You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Abortion’ tag.
One of the cheap rhetorical tricks that forced birth advocates often use is the idea that somehow “Science” (ya know science, that vast shadowy monolithic structure) supports their crappy arguments and thus lends weight to their assault on women and their rights. One of the easiest tells illustrating the rhetorical, rather than scientific vein of this particular argument, is that idea that we have a definite grasp of when “life” begins. Unsurprisingly, the anti-choice position relies on a gross simplification of what the bio-medical position actually is on when life begins. The irony is very rich as fetus fetishists often assign the label of “anti-science” to pro-choice people arguing against them and their misguided campaign for life.
I’m not really a fan of arguing from authority (This introduction is a perspective from an evolutionary biologist, for the record.), but I swear, if see one more out of context reference to a embryology text during an argument, I will practice immediate defenestration of the offender in question.
This next quoted section is from Blazer S, Zimmer EZ (eds):The Embryo: Scientific Discovery and Medical Ethics. Basel, Karger, 2005, pp 1– 20 (ed. minor formatting changes for effect)
”
[…]
This chapter began with the central ethical question of ‘when does life begin?’ The evolutionary answer to this question makes it devoid of ethical
implications concerning the sojourn from conception to birth (although it has other, profound ethical implications). Instead, the evolutionary and
genetic arguments presented in this chapter indicate that a more meaningful ethical question is:
Where do we place ethical thresholds in the continual process of human
individuality?
Biology provides no clear defining event to answer this question because diploid human individuality arises gradually during the mitotic phase of our life cycle and not at fertilization. Perhaps there is no single ethical threshold in dealing with the mitotic continuum and the attendant gradual emergence
of functional genotypes and individual traits. Although modern biology does not provide an answer to the above question, knowing what the question should be and what it should not be is the critical first step in any debate. Thus, modern biology, and particularly evolutionary biology and genetics, can play an important role in the ethical debates concerning the passage from conception to birth.
[…]”
So let the record be set straight that science doesn’t not precisely know when “life” begins and that very possibly it is the wrong question to be asking.
Ah, the forced birth lobby has finally pissed off enough women to start the inevitable slapdown of their deplorable, retrograde fundamentally anti-woman position. Let’s keep this video in the “abortion” feed for a long time, in light of that goal, I encourage everyone to share and repost this clip on their blog, so our anti-choice friends know exactly what they are up against.
Steven Harper really enjoys floating trial balloons through his back benches. Another preemptive volley from the western conservative black hole of politics has made it the media. The poll, of course, has been skewed by the screwball forced birth advocating religious right in Canada so ignore the results. However, one comment on the poll caught my attention and thus is reproduced here.
The Supreme Court of Canada ruling on the Morgentaler appeal in 1988 confirmed as Chief Justice Brian Dickson wrote:
“Forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman’s body and thus a violation of her security of the person.”
This confirmed a woman’s Charter right to choose.
It has served us well over the last 25 years and the notion of creating a new law is only to serve the interests of those who will *never* accept a woman’s right over her own body.
My thoughts exactly. You can frack-off forever my forced birth advocating friends, women are treated as people here in Canada, get used to it.
It is nice when the anti-woman, fetus-fetish brigade starts getting worked up. The thin veil of “protecting life” is torn away leaving only the desperate misogyny that is so typical of the anti-choice zealots. This from the Feel that pro-life love! Tumblr.
damnsoprochoice:
jojobear11:
J: Lol, people who think bodily autonomy is more important than the right to life.
DPC: Lol, people who think it’s okay to use someone’s body against their will and think that anyone will benefit from forced pregnancies and birth. Lol, people who think think that an embryo is more important than a grown person. Lol, people who think being born is a right.
DPC: I can lol all day.
J: Forced pregnancies and birth? Hahaha don’t get pregnant then asshole. No one said the unborn were more important, but keep putting words in someone’s mouth to make yourself look less like the stupid selfish cunt that you are. Saying being born isn’t a right doesn’t make any sense. You’re just making up stupid shit now.
DPC: Oh shit happens, peopel get pregnant. Abortion is a legitimate way of dealing with it.
DPC: And oooh, name calling. Fiesty.
