Welp, it’s official. Today, the Supreme Court voted to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion. Trigger laws have already made abortion illegal in several states, even in the case of rape and incest. And if that weren’t bad enough, Justice Thomas wrote a concurring opinion arguing the Supreme Court “should reconsider” previous rulings on same-sex relationships, same-sex marriage, and contraception.
On balance, I favor legal abortion and have supported that for many decades in many ways. Keep that in mind and please do not falsely impute beliefs to me.
However, I try to understand the thinking on all sides. And in that context, I think that your concept that men have no standing in regard to abortion kind of begs the question. By which I mean assuming one conclusion in a contested issue, as part of the reasoning to support that same conclusion.
Suppose we assume that it has been proven or can be axiomatic that a fetus is just a bundle of cells with no human rights. From there we can reason that the only human being involved in abortion is the mother, and that only females (who might become pregnant) should have any say on whether the mother can abort that non-human bundle of cells or not; males should abstain from discussion or voting on the matter and leave it up to females.
But there are those who in good faith believe that a fetus is already a human with rights even before birth, not just a non-human bundle of cells. So they believe that abortion involves balancing the needs of two humans, not just one. So for such people, there is zero reason for males to avoid discussion or voting on abortion, because protecting the rights of an unborn human is equally the duty of both males and females. - just as both males and females should be able to vote on a bill legalizing infanticide.
So the "males should stay out of this" only makes sense if you have already decided that fetuses are just a bundle of cells. But before that, deciding whether a fetus is a human being or not would be a question in which both males and females would have standing.
Both males and females would have a vote on legalizing infanticide. The sex of the person voting or discussing it, is not relevant to deciding whether that's homicide or not. And that's how the anti-abortion folks see it.
And pro-abortion males mostly do act as if they believe they have standing, whatever they say about it being up to women. They don't in general abstain from the discussion or from voting, to turn the issue over to just women alone to decide.
What I think some pro-abortion folks really want is for pro-abortion men to vote for abortion, but anti-abortion men to abstain. But that's inverting the logic - it's the pro-abortion men whose belief system would suggest their own abstention, and the anti-abortion men whose belief system ethically requires them to participate.
How do I resolve this? I'm pro abortion AND I believe the both sexes have standing to weigh in on the question of whether fetuses are humans or not (but *IF* and after it's decided that they are not human beings, then only the individual pregnant women has a right to decide whether to terminate it - not other women nor men). So I support men and women discuss it, and support both sexes to vote, without any hypocrisy.
We are a representative democracy. I see a great sorting process ahead.
I do not want 9 unelected people deciding matters of great moment. I want them to be judges, supporting the laws of the land, not making them up.
I would contribute to a fund helping a woman who wanted an abortion to cross state lines as needed to get what she needs. I would support leaving states that don’t reflect the type of pregnancy alternatives a woman wants.
I’m not in favor of dismissing swathes of women as ‘brain-washed’ because they believe life begins at conception.
The debate on abortion was halted after 1973. Even as progressive a stalwart as Ruth Bader Ginsburg felt this was wrong. We are likely in a better position (with many more women in power positions) to have the complex debates needed to figure this out.
"Brainwashed" may sound diminishing or condescending but when it comes to religion I think the definition is soundly met. Children are raised with a terror of saying anything against matters of faith; parents take them to church at young ages and scare the shit out of them with the weird sight of those they regard as authority figures obediently standing and sitting and kneeling, all in a threatening atmosphere of intense reverence.
Everything about religion is off-limits to reflection and question, exempt from examination and logic (especially logic). Anyone not wholly on the side of Jesus is pure evil, and the indoctrination of religious "values" is for many ineradicable. NO educated person should believe in God; this is as supernatural as ghosts, witches, and magic. But even many scientists are unable to tunnel out.
