? You can argue that one ought not to terminate a pregnancy simply because the child is to have Down’s Syndrome — and while the arguments taking place on this blog do pay lip service to the rightness of the decision to terminate such a pregnancy, the consensus opinion here is that one ought not to terminate — but at what point does the weight of that consensus opinion counterbalance the parents’ desire not to have such a burden, or not to have to foist it off on the state when they die, or to want a child that isn’t defective or disabled? And of course then you have the Gattaca question of just what constitutes disability in an age where genetic profiles can be done. Is blonde hair, or dark skin, or shortness a disability? If I were to have a son I would certainly want him to turn out to be above average height — does this make me a bad person? Does it make me a bad person if we abort a pregnancy because the boy is destined to be five foot one instead of six foot two? How about five foot six, or eight, or ten?
let’s face it, someone who is wealthy and aborting a pregnancy because of Down’s and is worried about what the neighbors will think is being an asshole
See, I don’t even know about this. Usually I’m of the opinion that having a right to do something doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole for doing it. But when it comes to something like pregnancy…I don’t think you or I or anyone else has the right to call someone an “asshole” for deciding that nine months of pregnancy is just not worth it, for whatever reason.
Jack Bauer would just kill the Abortoterrorists, probably by biting their necks or something. Problem solved…
(Except this season of 24 we’d find out Jack’s father owns a company that specializes in abortions…)
I’m one of those selfish people who realized early on that I had no desire to be a father. Nothing against those who are, just not for me. I am also pro-choice, reasoning that it pretty much falls into the “noneya” category. Of course, I also had a father who counseled me to wear a condom at all times, which I have done. He just didn’t want any “b*stard” grandkids running around but it seemed to be rather sage advice, all in all.
I guess my point is that it is really such a personal decision for both the man and woman that the rules makers should just stay the hell away. Of course, the patriarchy that loves eugenics and hates abortions are also those who refuse to teach anything in the way of sex/health education other than abstinence. Yes, I know abstinence is 100% effective. It is also totally and completely unrealistic.
Yes, I know abstinence is 100% effective. It is also totally and completely unrealistic.
Being gay works pretty well too.
The thing is, it’s really HARD to be a good parent. It takes time, and effort and devotion to raise a happy healthy well-adjusted child. I trust women to be smart enough to know whether or not they can be a good parent, and if they decide for whatever reason that they can’t then they shouldn’t have a baby. And what the right to lifers seem to forget is bad parenting can ruin a child and help turn them into unhappy adults, who then do terrible things and that makes the world a worse place. Women abort because they don’t want a child AT THAT TIME and why that is so doesn’t matter. If a woman is so shallow that she will abort to fit into a prom dress,what kind of parent will she be? Every child deserves to at least be wanted from the very beginning of its life. As for the disabled issue, it is a complex one. I agree that there needs to be more education as to what the disabled can do and far more support systems for the families of the disabled so that both the child and the family can flourish. BUT if someone can’t handle raising a disabled child and still is forced to bear one, then we are condemning a totally vulnerable child to be raised by an incapable parent, AND because of the disability that child will have less of a chance to escape from its circumstances. He/she is less likely to be adopted and since a disabled child needs more attention to achieve his/her full potential having a parent who feels they can’t cope is a disaster in the making.
“Being gay works pretty well too.”
You are absolutely correct yet being a middle aged straight male, it never crossed my mind. Sorry about that. I DO like that this site has me thinking a bit “outside the box” if you will…
I’m actually curious how far opposition to abortion would go if the need to maintain racial/cultural “purity” were pitted against the use of abortion to achieve that goal.
I suspect very strongly that some “compromise” would be found if it were thought to be needed to “maintain order”. Likewise, with the rise of so called “pregnancy counseling centers”, we’re really only a few steps away from a formal “Lebensborn” system to care for wayward
AryanWASP girls…After all, you can’t spell “Reichwing” without “Reich”…
“The most popular example of this principle is with freedom of speech. If people were to have their right to free speech pulled because they said repugnant things—think the KKK on some hate march—then we don’t have free speech. Same with reproductive rights.�
We limit free speech when it is harmful all the time. Threats, libel, and dangerous false public statements are all banned. Freedoms that could diminish or annihilate entire peoples (millions of females in India and China, disabled people, and poorer ethnic groups) could fall under that category.
Even if you think a fetus is just a blob of tissue, losing 80% of certain disabled groups, or millions of women, might not seem to be an acceptable loss while you empower or educate women and society at large to choose to take those pregnancies to term.
But if you’re willing to concede that women who abort for slight abnormalities, or because they want to fit a dress, are making a “bad choice,� you open the possibility of the government regulating that choice to preserve those endangered groups. And then the problem becomes, what is a “good� or “necessary� reason (short of a serious health risk) to abort a fetus? In other words, your position starts sounding like that of a pro-lifer.
And if you think a fetus is something more, the importance of a “good choice” becomes all the more important.
LindaH,
If I may, it is also a bad father that can have the negative impact. Being selfish, I recognized that fathering a child meant a MINIMUM commitment of eighteen years for even healthy children.
But the people who would force the child to be born no matter what the circumstances are all too often the same ones who are almost fetishistic in their zeal to cut all social services as not worthy for the spending of the almight tax dollar.
See, I don’t even know about this. Usually I’m of the opinion that having a right to do something doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole for doing it. But when it comes to something like pregnancy…I don’t think you or I or anyone else has the right to call someone an “asshole� for deciding that nine months of pregnancy is just not worth it, for whatever reason.
Hey, we have a perfect right to call said hypothetical woman an asshole, if that’s what we think.
However, it’s her body. If she wants to be an asshole in exercising her freedom to it, so be it.
If you are eight months pregnant and abort, that prom dress ain’t gonna fit anytime soon.
That said, there are already protections in place that prevent the widely ballyhood and nonexistant “vanity abortions” past the limit of viability. Short Answer: they don’t happen. Friends I know who have gone through the hoops to have a “late term abortion” had to get court say-so to proceed - although the emergency procedure (preeclampsia) was post-hoc. The other case was anencephaly - non-viable fetus.
These were wanted pregnancies, very much planned, and very tragically ended. Who needs the bullshit of guilt and hate on top of that?
Before the limit of viability outside the mother? That’s her call. Keep in mind that 80+% take place at the embryo stage and over 90% before 12 weeks. We need to keep flogging this as a non-issue.
You can argue that one ought not to terminate a pregnancy simply because the child is to have Down’s Syndrome — and while the arguments taking place on this blog do pay lip service to the rightness of the decision to terminate such a pregnancy, the consensus opinion here is that one ought not to terminate — but at what point does the weight of that consensus opinion counterbalance the parents’ desire not to have such a burden, or not to have to foist it off on the state when they die, or to want a child that isn’t defective or disabled?
Putting aside your rather repulsive use of the word “defective”, I don’t think the consensus in the Berube thread was ever “not abort”.
The consensus seemed to me that parents needed to make that decision, but also need to be adequately supported in making that decision. In otherwords, they need to be free from defective terms like defective, and defective information which overstates the potential burdens, and skews the potential overall defectiveness of the fetus in question.
All which is to say I can’t wait for a very special anti-choice “24″, where Jack only has 12 hours to get some critical anti-abortion bill passed through the legislature and signed by a governor before the solitary 18-year-old who’s 8 months pregnant and wants to abort to keep her somehow still-slender figure actually gets her abortion.