DPC: But I’m not putting words in your mouth, you are making the embryo more important than the born person because you don’t give a fuck about how hard and debilitating a pregnancy can be for people, and you certainly think people should suffer through just so that itty bitty baby can be born and solve nothing. Just so that you in 20 years can go “I don’t have to provide for you, go fucking work or something you lazy ass”.
DPC: Being born isn’t a right, it’s a privilege. Now go kiss your mother for suffering for you.
DPC: Not just “name-calling”, but an insult that implies that being a woman and not self-sacrificing is a horrible thing. Unsurprising considering who it’s coming from.
Ah yes, the perennially wrong anti-choice, forced birth lobby loses again, and again and again. You never get to ignore the bodily autonomy of women and this comment from Pharyngula details precisely why.
“I’ll tell you why I hate those hypothetical near-birth abortion scenarios. It’s not that they’re stupid, or that they never happen, or even that there’s a real world problem of them encouraging the antichoicers to think of this nonsense as a real thing. All of which are true, too, and seriously annoying. But [that’s] not why I get the white-hot HATE.
The hate is because the hypothesizer is just so damned keen to find some way, some very very special exceptional circumstance, in which it’s OK to remove my bodily autonomy. It’s very much like asking me when is rape OK.
Never? Really never? Ok, supposing she were the last fertile woman on earth… Or maybe there was a ticking time-bomb nuke and raping this woman would totally prevent it because a secret code has been tattooed on the inside of her vagina by some crazy mad supervillain in invisible ink and only your special semen can reveal the antinuke codes…
Awww c’mon, pretty please, surely there must be ONE situation in which a woman can be reduced to a piece of livestock?
NO. FUCK OFF. IT IS NEVER OK.
Why are you being so meeeeean to me for just asking?
Why are you so damned insistent on finding that one special circumstance when it’s morally OK for you to do something horrific to me? Why is it so unacceptable to you that I have bodily autonomy in all circumstances? NO, there isn’t a circumstance that makes you the rightful owner and master and torturer of me.
Just stop it right now.
Oh and another bit from the same thread.
“On the off-chance that there are any “I’m pro-choice, BUT I feel the need to qualify this position so that I can cast judgment on women who make choices I don’t approve of”, I’d like to say the following:
Dear “I’m pro-choice, BUT I feel the need to qualify this position so that I can cast judgment on women who make choices I don’t approve of”:
Fuck off.
Wait, I should probably make it a little more clear about what kinds of people I’m talking about, so that they know that this message is for them.
You might be a “I’m pro-choice, BUT I feel the need to qualify this position so that I can cast judgment on women who make choices I don’t approve of” person IF:
1. You think that, in some cases, women need to “take responsibility” for their actions. By this, you mean that women choose to have sex, and therefore they cannot choose NOT to be pregnant as a result of that sex. You think, or at least your attitude displays, that women who choose to have sex, women who choose to have a lot of sex, women who don’t always have safe sex, women who have sex in circumstances that you consider “iffy”, are “sluts”, and therefore need to be “taught” something so that they can mend their slutty, wicked ways.
2. You think that some women make the “right” choice for them, but that other women make the “selfish” choice. By this, you mean that you feel you are qualified to judge the appropriateness of someone else’s decision about a potentially life-changing situation, without actually being that person. A woman who chooses to have an abortion so that she can keep barely feeding her existing children – sad, but the “right” thing to do. A woman who is young, sexually promiscuous (for whatever “promiscuous” means to you), and seems more “care-free” than you think she should be – not sad, well-deserved, and the selfish bitch could use some “settling down”.
3. You think that some women might carry a pregnancy almost to term and then randomly decide to have an abortion. By this, you mean that a woman who has endured eight months, three weeks, six days and twenty-three hours of pregnancy has the potential to be flighty and impulsive enough to demand that someone kill her fetus.
Are we all clear on who I’m talking about now? Yes? Good.
I say again, fuck off.
My cousin nearly died last night. She went into eclampsia, in the last month of her pregnancy. She’s nineteen. She’s not married. She takes drugs. She’s unemployed. She’s had multiple sexual partners in her life.
In short, she is exactly the kind of person that people talk about (but never actually KNOW) when they say, “I’m pro-choice, BUT”.
You think she’s sexually promiscuous. Let me tell you that it’s hard to develop a healthy sexual attitude when your 20-year-old “boyfriend” coerced you into having sex when you were fourteen.