My own atheism came at the age of eleven, fifteen seconds of unrestrained thought that began with wanting to go back to sleep instead of Sunday school and ending with the realization that I got nothing out of the experience because I didn't believe a word of it.
That kind of unrestrained thought is simply unavailable to most people, and not just women.
Look at the religious absurdity of "pro-life"; life begins at conception (ova and spermatozoa are dead?), a blastula is a human being (yeah, a homunculus), abortion is sin (70% of embryos fail to implant in the endometrium and die). I say and will continue to say that anyone educated and who still believes in this pretty lie is, yes, brainwashed. We have thousands of years' experience at this and a predilection that's easily manipulated
I don't seek to insult those who believe but they all know as well as I do that religion is absurd, they won't abandon it because it inspires emotions they enjoy experiencing (neurochemical explosions sort of like cocaine). Just look at that glint of freshly washed brains when they start with the thee and thou and "the Lord Jesus Christ."
Take this away and abortion ceases to be any kind of moral issue.
I am curious about what avenues you see as appropriate to discuss and debate abortion that would give it the seriousness that it deserves. Also if you don’t think it is being discussed seriously enough now which part or why? I am not asking to argue but out of curiosity. I feel like the women discussing the looming health repercussions and the unequal distribution of care are very serious, but are there aspects being missed? I also feel the discussion of states rights on abortion vs gun rights is a legitimate avenue of thought. What are you thinking?
Practical matters. Most of the justices have decades to live, their impeachment is a nonstarter, the overturning of Roe is just the beginning. We can expect a federal law defining abortion as murder where every miscarriage may mean an arrest; amniocentesis is likely to be banned since the knowledge of carrying a fetus with Down Syndrome or without a cerebrum motivates abortion. The conservatives have lost on the social wars so they are nuking the enemy capitol with the Catholics on the Supreme Court. Same sex marriage will be ended and retroactively annulled; contraception will be banned;
In the meantime, women should divorce conservative men or at least deny them sex and children; companies should relocate out of red states and leave them jobless; underground railways should be set up to fund travel and treatment for women in troglodyte red states.
But America has been heading down a very dark path for forty years and it just got a lot darker,
In order to believe what Lisa says about the motives of anti-choice people, you also have to believe that the anti-choice position is obviously false, so no one could reach out by careful objective deliberation. I am passionately pro-choice, but not because I think the anti-choice advocates are all liars and fools. There are people on both sides of this issue that think the answer is obvious, and can be found by consulting common sense and/or scientific fact. For several years, I taught a course on abortion that was designed to destroy this self-confidence, by showing how confusing this topic is when you think clearly about it. That is the strongest argument for why this is really a religious question, and why the state has no business making this decision for anyone else. My uncertainty does not weaken my commitment to the pro-choice position. On the contrary, it is because the issues can’t be easily resolved either way that having an abortion must remain a matter of personal choice: Not because the question is simple but because it is too complicated for anyone to be sure what the right answer is.
This series of linked essays is based on the texts from my abortion course, and the discussions we had in class. My goal is to enable the reader to experience first hand just how difficult these questions are. At the end of that course, most of my students concluded that they were anti-abortion and pro-choice. It is my hope that paraphrasing our class discussions will help foster a level of tolerance which is regrettably lacking in the current public debates on this topic.
Many years ago on a long drive we stopped at a small town in Oregon to go to a restaurant. It was one of those towns that probably has a single employer, where high school graduates report for work the first Monday after high school.
There was a young couple a few tables away, the wife rocking one baby and pregnant with another. Her eyes were as vacant as a Trump hotel and her rocking looked as self-aware as a flatworm.
But what was most striking was the husband, A world of despair and misery in his eyes. He was maybe 19 but knew his life was over. I didn't talk to them bit I would bet that he had gotten her pregnant and married her because to abandon her with his child would be unconscionable; and now his choices were over. He would never go further in school, never have a life with travel and opportunity. It was as depressing as anything could be.
Not getting an abortion had stopped his life in its tracks.