Try flying his ass down to Mississippi or Texas, they’ll/we’ll have it done with 9 hours to spare.
Threats, libel, and dangerous false public statements are all banned.
No, they’re not banned. Not at all. You have to sue and prove actual damage before a threat or libel is a problem. Which doesn’t sound that different in theory than censorship, but is very much so in practice. But your constitutional right to speak of ideas is pretty strongly protected.
But if you’re willing to concede that women who abort for slight abnormalities, or because they want to fit a dress, are making a “bad choice,� you open the possibility of the government regulating that choice to preserve those endangered groups.
I don’t see why. If that’s so, then the fact that hate speech is utterly repugnant automatically qualifies it for being banned. And that hasn’t happened, because guess what? Freedom means you don’t get to legislate against others because of a personal judgement that they aren’t making the decisions you think they should.
“And what the right to lifers seem to forget is bad parenting can ruin a child and help turn them into unhappy adults, who then do terrible things and that makes the world a worse place. Women abort because they don’t want a child AT THAT TIME and why that is so doesn’t matter. If a woman is so shallow that she will abort to fit into a prom dress, what kind of parent will she be?”
I honestly don’t know why people keep making this argument without defending the obvious assumption: that someone with a bad parent, bad childhood, or disability is always, often, or even sometimes better off dead.
That seems impossible to prove empirically, and there’s plenty of reason to think there’s nothing worse than not existing. Without proving the claim, it seems callous to say that millions of prospective babies are better off dead.
RUD, you’re conflating actual people with hypothetical people. There’s a big difference between, for instance, coming to my house and shooting me and my wanton disregard for my hypothetical child that I’m demonstrating by typing this into a comment box instead of fucking wildly in hopes of making the hypothetical child. If you can’t see the difference, then I’m not really sure that we can even have a discussion. After all, you’re murdering your sperm as we speak.
“prospective babies are better off dead. ”
But they’re still only potentia. They aren’t babies. A baby might not be better off dead. A fetus is not a baby.
“No, they’re not banned. Not at all. You have to sue and prove actual damage before a threat or libel is a problem. Which doesn’t sound that different in theory than censorship, but is very much so in practice. But your constitutional right to speak of ideas is pretty strongly protected.”
Some of these aren’t prior restrained….but you can go to jail for theats. So would you be ok if we didn’t stop anyone from having an abortion, but just threw them in jail afterward?
“I don’t see why. If that’s so, then the fact that hate speech is utterly repugnant automatically qualifies it for being banned. And that hasn’t happened, because guess what? Freedom means you don’t get to legislate against others because of a personal judgement that they aren’t making the decisions you think they should.”
People have all sorts of justifications for allowing hate speech, but one might be that it doesn’t potentially hurt people the way threats do, or that on balance it will help more than it hurts. I don’t want to make an argument about hate speech, but the fact that there is unprotected speech (threats, libel, fire in a public theater) shows that we do regulate our freedoms. And in terms of abortion, that might mean trying to ban “bad” justifications. Which could lead to the slope I describe.
I think you have to be consistently pro-choice and not criticize any choice, or you’re opening the door to more and more restrictive regulation and the pro-life position. Which is why the disability/eugenic critique of abortion is made.
As for hypothetical/acutal people, I was assuming exactly your point that fetuses aren’t people. That’s what I mean by “prospective.” I’m just saying that the argument that they are better off not existing than being born into bad conditions isn’t being adequately defended. Even if the fetus counts for nothing, I don’t see how its interests are served by not existing. Of course, if the fetus counts for nothing, you can support abortion without worrying about whether the fetus is “better off.” I was just talking about that specific argument LindaH made.
Well, obviously Ms. Marcotte and zuzu are both right, in their own way. It would be great to have a social safety net that helped alleviate some of the hard choices people make, and not just about pregnancy. But they still need to be free to make the choices. This comes back to what Ms. Marcotte has written about before, the dangers of the “abortion is an icky, necessary evil” mindset. It becomes very easy then to strike out the “necessary” part once the “icky, evil” ground has been ceded. Likewise, if we ease the financial and care-provision burdens in this circumstance, there are those who will take advantage of it to say, “Why would anyone choose an abortion now?” And don’t think it wouldn’t happen. I’m actually relieved in a way that the anti-choice movement is also largely hostile to contraception, because getting on board the “contraception for all” bandwagon could further the PR goal of demonizing “unnecessary” abortion. So, what I’m fumbling with here is that we need to create a supportive society, but supportive in the sense of fully accepting people’s personal choices, not just offering assistance for the “consequences.”
And the following week, we can dismantle the moon for fun and profit.
RUD, you seem a little entranced with the fear of going to jail for threats. I wouldn’t characterize that as a significant impediment to your freedom unless you’re a stalker or something.
To demonstrate why your other argument doesn’t make sense, just mull over the fact that you aren’t serving the interests of your hopeful sperm who aren’t being served by you sitting here rather than spewing them off in the grand hopes of giving them a chance at actually existing, you murderer.
That seems impossible to prove empirically, and there’s plenty of reason to think there’s nothing worse than not existing.
That’s an interesting philosophical point, because I would have to disagree with you. I can think of plenty of worse things than simply not existing. Heck, I can think of plenty of things that are worse than death.
This is a complete load. One can disagree with a person’s choice without disagreeing with their right to make it. For instance, I think you have said some stupid things, but I have no problem allowing you to say them.
There is a big difference between saying you shouldn’t do something and saying you shouldn’t be allowed to do something.
My mother is pro-life. Sometimes I wonder if I was wanted, or just an accident that she couldn’t get out of. At least any children I have will know that I chose them.
If it counts for nothing, it doesn’t have “interests.”
some people say horrible things, but no one I know wants to eliminate the right to speech in the way many want to eliminate the right to abortion
that some people use a freedom with bad motives is not an indict of the freedom: it is an indict of the motives
That seems impossible to prove empirically, and there’s plenty of reason to think there’s nothing worse than not existing.
I have to wonder how you live with the terror of literally billions of years of non-existence before you were conceived. Such bravery…
Rud:
“I honestly don’t know why people keep making this argument without defending the obvious assumption: that someone with a bad parent, bad childhood, or disability is always, often, or even sometimes better off dead.
That seems impossible to prove empirically, and there’s plenty of reason to think there’s nothing worse than not existing. Without proving the claim, it seems callous to say that millions of prospective babies are better off dead. ”
I’ll defend it: All pro-choicers distinguish dead from never having existed. Obviously I am glad I wasn’t aborted (not that I should have expected to be) because I’m alive now and I am aware of what I would be missing out on. It’s basically the same reason I don’t want to die. But if I’d never existed I wouldn’t know what I’d missed.
Okay, maybe not a towering example of logical clarity, but here’s the real problem with the view that never existing is as bad as dying as an argument against abortion: nothing in that assumption is specific to abortion. If a “prevented potential life” is bad enough to warrant banning abortion, it would be just as important to ban birth control: every time a fertile couple has intercourse with birth control, a “potential life” is prevented. In fact, why stop at birth control? If a “potential life” is as important to protect as a real life, every woman on the planet is morally obliged to be constantly pregnant from puberty to menopause (real convenient for us guys that gestation is the rate-limiting step, but hey, we didn’t pick our biology), because every nine-months of non-pregnancy is a potential life that didn’t get its chance.