You think she’s irresponsible. Yeah, not having a firm support structure will do that to you. Not being allowed to grieve the death of your mother will do that to you. Being told of your mother’s sudden death due to side-effects of medication and then being told, “Okay, now go do your homework” will do that to you. Having your father emotionally abuse you and practically abandon you will do that to you. Being passed around from extended relative to extended relative, not having a stable home for more than a couple of years will do that to you. Being the youngest child in a family where all of your siblings are living far away, leaving you alone in a small, impossible-to-leave-town will do that to you. Living in a town that is mostly white, while you’re an adopted woman of color, will do that to you (along with all the judgments that go along with the “hypersexuality” of women of color). Having your own mother, before she passed, speak of adopting black children as if they were litters of puppies, will do that do you.
You might even try to seek comfort in bad places. You might accept the friendship of bad people, just so you won’t be alone. You might try to make some of your pain go away by taking drugs.
You might do that.
But you know what? “Sluts” die from pregnancy, too. Drug addicts die from pregnancy, too. Pregnancy is a medical condition. It doesn’t care what your circumstances are. It sure as hell doesn’t mete out “justice” or “punishment” for your actions and decisions. It kills “good” women as well as “bad” women.
But my cousin never had a choice. Not a real choice. She had no money for an abortion. She had no family that would help her if she did. It was all arranged – they would find an adoptive couple, and she would give the baby up. There was no discussion. My cousin didn’t have a say – after all, she brought this on herself, didn’t she? She can’t make choices about what happens to her own body when she depends on other people, can she?
No real choice for her, and she very nearly paid with her life. She started having seizures. The doctors did an emergency C-section (the baby is small, but should be fine) and continued surgery to try to save my cousin’s life. We don’t know yet if she will have brain damage as a result of those seizures.
So, to all of you “I’m pro-choice, BUT”:
Fuck off.
Who’s the one placing a value judgment on human life, here? Is it me (unequivocally pro-choice, abortion on demand)? Or is it you (I’m pro-choice, BUT)?”
And of course, the arguments that forced birth advocates refuse to answer and repeat what about the baaaaabY! Again.
Read the rest of this entry »
Well. I’m glad to see the Catlicks coming around on such an important issue to women and their rights. This is an object lesson for the deluded pro-life movement. Your fetus worshipping is useful for whipping up the frenzy and getting people all frothy, but when serious issues come, its time for you to sit the frack down and shut the frack up on cue while the adults talk about the serious issues.
From the Alter.net article –
[…]
And all of this—all of it—goes back to the Church’s insistence that life begins with your very first hell-worthy dirty thought and must be protected at all costs, despite all consequences, including, of course, the consequence of dead women, whose lives are not nearly as valuable as the “life” of an unborn fetus. In just the past year, the Church has called upon its faithful followers to march, to starve themselves, to go to jail, to even take up arms—all to protect those fetuses. No exceptions. None. Not if the fetus is already dead inside the womb. Not if the fetus is going to kill the actual living woman carrying it. No goddamned exceptions EVER.
Well, except for one: when it’s going to cost the Church money.
Turns out, when a man sues a Catholic hospital for malpractice because his wife and the twins she was carrying inside her died when she turned up in the emergency room and her doctor never bothered to answer a page—well, things get a little tricky. Yes, the Catholic hospital adheres to the strict Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church, as set forth by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And yes, those directives include the claim that “[t]he Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn” and a mandate to uphold “the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death.'” But come on. That obviously does not apply when Catholic Health Initiatives, the Church-affiliated organization that runs the Church-affiliated St. Thomas More Hospital where a young woman and her two unborn fetuses died, is the lead defendant in a lawsuit:
Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.
As Jason Langley, an attorney with Denver-based Kennedy Childs, argued in one of the briefs he filed for the defense, the court “should not overturn the long-standing rule in Colorado that the term ‘person,’ as is used in the Wrongful Death Act, encompasses only individuals born alive. Colorado state courts define ‘person’ under the Act to include only those born alive. Therefore Plaintiffs cannot maintain wrongful death claims based on two unborn fetuses.”
Thank you, counselor, for totally undermining everything the Catholic Church has ever said about women and health care and fetuses and the “sanctity of life,” just to save a buck, thereby confirming how very empty and meaningless all that rhetoric really is. Praise the Lord.