As a woman with a history of the right ( and no right as a teenager) to choose the massive implications of caring for and raising another human being (with no support from family or otherwise), this decision slays me to my very soul. My deepest empathy to all women, too young and not so young who will not have the right to choose their own freedoms in life and will have to suffer the consequences (as will their child) until the day they die.
I often don't argue with the position Lisa is advocating here, because we're both on the same side about the important issue, and it seems to me we should focus on fighting together against those people who want to deny women the right to choose. But just to get this out of the way: It's just not true that a preponderance of men are anti-choice. Preponderance means "more than half" and the polls show that most men are pro-choice. The reasons for that are pretty obvious, if you try looking at this from most men's point of view, especially young and unmarried men. As Dave Murray points out, If you are a man and your sexual partner gets pregnant, your life will get very seriously bent out of shape if you had no interest in raising a child with that woman at that point of your life. Yes, it will be worse for the woman. Whatever burdens are placed on the man are equally on the woman, and then compounded with all the things that happen to her body. But unless the man is a psychopath willing to skip town on the woman, the burdens placed on the man are still enough to make it very much in his interest to keep abortion safe and legal. The only people for whom that isn't true are a few impotent old Patriarchs who are in no danger of getting in this situation. Those people are powerful and dangerous, but they are definitely a minority of the male population.
This song https://youtu.be/JdmGO-GvHyo was released in 1968, five years before the Roe v. Wade ruling. If you are under fifty you have no memory of the zeitgeist when that song had meaning that you may not be able to completely grasp. If you "got a girl in trouble" the choices were, "do the right thing" and marry her, or if that was deemed to be not the right thing (it often wasn't) she went away for a while to stay with Aunt Sally where she had the child that was put up for adoption (never spoken of). I had a girlfriend who told me she would never marry a guy who knocked her up because she never wanted to hear the words during a heated argument, "I wouldn't have married you except for that little bastard." Or you could be the person in the song.
That was just the world of teen pregnancy. Adults also had/have reasons to not bring another child into the world. Listen to the song (really listen) and try to let those times sink in. How do you think that people have never known a time when safe abortion was not an option are going to deal with a return of those times? Will cities burn during another summer of peaceful protests?
I'm not part of the "it's men trying to control women's bodies" thinking crowd. There are truly people who are opposed to abortion as a matter of conscience. I'm of the "it's none of my f'ing business," or the government's way of thinking. I'll spare you the list of evil shit (yes, I'm getting worked up) that the government has been involved in pertaining to "medicine." A paragon of virtue.
I've got a friend, an evangelical (not dissing religions) who is very outspoken in his opposition to abortion. In the Navy he served on a nuclear submarine with a mission to annihilate cities with millions of people, including pregnant women, if his government commanded it. We humans are a mass of contradictions, all in good faith. But then we are also a bunch of assholes seeking to give government the power to do *to* the political opposition and then become horrified when the opposition gets that power. I'll stop my government has too much power rant before I go anarchist.
Lisa comes from a hyper-religious background so when she hears 'pro-choice' she thinks 'Christian' (not that Christians are the only religion where the conservatives think women have no right to their own bodies).
You're right, a woman can be 'pro-life', believe that abortion is murder, and not necessarily be a brainwashed little handmaid. In fact, I think mindless pro-trans women on the left like Emma Watson are every bit as brainwashed by misogynist men as Bible-thumpers (or Torah-thumpers, or Koran-thumpers, or...)