Hm. Wonder if we had a handy-dandy medical operation where you could have your embryo/fetus scooped out of you and popped into the freezer until “later”, at which point you would have it popped back into you again (thawed out of course) and continue the process–how many people would go for that rather than abortion? I think in the case of a lot of women it’s not that they don’t want to have kids; it’s that they don’t want to have a kid at that time.
If I ever get enough money, I’m going to start up an R&D program to develop a uterine replicator. Dunno why we don’t have it already….it would end up throwing the cat among the pigeons on both sides, which is what should happen from really revolutionary technology.
So what happens when you then discover at a later date that you don’t want to have *that* guy’s kid?
Hm. Wonder if we had a handy-dandy medical operation where you could have your embryo/fetus scooped out of you and popped into the freezer until “later�, at which point you would have it popped back into you again (thawed out of course) and continue the process–how many people would go for that rather than abortion
Um…practically nobody? Why in the world would you opt for the trouble of freezing an embryo rather than just conceiving again later, especially when it meant you’d have to go through a surgical operation rather than the relative convenience of a medical abortion? Unless you wanted backup in case of future age-related low fertility, in which case procuring the embryo would be deliberate, not an abortion substitute.
I have two autistic sons, whom I love dearly. One is “recovering”, the other relatively “profound”, i.e., he’ll be with us as long as we live.
I’ve had five children. I am 100% pro-choice, at any point in a pregnancy, for any reason. I trust women to make the right decision for them. All the time. Every time. If I became pregnant again, I’d terminate, without any qualms. I have very high risk pregnancies (life-threatening high risk) and my current family is more important than any “potential” addition. I trust myself to make this decision. No one else, not even my feminist spouse.
Well, we do have something sorta kinda like this in the present: snowflake babies. It’s the creation of embryos and freezing and then thawing and implanting, it just happens that the implanting occurs with a new person.
It seems if you follow right-wing ideology on this to it’s logical conclusion, then creating a new embryo (via sex), is not only selfish, but is a basically tantamount to murder by willful indifference because you’re not saving the snowflake embryos that otherwise might be destroyed.
Calling every pro-lifer who impregnates naturally instead of saving a snowflake baby a murder, while rhetorically fun, might not make much headway in converting people to our cause.
It’s all about the multitasking . . .Oh, and here’s the link, if people are unfamiliar with snowflake babies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_children
Ian-
That makes sense as far as explaining why we don’t view abortion as robbing a person of “the rest of their life” any more than we think of not conceiving in that way. I think most people categorize early-stage fetuses as being potential people more like embryos and sperm and the children I might someday have than like babies.
But it doesn’t do much to defend the argument that abortion is somehow kind to the children who would be born, and to the rest of us, because those kids are likely to become “unhappy adults.” I think any argument that makes abortion into a metaphor for pre-emptive mercy-killing is just bad news for a lot of reasons. I mean, these fetuses could end up being desperately unhappy people who harm themselves and others, or they could not. But doesn’t arguing for reproductive rights entail not opening either door?
It seems if you follow right-wing ideology on this to it’s logical conclusion, then creating a new embryo (via sex), is not only selfish, but is a basically tantamount to murder by willful indifference because you’re not saving the snowflake embryos that otherwise might be destroyed.
True, but this simply demonstrates the fact that not even the most embryo-rhapsodic lifer really believes that a multi-celled organism is the equivalent of a baby. Regarded realistically, the majority of these fertilized eggs are on death row — as the least-healthy products of IVF, these leftovers (somewhere between 100,000 and 400,000 of them) are destined to remain a frozen daiquiri until their expiration date results in their disposal. Very, very few of them have been “adopted” — fewer still became viable fetuses. It would appear that even those who swear that embryos are the equivalent of children are not willing to act like it.
since someone mentioned the artificial-uterus scenario… bitingbeaver once wrote about something like that, and said she was not into the idea because it would remove that one last reminder to men that women’s bodies are not “meant” to be men’s playgrounds-in-perpetuity. as in, now we can formula-feed (or at one point people hired wet-nurses) because it’s so much more convenient for women’s breasts to keep their pre-baby sexiness, we can c-section so that vaginas stay tight and whatever, etc etc. i’d never thought about it that way and it’s a really interesting perspective, though i’m still not convinced.
so i know this is really drift-y, but i’d be interested to hear responses to that. personally i’d still be interested in technology that could prevent patriarchy from imprisoning me via my own body.
because it would remove that one last reminder to men that women’s bodies are not “meant� to be men’s playgrounds-in-perpetuity. as in, now we can formula-feed (or at one point people hired wet-nurses) because it’s so much more convenient for women’s breasts to keep their pre-baby sexiness, we can c-section so that vaginas stay tight and whatever, etc etc. i’d never thought about it that way and it’s a really interesting perspective, though i’m still not convinced.
so i know this is really drift-y, but i’d be interested to hear responses to that.
It’s barely worth responding to anyone who thinks having her body made into a factory farm is better than having it used as a playground.
If I’m not willing to have my body used as a “playground” by an adult — which I’m not — why the fuck does BitingBeaver think I’d want to have it used as a playground by a pre-verbal child? The indignity is far greater and the physical discomfort is too.
Now, anyone who enjoys the physical process of pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding or derives other benefits from it is of course welcome to keep on doing it, just like I keep on having heterosexual sex, because I like it. But the idea that pregnancy is harder on men than on women, such that men would benefit more from its removal from human reproduction, is batshit nuts.
personally i’d still be interested in technology that could prevent patriarchy from imprisoning me via my own body.
Likewise. As long as pregnancy plus surgery/vaginal birth is the only way for me to make a baby, I’m not doing it. I probably wouldn’t do it if there were uterine replicators, either, but it would become a real option to consider, whereas it isn’t, now.
[…] March 13th, 2007 Amanda has a thought provoking piece up at Pandagon: So while agreeing about the usefulness of the trust rhetoric, let me go a step further and say that it’s sad that it’s even necessary to use language like that. Freedom is not contigent on universal good use of it, or it’s not really freedom. The most popular example of this principle is with freedom of speech. If people were to have their right to free speech pulled because they said repugnant things—think the KKK on some hate march—then we don’t have free speech. Same with reproductive rights. You don’t really have your rights if they can be snatched because other people dislike your reasons. […]
Roula, I see bitingbeaver’s point there but I think my decision not to procreate was cemented when I saw how fish reproduce on a science program one time. The female deposits some eggs and then a male comes along and fertilizes them. The surviving zygotes go on to swim to their destinies. It’s brilliant! Female mammals, particularly we big-headed humans got a shitty deal with our reproduction by having to sustain our progeny in our bodies for an incredibly long time and then expel them in the most painful manner. To paraphrase Gloria Steinem: If men got pregnant, the development of extra-uteral gestation would be a sacrament.
sophonisba, I believe you and I are kindred spirits.
An excellent post. The part on freedom really got me thinking. Is there ever a line that merits limitation of freedom? Can we be said to truly have freedom if it only extends to a certain cut off point?
Dead on with the rhetorical risk of the trust approach. There is no almost about it, it does open us up to attack via a “worst possible case” example.
Even if they do take this tact, the anti-choicers would be making a particularly clumsy strawman argument, but it is an effective one. It resonates for the same reason the torture argument does. We don’t easily identify with the suspected terrorist being tortured, but we can immediately feel the fear of a ticking time bomb.