Shall we wake up to some historical notions? Has history ever been kind to women? The short answer is no. Why?
Because, Patriarchy.
Today is not for learning about 101 level feminism. Today is calling down from pulpit the rage and the anger against the systematic oppression of women in our society. If you’re not “down” with Patriarchy and what it entails, I’m not here to explain it to your special snowflakyness (at least not today).
Today, friends, we address a structural question that I rarely see mentioned in the abortion debate. It is a relationship between the amount of freedom women possess in a society and said women’s access to reproductive health services – covering contraception, abortion and all shades of family planning. The correlation being that as women become full fledged members of society they gain the right to decide what is best for themselves and their families contrary to established patriarchal norms.
Women when not chained to strict reproductive roles gain freedom in society. When women can control their fertility they can choose to join the public sphere (or not) and contribute in more ways than just propagating the species. How bad was it, let’s look at what women were fighting for in 1922.
“WHEREAS, Women today, although enfranchised, are still in every way subordinate to men before the law, in government, in educational opportunities, in professions, in the church, in industry, and in the home:
“BE IT RESOLVED, That as a part of our campaign to remove all form of the subjection of women, we shall work for the following immediate objects:
“That women shall no longer be regarded and shall no longer regard themselves as inferior to men, but the equality of the sexes shall be recognized.
“That women shall no longer be the governed half of society, but shall participate equally with men in the direction of life.
“That women shall no longer be denied equal educational opportunities with men, but the same opportunities shall be given to both sexes in all schools, colleges, and universities which are supported in any way by public funds.
“That women shall no longer be barred from any occupation, but every occupation to men shall be open to women and restrictions upon the hours, conditions and remuneration of labor shall apply alike to both sexes.
“That women shall no longer be discriminated against in the legal, the medical, the teaching, or any other profession, but the same opportunities shall be given to women as to men in training for professions and in the practice of these professions.
[…]
“That women shall no longer receive less pay than men for the same work, but shall receive equal compensation for equal work in public and private employment.
“That women shall no longer be barred from the priesthood or ministry, or any position of authority in the church, but equally with men shall participate in ecclesiastical offices and dignites.
“That a double moral standard shall no longer exist, but one code shall obtain for both men and women.
“That exploitation of the sex of women shall no longer exist, but women shall have the same right to control of their persons as have men.
“That women shall no longer be discriminated against in treatment of sex diseases and in punishment of sex offenses, but men and women shall be treated in the same was for sex diseases and sex offenses.
“That women shall no longer be deprived of the right of trial by a jury of their peers, but jury service shall be open to women as to men.
“That women shall no longer be discriminated against in inheritance laws, but men and women shall have the same right to inherit property.
[…]
“In short – That women shall no longer be in any form of subjection to man in law to custom, but shall in every way be on an equal plane in rights, as she has always been and will continue to be, in responsibilities and obligations.
They understood back then what was required to be free, to be treated equally and fairly in society because women at the time (1922) they were NOT. Not legal persons under the law, but rather owned property of men, slavery all but in name, so to speak.. Look at our rape laws to see how women are viewed as property rather than as a person. Its chilling.
Enter the “pro-life” movement, more accurately, the forced-birth, anti-choice, anti-woman legion that is blithely serving the patriarchy attempting to remove women’s hard won bodily autonomy. Denuding women of their rights serves only to force them back down the ladder of equality where once again they can be solely defined by their biological fecundity. Our forced-birther friends know only one date from history, January 21st, 1973 Roe Vs. Wade. They fail, consistently, to see that women’s control of their bodies is the cornerstone of women’s rights as a whole. Chipping away at female personhoood is what these misguided fetus-worshipping individuals excel at. They pine for the days when women were at the mercy of their reproductive systems and enslaved by the patriarchal system surrounding them.
There is no “Golden Age” to aspire to when it comes to women and their rights, the time for action and activism is now, because the counter-revolution is pushing back with unparalleled ferocity. Fuelled by ignorance and religion (redundant I know.) the anti-choice contingent screams for justice for the unborn, ignoring the real living breathing women who do not want any more constraints on their autonomy. Ignoring women is a specialty of the patriarchy, make sure you are smiling while we remove your rights.
The pro-life platform is nothing more than a set of patriarchal shackles for women; why so many women want to get them fitted and locked on again is entirely beyond me.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…