I think I could even get behind the right-to-life position in a different world, maybe a future world (I hope) where men and women are a lot more equal (and everyone else). Where I differ is to whether any baby has a 'right' to life, and in fact the reasonable question may be asked, "What sort of life will this baby have if I allow it to be born?" How about *quality* of life? Will the mother have to raise it on her own? Will she want to raise perhaps a rape baby? How much support will she have? This is where so-called 'pro-lifers' fall so far short. It's not really about babies' lives, it's about controlling women. Period. The fact that Clarence Thomas wants to go after birth control next demonstrates it's all about returning sexual decisions to men and, I don't know, reinstating those Homes for Wayward Women of yore. As long as he's going after hippie-era decisions, I await his announcement that it's time to rescind the ban on interracial marriages again, do the 'right' thing, and divorce his ofay wife ;P
(He'll have a lot of support from his white fanboys & girls on this)
I'm with Lisa on the evils of patriarchy and I agree with her that men don't contribute enough to get 50% of the decision. I say if they don't want 'their' baby aborted that they use whatever birth control is available to them (to the *man*, this is *his responsibility we're talking about) and don't whine if he doesn't and she gets pregnant and wants marriage/an abortion/18 years of child support.
In a future world where women and men really are far more equal, I'd be more inclined to give men more of the decision-making process. Right now, esp with the pushback after only roughly a century and change of women's equality, men in general aren't even close to being ready for that, and won't be for several generations, at the least, to come.
I don't think you don't have the right not to speak out about abortion just because you're a man. I have the right to speak out about anti/racism even though I'm white (and funny, no one objects unless they disagree with me :) ) We need to challenge the idea that you have to be X to speak critically about X, especially since X never likes to be criticized and will never hear it from their own.
Cripes, Twitter is a bloody mess today. <great tweets> describing why ending Roe v Wade is a bad thing> followed by, "And if you don't agree you're a total cunt."
"Not that I think the pro-life position is all religious quackery."
I do think so, for one simple reason: the position has no resemblance to any Schweitzerian reverence for life. It does not extend to animals. It's only about the sanctity of *human* life, and if that isn't a religious view then the only other possible explanation is an execrable bigotry.
When I was ten we visited the Smithsonian. In one exhibit there were a few dozen taxidermied animals, shrunken and sad with age. A few of them were labeled "Extinct." It was one of the most disturbing moments of my life; about 20 minutes later I vomited, the only time in my life I have reacted that way. All my political views began with that exhibit.
I am more misanthropic than the elder Franz Liszt. I love animals; when I die all my money will go to the Loro Parque Fundación in Spain to help keep some parrots from extinction. I donate to anti-animal-cruelty causes and shelters for abandoned pets.
I despise how our species is wiping out all the others because everyone wants babies. The global animal population has fallen over 50% since 1970.
This is why I am pro-abortion more than pro-choice. I'd prefer a global population substantially lower than when I was born.
This Dobbs case is not the first horrid Supreme Court Decision. There was Plessy v Ferguson and the Brown v Bd of Education which withheld from Blacks the inalienable right of liberty, thereby implying that Blacks were not fully human. Brown was actually more racist than Plessy. People, however, do not analyze; they merely emote over the outcome like it's a horse race. Roe v Wade was a the best decision in the 20th century.
USA v Miller (1939) must have been written by someone who was drunk. It lay the ground for Heller and much death. I plan an article on it.
Citizen United decided that fictitious persons (corporations) should be treated as if they were living human beings and human beings should be treated like trash.
We ow the Dobbs decision to one word and three women: Pelosi, Hillary, and Ginsburg. Against the advise of law enforcement, Pelosi has been ginning up the Alt Right with her Identity Politics knowing that they are very violent. Their violence makes money for her. Whites not only shoot people, they VOTE. Hillary brought into Identity Politics think that would bring her the woman's vote and called Rust Belt Whites 'deplorables" so they voted for a mentally ill lunatic as President who put three unqualified right wing fanatics on the court. And there's Ginsburg who was too selfish to resign when Obama could have appointed hr replacement. I have nothing to good to say abut the GOP, but all the crucial mistakes were made by DEMS are for craven reasons. for her next trick, Pelosi will turn all of Congress deep red.
On balance, I favor legal abortion and have supported that for many decades in many ways. Keep that in mind and please do not falsely impute beliefs to me.