Avoiding it be returning to the central question of freedom is the best bet, but this can also be a retort. After all, if one person is caught driving drunk, should we all lose our licenses?
PS.
I think we are all looking forward to that “very special anti-choice “24″”.
[…] Amanda has a thought provoking piece up at Pandagon: So while agreeing about the usefulness of the trust rhetoric, let me go a step further and say that it’s sad that it’s even necessary to use language like that. Freedom is not contigent on universal good use of it, or it’s not really freedom. The most popular example of this principle is with freedom of speech. If people were to have their right to free speech pulled because they said repugnant things—think the KKK on some hate march—then we don’t have free speech. Same with reproductive rights. You don’t really have your rights if they can be snatched because other people dislike your reasons. […]
i agree with both of you on those points. i do strongly sympathise with bitingbeaver’s sub-thesis, which is that it seems pretty pathological how badly men seem to want to control reproduction at their convenience (even literally — the way that OBs do their deliveries is a good example, making women lie on the table in a counter-intuitive position so that the dr can sit on a stool, adding drugs to the iv that speed up or slow down contractions in order to make the timing easier on the dr, etc).
but on the whole, rather than insist that reproduction is-and-always-should-be essentially female/mine, i’d kind of rather go ahead and separate reproduction from my body, then just let them have control over that in a format that is not going to shackle me.
heh, even though at the same time i doubt it would distract the patriarchy for long, to be honest.
There is some research being done into artificial wombs. It was in Discover or Popular Science magazine a couple of years ago, I think. There are a lot of problems getting it to work completely as it is an incredibly complicated process.
Aha! Here’s the article. Or one article on it, at least.
Hm. Wonder if we had a handy-dandy medical operation where you could have your embryo/fetus scooped out of you and popped into the freezer until “later�, at which point you would have it popped back into you again (thawed out of course) and continue the process–how many people would go for that rather than abortion.
I suspect that the nutters would still be opposed to it, despite the fact that it would be virtually certain to reduce abortions to some extent. The reason for their opposition would be, of course, the fact that this would reinforce the uterus as a woman’s bodily property as opposed to, you know, a vessel that exists for, and is owned by, a fetus. Nothing says “my house” quite as explicitly as the ability to kick unwanted entities out the door and then decide when and if you’ll let them back in.
I object to women being called “selfish” for aborting a fetus with Down’s. Even with all the support in the world, raising a disabled child is a very difficult task, and I can’t blame anyone for feeling they wouldn’t be able to do it. Besides, don’t forget that all people with Down’s are different: Some will be able to lead an independant life, others won’t. I think it’s all very easy to pass judgement when you’re not in that particular situation. (Even though I don’t plan on having a child ever, not even through an artificial uterus).
Oh, and I fully agree with Sophonisba and dmg, BTW. I can’t understand how some people have to see the female body as EITHER a man’s plaything OR a baby factory. I’m sorry, but my body is there for my own sustenance and enjoyment. Period. And I do think it’s utterly stupid to assume that using formula instead of breastfeeding and trying to minimize pregnancy’s “side effects” is for the benefit of men only. Is it supposed to be enjoyable for all mothers? I have quite a number of friends who would call rubbish on that…
Felagund asked:
In the choice model–the pregnant woman “gets to draw the line.”
Look, she’s the one who is pregnant. No one else can substitute in that role. She’s the one taking the risks and paying the price. She is also the one who enables a fetus to become a human being if that is the choice she makes. I see no problem whatsoever, in any scenario, in simply letting her make the call. At any rate–no problem that would be solved better by some other concept of who decides and how, and of course any other approach overrides her basic human right to bodily autonomy.
Woman’s decision again. Here’s a thing about being pro-choice–it works both ways. If a woman has in fact been effectively free to choose–if abortion were affordably available, with no artificial barriers set up, and with as much privacy as she chose, in the early weeks and months, then a late-term problem will come up after she has made a firm and ever-solidifying committment to have this baby. Tragically, a major reason for actual late-term abortions in real life is that unexpected medical problems come up, generally the kind that (back in the 70s, when I was being raised, anyway) even the Catholic Church would not argue against abortion in–technically, the Catholic doctrine is that in a trade-off of mother versus fetus, mother’s interest wins, perhaps because a born person has obligations as well as rights. In real life, even though we have far from perfect access to early-term abortion and therefore more women are ambiguous about their choice late into pregnancy, the vast majority of women who “choose” a late-term abortion do so with a bio-medical gun held to their heads, and regret losing a child they had invested in, physically and spiritually.
So if in fact a woman carrying a healthy fetus in a non-problematic pregnancy made a late-term decision that the father of the child should not be a father, I would presume that she has a very good reason indeed, to override her own committment to that pregnancy. Perhaps she has learned that the man is really awful and will attempt to seize the baby at some point, and judges that the potential child’s life prospects are therefore poor.
But if we have a society in which her parenting rights, as the biological mother (that is, the woman who took a big risk and paid a big price to bring another human being in the world and therefore should be presumptively respected) are paramount, or at least take priority, and one which protects children from parental abuse, and is in general a good society for people to actually live in, I doubt very much that many women would make this rhetorical choice of yours, philosophizer. They’d just have the baby and keep it and not let Mr Wrong anywhere near it.
In any case, you are doing exactly what Amanda has already pointed out anti-abortionist rhetoriticians do, imagining some hyperbolic hyptothetical situation and then substituting it by sleight-of-hand for the normal case. Even as a test case–better for a woman to have this “arbitrary” power to decide whether or not to continue developing a fetus, than for some third party to come in and dictate that she be used against her will.
But in real life, I do indeed trust that women won’t kid around with a late pregnancy–they know by then, after several months of increasing inconvenience and risk, if they somehow didn’t before, what is at stake, and are in fact the experts in the case.
Jack Bauer would just kill the Abortoterrorists, probably by biting their necks or something. Problem solved…
I bet he’d do this one without killing anyone. But he would need to apply some of the ol’ extra special persuasion techniques to some balky legislators. And afterwards he can mock them a la George W - “Please don’t hurt me.”
bitingbeaver once wrote about something like that, and said she was not into the idea because it would remove that one last reminder to men that women’s bodies are not “meant� to be men’s playgrounds-in-perpetuity.
If she did, she really underestimated the way anti-choice men envy women’s ability to give birth and would do whatever they could to take that power away from the people they consider inferior to it.
Amanda,
I really find it hard to imagine that men in general, in any era of history, really want the power of reproduction, at least not at the sort of personal bodily cost women have to pay. Perhaps some idly wish they could just wave a wand or something and have obedient minions pop painlessly into existence and give them loyal service forever. People idly wish for ponies too.
OTOH–getting control of the babies women painfully pop out–yep, I think that’s a deep motive. Not an eternal or logically necessary one to be sure, but a motive as ancient and deep as the foundations of dominator society. That’s basically what dominator society is all about. It does give men that magic wand–sort of, because people always resist every form of oppression somehow.
And of course the oppression is not just in appropriating the babies at the moment of birth–it is also (maybe mainly, comparing timespans, though the intensity of pregnancy tips the balance that way) drafting the women to take care of the kids and the patriarchs too that makes it all win, no lose, to the thoughtless patriarch.
But part of the “magic” is instilling these notions in the next generation of men. That part doesn’t always work, either, at least not without side effects.