However, I try to understand the thinking on all sides. And in that context, I think that your concept that men have no standing in regard to abortion kind of begs the question. By which I mean assuming one conclusion in a contested issue, as part of the reasoning to support that same conclusion.
Suppose we assume that it has been proven or can be axiomatic that a fetus is just a bundle of cells with no human rights. From there we can reason that the only human being involved in abortion is the mother, and that only females (who might become pregnant) should have any say on whether the mother can abort that non-human bundle of cells or not; males should abstain from discussion or voting on the matter and leave it up to females.
But there are those who in good faith believe that a fetus is already a human with rights even before birth, not just a non-human bundle of cells. So they believe that abortion involves balancing the needs of two humans, not just one. So for such people, there is zero reason for males to avoid discussion or voting on abortion, because protecting the rights of an unborn human is equally the duty of both males and females. - just as both males and females should be able to vote on a bill legalizing infanticide.
So the "males should stay out of this" only makes sense if you have already decided that fetuses are just a bundle of cells. But before that, deciding whether a fetus is a human being or not would be a question in which both males and females would have standing.
Both males and females would have a vote on legalizing infanticide. The sex of the person voting or discussing it, is not relevant to deciding whether that's homicide or not. And that's how the anti-abortion folks see it.
And pro-abortion males mostly do act as if they believe they have standing, whatever they say about it being up to women. They don't in general abstain from the discussion or from voting, to turn the issue over to just women alone to decide.
What I think some pro-abortion folks really want is for pro-abortion men to vote for abortion, but anti-abortion men to abstain. But that's inverting the logic - it's the pro-abortion men whose belief system would suggest their own abstention, and the anti-abortion men whose belief system ethically requires them to participate.
How do I resolve this? I'm pro abortion AND I believe the both sexes have standing to weigh in on the question of whether fetuses are humans or not (but *IF* and after it's decided that they are not human beings, then only the individual pregnant women has a right to decide whether to terminate it - not other women nor men). So I support men and women discuss it, and support both sexes to vote, without any hypocrisy.
We are a representative democracy. I see a great sorting process ahead.
I do not want 9 unelected people deciding matters of great moment. I want them to be judges, supporting the laws of the land, not making them up.
I would contribute to a fund helping a woman who wanted an abortion to cross state lines as needed to get what she needs. I would support leaving states that don’t reflect the type of pregnancy alternatives a woman wants.
I’m not in favor of dismissing swathes of women as ‘brain-washed’ because they believe life begins at conception.
The debate on abortion was halted after 1973. Even as progressive a stalwart as Ruth Bader Ginsburg felt this was wrong. We are likely in a better position (with many more women in power positions) to have the complex debates needed to figure this out.
We do indeed live in interesting times.
"Brainwashed" may sound diminishing or condescending but when it comes to religion I think the definition is soundly met. Children are raised with a terror of saying anything against matters of faith; parents take them to church at young ages and scare the shit out of them with the weird sight of those they regard as authority figures obediently standing and sitting and kneeling, all in a threatening atmosphere of intense reverence.
Everything about religion is off-limits to reflection and question, exempt from examination and logic (especially logic). Anyone not wholly on the side of Jesus is pure evil, and the indoctrination of religious "values" is for many ineradicable. NO educated person should believe in God; this is as supernatural as ghosts, witches, and magic. But even many scientists are unable to tunnel out.
My own atheism came at the age of eleven, fifteen seconds of unrestrained thought that began with wanting to go back to sleep instead of Sunday school and ending with the realization that I got nothing out of the experience because I didn't believe a word of it.
That kind of unrestrained thought is simply unavailable to most people, and not just women.
Look at the religious absurdity of "pro-life"; life begins at conception (ova and spermatozoa are dead?), a blastula is a human being (yeah, a homunculus), abortion is sin (70% of embryos fail to implant in the endometrium and die). I say and will continue to say that anyone educated and who still believes in this pretty lie is, yes, brainwashed. We have thousands of years' experience at this and a predilection that's easily manipulated
I don't seek to insult those who believe but they all know as well as I do that religion is absurd, they won't abandon it because it inspires emotions they enjoy experiencing (neurochemical explosions sort of like cocaine). Just look at that glint of freshly washed brains when they start with the thee and thou and "the Lord Jesus Christ."
Take this away and abortion ceases to be any kind of moral issue.
I am curious about what avenues you see as appropriate to discuss and debate abortion that would give it the seriousness that it deserves. Also if you don’t think it is being discussed seriously enough now which part or why? I am not asking to argue but out of curiosity. I feel like the women discussing the looming health repercussions and the unequal distribution of care are very serious, but are there aspects being missed? I also feel the discussion of states rights on abortion vs gun rights is a legitimate avenue of thought. What are you thinking?
Practical matters. Most of the justices have decades to live, their impeachment is a nonstarter, the overturning of Roe is just the beginning. We can expect a federal law defining abortion as murder where every miscarriage may mean an arrest; amniocentesis is likely to be banned since the knowledge of carrying a fetus with Down Syndrome or without a cerebrum motivates abortion. The conservatives have lost on the social wars so they are nuking the enemy capitol with the Catholics on the Supreme Court. Same sex marriage will be ended and retroactively annulled; contraception will be banned;
In the meantime, women should divorce conservative men or at least deny them sex and children; companies should relocate out of red states and leave them jobless; underground railways should be set up to fund travel and treatment for women in troglodyte red states.
But America has been heading down a very dark path for forty years and it just got a lot darker,
In order to believe what Lisa says about the motives of anti-choice people, you also have to believe that the anti-choice position is obviously false, so no one could reach out by careful objective deliberation. I am passionately pro-choice, but not because I think the anti-choice advocates are all liars and fools. There are people on both sides of this issue that think the answer is obvious, and can be found by consulting common sense and/or scientific fact. For several years, I taught a course on abortion that was designed to destroy this self-confidence, by showing how confusing this topic is when you think clearly about it. That is the strongest argument for why this is really a religious question, and why the state has no business making this decision for anyone else. My uncertainty does not weaken my commitment to the pro-choice position. On the contrary, it is because the issues can’t be easily resolved either way that having an abortion must remain a matter of personal choice: Not because the question is simple but because it is too complicated for anyone to be sure what the right answer is.
This series of linked essays is based on the texts from my abortion course, and the discussions we had in class. My goal is to enable the reader to experience first hand just how difficult these questions are. At the end of that course, most of my students concluded that they were anti-abortion and pro-choice. It is my hope that paraphrasing our class discussions will help foster a level of tolerance which is regrettably lacking in the current public debates on this topic.
https://teedrockwell.medium.com/abortion-involves-all-the-unanswerable-questions-in-philosophy-e7eb985102f2
Many years ago on a long drive we stopped at a small town in Oregon to go to a restaurant. It was one of those towns that probably has a single employer, where high school graduates report for work the first Monday after high school.
There was a young couple a few tables away, the wife rocking one baby and pregnant with another. Her eyes were as vacant as a Trump hotel and her rocking looked as self-aware as a flatworm.
But what was most striking was the husband, A world of despair and misery in his eyes. He was maybe 19 but knew his life was over. I didn't talk to them bit I would bet that he had gotten her pregnant and married her because to abandon her with his child would be unconscionable; and now his choices were over. He would never go further in school, never have a life with travel and opportunity. It was as depressing as anything could be.
Not getting an abortion had stopped his life in its tracks.
As a woman with a history of the right ( and no right as a teenager) to choose the massive implications of caring for and raising another human being (with no support from family or otherwise), this decision slays me to my very soul. My deepest empathy to all women, too young and not so young who will not have the right to choose their own freedoms in life and will have to suffer the consequences (as will their child) until the day they die.