I just can’t imagine that we just naturally and directly suffer from envy at not “getting” to go through pregnancy though. Maybe I’m just kidding myself? But I just can’t turn up that impulse or any deep sense of loss due to being denied it. I have sometimes been mopy about not having “my own” kids (not since coming to Pandagon and reflecting more deeply on what pregnancy means to women) but I always assumed someone else–some woman–would be the one who would gladly, nay, joyfully, pop it out for me.
As for uterine replicator gadget thingies–I never, in all my years as an SF geek, have fantasied over how cool it would be to just have my own baby cooked up for me without the help of some woman or other to be the mommie.
With childrearing, in theory, comes great power and rewards–colonizing the future, sharing the wonder of some kid growing up, all that good stuff. I really like kids. But the work involved! The sheer anxiety of offering up a hostage to fortune! Jeez, all my friggin’ pets have died on me–I never dreamed of gambling some poor kid’s life on my slapdash nurturing. Nope, patriarchy is about drafting the women to do the hard stuff so men–or more properly speaking, the self-perpetuating patriachal meme/social system–can harvest them.
I know it seems hard to believe, but think about the underlying meaning of how the patriarchy seems geared around using social custom to deny that women are the ones that make babies.
In fact, the entire debate about when “life” begins can actually be rephrased more usefully as, “Who makes it a baby? A man when he comes or a woman when she gives birth?” Anti-choicers are desperate to quash the more reality-centered understanding that people come out of women’s bodies and have the law define personhood as something that exists contigent on a man’s, um, exertions.
You wouldn’t think that men suffer envy over pregnancy itself, but weirdly enough, a lot of men tend to suffer empathetic pregnancies—and research shows the more sexist a man, the more likely he is to gain weight and “suffer” pregnancy while his wife is pregnant. So that you don’t have a great envy over pregnancy probably goes back to the fact that you don’t think women are inferior or a mysterious Other. But men who do Other women suffer pretty greatly from what they see as women’s unfair abilities to have babies.
As for uterine replicator gadget thingies–I never, in all my years as an SF geek, have fantasied over how cool it would be to just have my own baby cooked up for me without the help of some woman or other to be the mommie.
Well, aren’t such situations usually in more of a kibbutz-style context, such as the early years of colonizing another world? So “my own baby” is not necessarily part of the equation. Though it’s certainly is part of the anti-choice equation, where there’s that notion of ownership and control that you delineate. It’s not uterus envy, it’s uterus resentment. (Personally, I think I’d just as soon share children, without necessarily having “my own.” So I wouldn’t adamantly oppose a communal artificial womb on my space station.
)
In any case, you are doing exactly what Amanda has already pointed out anti-abortionist rhetoriticians do, imagining some hyperbolic hyptothetical situation and then substituting it by sleight-of-hand for the normal case.
Yup. That’s why we must be so cautious of the “In this case, abortion is definitely wrong” arguments. Because we aren’t actually otherwise on the verge of pro-choice0-based “Nazi” eugenics holding sway, unless we continue to allow the insurance companies to gain more and more sway. But that’s not really maximizing individual freedom, either, and needs to be fought regardless of prenatal testing.
mark foxwell-
the Catholic doctrine is that in a trade-off of mother versus fetus, mother’s interest wins,
sadly though, the catholic church also has a really fucked up tendency to glorify women who die from pregnancies they choose not to abort. in fact, didn’t they beatify one such woman recently? or was she actually full-blown canonized?
also the recent insanity in nicaragua over that 10 year old who was raped and half the country tried to get involved in preventing her abortion, leading to the church’s pressing for a law that would remove the “to save the life of the mother” exception — and it passed, with the help of once-lefty daniel ortega — really seriously damaged my remaining scraps of trust that the church ever acts in good faith toward women.
I feel compelled to clarify for Mark Foxwell, who seemed to think I was arguing against choice for women in the uterine replicator scenario, that I was asking more this:
so you store your embryo because it’s the new abortion alternative. if you later decide you don’t want it at all instead of just not wanting it now, do they let you get rid of it? I’d be wary of people ending up using it just to reinforce TEH BAYBEEEEEEZ.
Re. Catholic doctrine, I distinctly remember my grandmother telling stories of a Catholic hospital where the prospective father was asked to choose whether he wanted to save his wife or his baby… It could be anecdotal, but all the years I spent in a Catholic school didn’t convince me they had women’s best interests at heart (even though mothers were highly regarded compared to childless heathens like me).
I think we can all support a woman’s right to choose.
For instance, if a woman finds through genetic testing that her child may be homosexual or “bi” in orientation, she should be able to abort the fetus rather than subject such a person to a lifetime of ostracism.
If a woman finds that he child is of mixed race, from an encounter with a particularly exotic during a one-night stand, she should be able to abort the fetus! No sense cluttering up her life with a child that may cause her difficulties with a future spouse whose parents may take a dim view of such a step-child.
If a women finds that her child will have brown rather than the preferable bluse eyes, it is certainly acceptable to abort the child. Likewise if she prefers to have a boy and a girl, and finds that the second child is “wrongly gendered”.
If a woman finds that her child is genetically determined to be of small stature or athletically disinclined, it should be permissable for her to abort said fetus and aim for a child that is more competitive and physically equipped to participate in athletic events (possibly a career).
It should not matter if the fetus is rather late in the developmental process before its genetic code can be correctly evaluated, even late-term abortions should be allowed if the woman deems it necessary to fulfill her own perception of acceptability. Who else should have a right to question her about her choices? Certainly not a spouse, the fetus’ male sperm donor, or even a doctor who will not be responsible for raising the child once born!
Imagine a mother being stuck with a child that is an “uglyBetty”? Or one prone to alcohol or drug abuse? Or one who is cursed with an “A” cup? Only a woman can make such life-changing decisions!Would a woman really want to subject her male child to a life of ridicule if he was destined to grow up and have an undersized penis that might limit his ability to select a suitable spouse or would be subject to teasing from his male peers? Why not avoid such obstacles by engaging in selective abortion to ensure the future success of the child?
Same, same for a child growing with an IQ that is sub-115. A woman should protect herself and the future of her child using approved medical intervention!
The world would be so much better if we did more research on genetic mapping and permitted women to make these important and necessary decisions! We know we can trust their judgement. Anyone who disagrees with this is probably stuck in some kind of religious time-warp that believes such non-living tissue is actually “life”! A woman can make decisions about life and knows what is best. She should not have to answer to some evangelical right-wing nut who wants to make moral judgements based upon some myths about creation or ethics!
/sarcasm
The Womb
If I had one I would demand that I be in charge of it.
Period.
tehehehe: The funny thing is that there’s a rather simple and effective solution to that.
It’s called “Mind your own business.”
That’s amazing, isn’t it? So simple. So effective. So easy. Stop worrying about other women’s wombs, and you’ll never have to worry about whether a woman is being oh-so-very selfish by *gasp* making choices about her body and what happens to it!
See, it’s not really anybody else’s business why a woman is getting an abortion, but her own.
You know what else?
There are plenty of women that I wouldn’t trust to know the Right Thing if it walked up and bit them in the ass. It doesn’t matter, though, how poor I think a woman’s judgement is, because it’s her body, not mine.
I suppose I’m pretty far to one end of the spectrum on the abortion issue, but, Christ on a cracker, how hard is it to realize that her right to control her body trumps your desire to see her punished for having sex?