I often don't argue with the position Lisa is advocating here, because we're both on the same side about the important issue, and it seems to me we should focus on fighting together against those people who want to deny women the right to choose. But just to get this out of the way: It's just not true that a preponderance of men are anti-choice. Preponderance means "more than half" and the polls show that most men are pro-choice. The reasons for that are pretty obvious, if you try looking at this from most men's point of view, especially young and unmarried men. As Dave Murray points out, If you are a man and your sexual partner gets pregnant, your life will get very seriously bent out of shape if you had no interest in raising a child with that woman at that point of your life. Yes, it will be worse for the woman. Whatever burdens are placed on the man are equally on the woman, and then compounded with all the things that happen to her body. But unless the man is a psychopath willing to skip town on the woman, the burdens placed on the man are still enough to make it very much in his interest to keep abortion safe and legal. The only people for whom that isn't true are a few impotent old Patriarchs who are in no danger of getting in this situation. Those people are powerful and dangerous, but they are definitely a minority of the male population.
This song https://youtu.be/JdmGO-GvHyo was released in 1968, five years before the Roe v. Wade ruling. If you are under fifty you have no memory of the zeitgeist when that song had meaning that you may not be able to completely grasp. If you "got a girl in trouble" the choices were, "do the right thing" and marry her, or if that was deemed to be not the right thing (it often wasn't) she went away for a while to stay with Aunt Sally where she had the child that was put up for adoption (never spoken of). I had a girlfriend who told me she would never marry a guy who knocked her up because she never wanted to hear the words during a heated argument, "I wouldn't have married you except for that little bastard." Or you could be the person in the song.
That was just the world of teen pregnancy. Adults also had/have reasons to not bring another child into the world. Listen to the song (really listen) and try to let those times sink in. How do you think that people have never known a time when safe abortion was not an option are going to deal with a return of those times? Will cities burn during another summer of peaceful protests?
I'm not part of the "it's men trying to control women's bodies" thinking crowd. There are truly people who are opposed to abortion as a matter of conscience. I'm of the "it's none of my f'ing business," or the government's way of thinking. I'll spare you the list of evil shit (yes, I'm getting worked up) that the government has been involved in pertaining to "medicine." A paragon of virtue.
I've got a friend, an evangelical (not dissing religions) who is very outspoken in his opposition to abortion. In the Navy he served on a nuclear submarine with a mission to annihilate cities with millions of people, including pregnant women, if his government commanded it. We humans are a mass of contradictions, all in good faith. But then we are also a bunch of assholes seeking to give government the power to do *to* the political opposition and then become horrified when the opposition gets that power. I'll stop my government has too much power rant before I go anarchist.
Lisa comes from a hyper-religious background so when she hears 'pro-choice' she thinks 'Christian' (not that Christians are the only religion where the conservatives think women have no right to their own bodies).
You're right, a woman can be 'pro-life', believe that abortion is murder, and not necessarily be a brainwashed little handmaid. In fact, I think mindless pro-trans women on the left like Emma Watson are every bit as brainwashed by misogynist men as Bible-thumpers (or Torah-thumpers, or Koran-thumpers, or...)
I think I could even get behind the right-to-life position in a different world, maybe a future world (I hope) where men and women are a lot more equal (and everyone else). Where I differ is to whether any baby has a 'right' to life, and in fact the reasonable question may be asked, "What sort of life will this baby have if I allow it to be born?" How about *quality* of life? Will the mother have to raise it on her own? Will she want to raise perhaps a rape baby? How much support will she have? This is where so-called 'pro-lifers' fall so far short. It's not really about babies' lives, it's about controlling women. Period. The fact that Clarence Thomas wants to go after birth control next demonstrates it's all about returning sexual decisions to men and, I don't know, reinstating those Homes for Wayward Women of yore. As long as he's going after hippie-era decisions, I await his announcement that it's time to rescind the ban on interracial marriages again, do the 'right' thing, and divorce his ofay wife ;P
(He'll have a lot of support from his white fanboys & girls on this)
I'm with Lisa on the evils of patriarchy and I agree with her that men don't contribute enough to get 50% of the decision. I say if they don't want 'their' baby aborted that they use whatever birth control is available to them (to the *man*, this is *his responsibility we're talking about) and don't whine if he doesn't and she gets pregnant and wants marriage/an abortion/18 years of child support.
In a future world where women and men really are far more equal, I'd be more inclined to give men more of the decision-making process. Right now, esp with the pushback after only roughly a century and change of women's equality, men in general aren't even close to being ready for that, and won't be for several generations, at the least, to come.
I don't think you don't have the right not to speak out about abortion just because you're a man. I have the right to speak out about anti/racism even though I'm white (and funny, no one objects unless they disagree with me :) ) We need to challenge the idea that you have to be X to speak critically about X, especially since X never likes to be criticized and will never hear it from their own.
Cripes, Twitter is a bloody mess today. <great tweets> describing why ending Roe v Wade is a bad thing> followed by, "And if you don't agree you're a total cunt."
<facepalm>
Top posting for a reason.
"Not that I think the pro-life position is all religious quackery."
I do think so, for one simple reason: the position has no resemblance to any Schweitzerian reverence for life. It does not extend to animals. It's only about the sanctity of *human* life, and if that isn't a religious view then the only other possible explanation is an execrable bigotry.
When I was ten we visited the Smithsonian. In one exhibit there were a few dozen taxidermied animals, shrunken and sad with age. A few of them were labeled "Extinct." It was one of the most disturbing moments of my life; about 20 minutes later I vomited, the only time in my life I have reacted that way. All my political views began with that exhibit.
I am more misanthropic than the elder Franz Liszt. I love animals; when I die all my money will go to the Loro Parque Fundación in Spain to help keep some parrots from extinction. I donate to anti-animal-cruelty causes and shelters for abandoned pets.
I despise how our species is wiping out all the others because everyone wants babies. The global animal population has fallen over 50% since 1970.
This is why I am pro-abortion more than pro-choice. I'd prefer a global population substantially lower than when I was born.
This is what the scientifically uneducated believe.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Carroll-13/publication/325819473/figure/fig3/AS:638841203458049@1529323020423/Homunculus-as-described-by-Hartsoeker-Taken-from-the-Wellcome-Collection-https.png
Note that the embryo originates in the spermatozoan cell.
This Dobbs case is not the first horrid Supreme Court Decision. There was Plessy v Ferguson and the Brown v Bd of Education which withheld from Blacks the inalienable right of liberty, thereby implying that Blacks were not fully human. Brown was actually more racist than Plessy. People, however, do not analyze; they merely emote over the outcome like it's a horse race. Roe v Wade was a the best decision in the 20th century.
USA v Miller (1939) must have been written by someone who was drunk. It lay the ground for Heller and much death. I plan an article on it.
Citizen United decided that fictitious persons (corporations) should be treated as if they were living human beings and human beings should be treated like trash.
We ow the Dobbs decision to one word and three women: Pelosi, Hillary, and Ginsburg. Against the advise of law enforcement, Pelosi has been ginning up the Alt Right with her Identity Politics knowing that they are very violent. Their violence makes money for her. Whites not only shoot people, they VOTE. Hillary brought into Identity Politics think that would bring her the woman's vote and called Rust Belt Whites 'deplorables" so they voted for a mentally ill lunatic as President who put three unqualified right wing fanatics on the court. And there's Ginsburg who was too selfish to resign when Obama could have appointed hr replacement. I have nothing to good to say abut the GOP, but all the crucial mistakes were made by DEMS are for craven reasons. for her next trick, Pelosi will turn all of Congress deep red.