Her right to control her body > Anybody else’s desire to control her body
I distinctly remember my grandmother telling stories of a Catholic hospital where the prospective father was asked to choose whether he wanted to save his wife or his baby
I remember my grandmother telling me similar stories–about my father. My mother had a rather nasty bout of preclampsia at my sister’s birth and came quite close to dying. What would have happened if my father had told them “save the baby” I don’t know, but apparently he looked at them in a daze and said “both”, the result of which was that they concluded that he was hopelessly stupid and didn’t ask him anything else. But they did save both.
Roy,
I share your support for letting a woman decide, “her body, her choice”. The only question that is unanswered at this point is whether there is any limit whatsoever to such choices? Are such choices appropriate?
I can support a person’s right to make a choice just like i can support a person’s right to free speech. That does not mean I have to agree with the choice made, nor the speech uttered. I also have a right to express my complete and total disgust for a woman that “selects”, through abortion, based upon the physical attributes of the fetus.
Society has a right as well as a responsibility to express support for or condemnation of the behaviors of others in that society. We can say “that’s a bad choice” when someone abuses alchohol, but still permit them to purchase the item. Same for cigarettes. Same for fancy wedding dresses that cost $20,000. We can permit a person to own a handgun or to hunt deer with a rifle, but still criticize their decision to engage in such behavior.
Likewise for abortion. I would not advocate or support ending a woman’s right to abortion. However, I do reserve the right to question or even criticize a woman for making such a choice, particularly if it is based upon some reason that I, as a free-speaking individual, deem to be frivolous or inappropriate.
That is where the “progressive” support for “a woman’s right to choose” goes awry and loses the support of many Americans. They say “any reason is a good reason” as this article so clearly says. I say “bunk”. There are reasons women make such choices that are simply wrong or unethical. They can still do it, but they can and should be criticized by the public at large (society).
What do you see wrong with this premise? Do you think it is wrong to criticize if someone makes a personal choice that you believe to be totally stupid? If I voice support of George Bush, would you refrain from criticism because “its my mind, and I can make my own decision”? How is this any different?
Are you willing to go out, as the author clearly does, and say, “Oh yeah. Having an abortion of you brown-eyed child is a perfectly responsible decision.” Or would you say, “I’m sorry. That is pretty weak!” Or do you simply stay silent and thereby establish a societal norm that it is perfectly fine to use abortion to select for eye-color?
If you are willing to stay silent (do you stay silent on the Iraq War?) or if you would support a woman that uses abortion to select for eye-color, then I not only consider you to lack good moral courage, but I think you are contributing to the deterioration of society as a whole. We have limits on lots of things in a society. That is what “culture” is. It establishes behavioral norms, and an individual in a society conforms to norms, or can face criticism. This is normal. To refrain from criticism or support for cultural norms is by definition destroying a culture. Our culture. American culture. The same is true in other cultures (African, Middle East, Asian, etc.). That is what is meant by “diversity” and why we “celebrate” it.
You need some good grounding in sociology if you cannot follow the argument above. You don’t have to agree with it, but you should know it is true.
That’s why we must be so cautious of the “In this case, abortion is definitely wrong� arguments.
In general, I think that you’re right, but there is one situation I can think of where abortion would definitely be wrong: A healthy woman bearing a healthy fetus who does not want an abortion. Forcing or coercing her to have an abortion would be definitely, without question, wrong. And that’s why I don’t buy the “reproductive choice leads to eugenics” argument: because, while any given woman might decide that, say, having a baby with blue eyes or male genetalia or any given genetic disorder from Tay-Sachs to a mildly increased risk of depression is something she doesn’t want, other women will decide that having such a child is just what she does want and it’ll all balance out in the end. Unless there is some social pressure that makes most women want one particular outcome (as in gender selection in China and India) or the state, church, or other authority intervenes and demands that every woman must have or not have an abortion for any particular trait. That indeed could lead to eugenics and a true weakening of the species (through loss of genetic variability), but individual choice is very unlikely to.
I also have a right to express my complete and total disgust for a woman that “selects�, through abortion, based upon the physical attributes of the fetus.
Indeed. And Roy–and I–have the right to say that we think that you’re misguided in your belief or presentation if we so believe as well, so we’re all even.
Incidently, I would think that any woman who aborted on the basis of having a brown eyed fetus would be a pretty strange and probably racist person, but I wouldn’t want her raising a brown eyed child so I’d be quite happy that she got the abortion before she had a person with a brain, consciousness, and feelings and started hurting that person.
In general, I think that you’re right, but there is one situation I can think of where abortion would definitely be wrong: A healthy woman bearing a healthy fetus who does not want an abortion. Forcing or coercing her to have an abortion would be definitely, without question, wrong.
Oh, whoops, of course. I didn’t mean to imply that force is acceptable. Perhaps a slightly better formulation of the thinking to be wary of would be, “In this case, a woman is wrong to choose an abortion.”
Tehehe: I share your support for letting a woman decide, “her body, her choice�. The only question that is unanswered at this point is whether there is any limit whatsoever to such choices? Are such choices appropriate?
I refer you to my earlier comment about said wome being assholes, but having teh right to be assholes. I also point out that you are being disingeneous:
Likewise for abortion. I would not advocate or support ending a woman’s right to abortion. However, I do reserve the right to question or even criticize a woman for making such a choice, particularly if it is based upon some reason that I, as a free-speaking individual, deem to be frivolous or inappropriate. […] We have limits on lots of things in a society. That is what “cultureâ€? is.
Yeah, right. You “support” the right to make bad choices, but you think society should put limits on them.
Tehehehe:
I figured out why your last tag is visible.
The proper closing tag would be “/strawman”. HTH;HAD[1].
[1] HTH, HAND is a typical signoff for such corrections, for “hope this helps, have a nice day”[2].
[2] No, I did not accidentally omit any letters.
If you are willing to stay silent (do you stay silent on the Iraq War?) or if you would support a woman that uses abortion to select for eye-color, then I not only consider you to lack good moral courage, but I think you are contributing to the deterioration of society as a whole.
Well, I guess you can go ahead and let me know how much moral courage I lack or how much I’m contributing to the “deterioration of society as a whole,” because I support a woman’s right to get an abortion for any reason. I suspect we have a pretty serious disagreement about what, exactly, deteriorates society, but, there you go. My stance is that I support a woman’s choice to get an abortion, no matter what her reasons are.
We have limits on lots of things in a society. That is what “culture� is. It establishes behavioral norms, and an individual in a society conforms to norms, or can face criticism. This is normal. To refrain from criticism or support for cultural norms is by definition destroying a culture. Our culture. American culture. The same is true in other cultures (African, Middle East, Asian, etc.). That is what is meant by “diversity� and why we “celebrate� it.
That’s the most fucked up description of “culture” I’ve ever read. Further, you’re treating “Culture” like some kind of monolithic thing that we should revere and respect, as though it’s set in stone. It’s not. I’d love to see a description of “American Culture” and how my support for a woman’s right to choose, no matter her reasons, is somehow destroying American culture.
Regardless, I fail to see what your weird definition of cultural diversity has to do with anything.
Besides, as Diane points out, your mad scientist eugenics scenarios are outlandish and ridiculously unlikely. In the event that they did become likely, it’s not abortion that is the problem, it’s whatever fucked up social structures and conditioning are encouraging or forcing women to take those steps. One woman who decides she can’t deal with the thought of having a male child isn’t a problem, and I don’t really give a rat’s ass why she got her abortion. If you’ve got hundreds of thousands of women aborting because they can’t stand the idea of having a boy, then you’re looking at a social problem. At which point, abortion is really the least of your worries- you should really be wondering “What the hell is going on that all these women are aborting male fetuses? What social pressures are at work, and how can we fix this?” I promise you, condemning abortion isn’t going to fix a problem like that. Sort of how blaming women for getting raped never stopped a rapist, but addressing rape culture and working towards changing the way we look at rape has helped reduce rape rates.
Ker-azy how that works.
Likewise for abortion. I would not advocate or support ending a woman’s right to abortion. However, I do reserve the right to question or even criticize a woman for making such a choice, particularly if it is based upon some reason that I, as a free-speaking individual, deem to be frivolous or inappropriate.
Well, society is already very critical of women who abort anyway, so what do you want? More public shaming? Do you think you can shame women into keeping children they don’t want?
Comparing criticism of the war in Iraq with criticism of someone’s personal choice is irrelevant. Criticizing a policy that has disastrous results on both a national and an international level is completely different from judging a woman’s personal decision which will have no bearing whatsoever on your life, but will mean everything to her.
In reference to another of your analogies, I might think it’s stupid of my friend to buy a 20,000$ wedding gown, but if I tell her about it, she’ll be well within her right to tell me to shut the fuck up because that’s exactly what I’d deserve for being a judgemental asshole.
Roy, I think you’re just spot on…
Tehehehe -
Criticize all you like. It’s not like we care what you think.
What we care about is stopping the practice of giving up rhetorical ground to people who want to - and do - turn their “criticisms” into laws for fear of losing “the support of many Americans”.
For one thing, anti-choicers are not interested in moderation or compromise. They want domination. If you try to meet them in the middle, they’re glad to…and then they keep pushing so “the middle” gets moved back.
For another, you don’t gain anyone’s support by acting like there’s something to be ashamed of in your position. You shout. You get the word out. You say: “This is what I believe, and this is why it is *right* and *true*.”
There are a lot of things that we take for granted today that didn’t have the support of many Americans once upon a time. I assure you, that’s how they changed - it’s the only way they can.
“let’s face it, someone who is wealthy and aborting a pregnancy because of Down’s and is worried about what the neighbors will think is being an asshole”
Even here, I think it’s better not to judge. Just because someone has the money to support a child with a disability financially doesn’t mean that person has the emotional or psychological wherewithal (and someone who is concerned about their ability to handle a particular kind of social stigma is, at the heart of it, expressing doubt about their own emotional/psychological capability to deal), and suggesting that a rich woman’s reasons aren’t as good as a poor woman’s reasons seems to me to be the kind of hairsplitting we should be trying to avoid.
Pre-viability, a woman doesn’t need to “justify” having an abortion. Period.
On whether or not men have womb envy, I don’t know about the grown ones, but I can assure you that boys of very different ages can definitely experience it. When I was pregnant with #2, #1 (who was then about 3) was very upset to learn that he would never be pregnant like mommy. Now, much later and pregnant with #3, #2 (who’s 10) is quite articulate about wishing that he could be pregnant someday and hoping that science will develop, by the time he’s grown up, to the point where he could be. [Mind you, #1 has now reached a stage of saying he’s grateful he’ll never have to go through it.]
let’s face it, someone who is wealthy and aborting a pregnancy because of Down’s and is worried about what the neighbors will think is being an asshole
But I thought abortion was supposed to be a moral good?
But I thought abortion was supposed to be a moral good?
Then you are an idiot.
The right to choose is a moral good. For pro-choicers, abortion itself is no more a moral or immoral good in itself than, say dental surgery.
Teeheeheehaw, if I need a kidney soon in order to prolong my life, I’ll track you down and force you to give me one.
No?
Well then, why are you demanding that women be forced to use their entire bodies to sustain another entity that would otherwise be unviable? How is that different? An embryonic or fetal human is always demanding another person’s organs be used for its survival.
Oh, Chico. To be a stupid fuck must be so hard. That abortion is a moral good doesn’t mean that childbirth couldn’t also be one. How sad for you to think that one thing being good doesn’t mean other things can’t be. How sad not to be able to eat the fries because you think it’s somehow inconsistent with your enjoyment of the hamburger.
Pre-viability, a woman doesn’t need to “justify� having an abortion. Period.
Exactly!
Eleven words to say what it took me over three-hundred-fifty to say.
I am shocked by the potty mouthed insults of Ms. Marcotte. Grow up. Calling someone a “stupid f*ck” minimizes the effect of your otherwise valid points on this thread.
MAJeff: Yes, I know abstinence is 100% effective. It is also totally and completely unrealistic.
Being gay works pretty well too.
So lesbians are immune to rape?
Over at the LBO-Talk mailing list they were discussing this same issue, and countering the position that the woman has one hundred percent right to abort the fetus she is carrying, one of the posters asked:
What about a woman who is eight months pregnant and she starts hearing voices, perhaps God’s, telling her to have an abortion?
To which I replied, that’s what the Baker Act is for. You also have the right to walk down the street, to handle razor-sharp knives, etc. Unlike a woman’s right to abortion, these rights are rarely disputed by anyone. Yet you go and start telling the local psychiatric authorities that you are being compelled to do bizarre stuff because you Hear Voices, they’ll invoke the Baker Act against you and you’ll find that those common, unargued rights, too, can be revoked.
All this invention of outre hypothetical limit-cases is dubious, because a.) we’re talking about erecting preventive laws against an offense which actually never occurs in real-life, a total waste of legislators’s valuable time, and b.) you don’t ever see any anti-abortion legislation worded like “third-trimester abortions shall be prohibited, provided that the mother is insane.” The fact is that what few third-trimester abortions do take place are invariably forced by necessity; either the fetus will be born dead or dying, or the attempt to give birth will kill the mother. So in order to prohibit hypothetical evil or mad women from doing things no one does anyway, we are supposed to issue a blanket legal prohibition against a valid medical procedure that’s necessary to save women’s lives.
Anyway the usual reason these highly hypothetical discussions take place at all is only as a wedge to legitimize legislative campaigning against, not only all abortions, but also all effective birth control as well.
Chico:
Yes, Abortion is a moral good in that context: a woman who is not equipped in some way to care for such a child does not have to do so, and a particularly vulnerable child is spared an existence with the additional handicaps of being an unwanted child and having a (presumably) unfit mother.
Then again, most mothers find themselves more capable of doing the job than they thought themselves at first; unbiased counseling might be a suggestion, similar to how the dying and severely wounded are counseled before being allowed to choose to die. It shouldn’t, I think, be required in either case: you should get your choice whether or not other people think it’s a good one.
Tehehehe:
Actually, since you’re obviously too dull-witted to figure this out, if someone claims to want an abortion to prevent the birth of a brown-eyed child - not *any* child, but specifically, a brown-eyed one, then
1) that’s not the whole story, or
2) they are lying to you
Before you can claim otherwise, you must first produce a being you are implicitly claiming exists: a woman who would use an abortion to select for eye color.
Since we have no reason to suspect one exists outside of your pretty sick imagination, there’s no reason to debate the point.
(Oh, for those who don’t get it: I’m not really suggesting that tehehe is too stupid to figure this out. Really, I think tehehe is dishonest and arguing in bad faith. Nevertheless, such people tend to be more willing to admit that they are evil than to confess to stupidity.)
If you really want to discuss the issue, come up with something *real*, not a distraction.
If you just want to spread lies and hatred, well, you *are* doing a fine job of it, but you should find a forum with people who are more gullible.
(You know what “gullible” means, don’t you? Because it’s not in the dictionary.)
I am shocked by the potty mouthed insults of Ms. Marcotte. Grow up.
I’m shocked that an adult would use the term “potty-mouthed”, you stupid fuck. Grow up or troll elsewhere,
I think that the concept of “trust” should be applied to the viagra debate.
Do we TRUST men to use viagra responsibly????
(((looking left, then right)))
MY BAD-There is no debate about viagra.
Wherever you might come out on this debate, please don’t talk about how undesirable it would be to have a child with a disabilty unless you have actually had one.
It is really insulting and condescending to those of us in that position. Make your own decisions for your own reasons, but don’t dare presume to know what it is like unless you have done it. (If nothing else, you learn in a hurry that you aren’t the most important person in your world.)
Calling someone a “stupid f*ck� minimizes the effect of your otherwise valid points on this thread.
When you grow up, shit-for-brains, you’ll learn to evaluate ideas by their merits, not by the people presenting them.
Watergate: If a person does not desire to have a child with a certain condition, then having it is undesirable to them. It’s their choice, just as (hopefully) you had the choice of your own. If you don’t want to hear about reasons for which people abort, a post about reproductive rights is not the best place for you.
good damn point, Uhura.
When my mother was younger, she was extremely anti-abortion (she still is, but over time she’s become personally anti-abortion while politically pro-choice. She used to favour making it illegal). However, when she and my dad were contemplating starting a family, she decided that under certain circumstances she would abort, regardless of her personal feelings.
My uncle has haemophilia, which is passed through the maternal line. Genetic testing was pretty primitive circa 1975, and the doctors said there was a very high chance she was a carrier, but they didn’t know for sure. They couldn’t establish definitively if she was a carrier or not, amnio would tell the fetus’s sex but not whether it was haemophiliac, amnio was rather riskier then than it is now, AND even carriers have an approximately 50% chance of having a non-haemophiliac male baby, so there are no guarantees either way.
My mom decided that for her first pregnancy, she would not have amnio done. If her first child was a haemophiliac boy, she would live with it. However, when trying to enlarge her family, she would abort any pregnancy where amnio revealed the fetus to be male (despite the fact that she might well be aborting a healthy fetus). And this was back when she was personally and politically opposed to abortion.
Why?
a) Having grown up with a haemophiliac brother, she didn’t see how she could possibly cope as the mother of TWO haemophiliacs, without shortchanging both of them.
b) She felt it would be morally wrong to condemn a child to a lifetime of suffering when she had the means to prevent it. Gambling that a male fetus MIGHT be alright when she already had a son with haemophilia struck her as irresponsible.
Now, my mom loves my uncle. He’s dying of Hepatitis C (contracted from the blood supply) and when my mom found out she wasn’t a match, she was devastated. She would have happily given up a chunk of her liver in order to give her brother a few extra years, in spite of the fact that she’s 61 herself, it takes months for the donor to recover, there is a risk of death or permanently-compromised health, and my uncle wasn’t sure he wanted to put a loved one through that even if they were a match.
She also has another brother, whom she also loves, who was born several years later (my grandparents’ first male child was the haemophiliac). Amnio wasn’t available in the 1940’s, so my grandparents had to cross their fingers and pray either for a girl, or for a boy who was lucky enough to win the genetic lottery. If her parents had followed the course she planned, that brother would have been aborted, and she knew it.
But she had to watch my older uncle suffer agonising physical pain throughout his entire childhood and adult life, and to know that his life could be cut short very suddenly. And she could handle the idea of leaving it up to fate with her first pregnancy, but she couldn’t deliberately subject another child to the very good chance that they would have to endure the same hell.
Nowadays, things are better. Pre-conception genetic testing is much more precise, and a woman who is a carrier can either use in vitro to ensure implanting only female embryos, or her husband’s sperm can be put in a special centrifuge that separates XX sperm from XY sperm, and be artificially inseminated only with the XX. As of about seven years ago, the only place that did it was some lab in Boston, and Canadian medicare wwas willing to pay for couples to fly to Massachusetts and have this done, because the lifelong costs to the medical system of a haemophiliac child are far greater than this treatment, which virtually guarantees a female child. I don’t want kids, but my younger sister does, and will need genetic testing beforehand. If she is a carrier, she fully intends to undergo the treatment. Now, if she subsequently finds out during a pregnancy that it didn’t work and she’s carrying a male fetus, I don’t know what she’d do (I asked her once, and she said she’d probably keep it, but she wasn’t 100% sure). But I’m pretty sure that whatever decision she made she would take it very seriously, and would be considering the welfare of the potential child as well as her own.
That whole trusting women thing works out pretty well. The ones who are thoughtful make a carefully considered decision, and as for the ones who aren’t, why on earth would we as a society want to subject a child to growing up with a mother that didn’t want it? On the other side of the family, my great-grandmother tried to get an (illegal then, and also dangerous even if you had money, because this was the pre-antibiotic era) abortion because she passionately did not want a third child, despite being married and financially secure. Her husband found out, threatened to put her in a mental home and/or take her older kids away, and she had the baby. And then she selectively abused him, and made sure he knew all his life that he was unwanted and unloved. Which he naturally interpreted as unloveable. Of her three children, he was the only one who grew up to be an alcoholic who abused his own spouse and children, and his three sons all grew up to be abusive alcoholics themselves. We’re talking multigenerational misery here. And he had all the material advantages, as well as very high intelligence.
My paternal grandfather was that child, and having known him, I can safely say that I never saw him happy. Not once. Schadenfreude yes, but never genuine happiness. Can’t say I’ve ever seen my father or his two brothers happy either. One of them has served time in prison for permanently blinding a man who subsequently committed suicide. They aren’t just unhappy, they are actively destructive, trying to make the people around them equally unhappy.
My siblings and I got lucky. My mom has a stainless-steel spine and lived in an era where she could get a divorce and support her children on her own. She worked like hell to undo as much of the damage as she could, and we all turned out okay. But she still spent 15 years with a man who abused her, and it’s left permanent emotional scars on her. If I could go back in time and ensure she didn’t marry my father, I would do it. Because okay, I wouldn’t exist, but someone I love very much would’ve had a much less painful life. And my dad, his brothers, and my grandfather would’ve all been better off if my great-grandmother had been able to obtain that illegal abortion, because they went through hell, and I wouldn’t wish that on any human being if I had the means to prevent it. My grandfather’s dead now, but that generation is all still alive, still just as horrifically unhappy, and still unable to break the cycle and quit trying to take out their misery on the people around them.
My siblings and i have virtually no relationship with our father (polite lunches on major holidays), but we still worry about him. I don’t like knowing that he’s miserable, but I know there’s nothing I can do to help him without hurting myself. But yes, I truly believe he would’ve been better off if he’d never existed. He never really had a shot, because his mother wasn’t like ours (she did try to get away once, but she had no education and no money, her husband threatened to take the kids, she had no way of pressing charges, and her own family didn’t want either the stigma of divorce or the expense of supporting her and her three small children. So she went back, and drank herself to death at 47). Forcing women to continue pregnancies they don’t want can cause horrible damage to that child, and to everybody that child comes in contact with during their life. And no, adoption was not an option for my greatgrandmother, because her husband wanted the kid.