It’s been too hot, the ACs on the blink and I’m been in a rather bad mood. (for days now). I misunderstood. I apologize again.

Gibbie

But typical, isn’t it?

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrement.”

The post was on Saipan.. but Amp touched upon what could be a larger issue, and she got me to thinking, so I commented on the stream of thought she authored.

Dubya blanches, attacks and ignores anything that suggests that the US is having problems meeting it’s own ideals .. here’s one of them.

And here we were all thinking it was yet again ALL ABOUT MEN and all those terrible, terrible burdens they have to bear cos the world is run by the Feminazis, who have evilly carried out a conspiracy to defraud all males of the right to parenthood by greedily hoarding all uteruses (uteri??) in women’s bodies only.

“If they can be judged by their actions, it seems that pro-life leaders are actually comfortable with increased and forced abortions, so long as it’s happening to women who aren’t from the first world. ”

The US is at negative population growth, just as Japan is. The difference between the US and Japan is that to make up the difference we MUST have a constant flow of immigrants to keep the system going. Japan does not allow immigration on any scale to replace it’s workers.

These immigrants won’t be coming from other first world countries because their doubling time is in terms of hundred + years (some as high as 700 years at current birthrates). These immigrants will come from the third world, poor, dark skinned, speaking another language with a wholly different cultural identity that they’d like to preserve and add to this “melting pot.”?

So the American Christian (mostly white) Taliban and neo-cons may see their anti abortion stance as promoting positive population growth or at least zero population growth for White Well Off Christian America. I can say this because they defund, cut and end programs that the poor and immigrants depend upon.

So it’s not so far off to see a policy that would totally disregard those who aren’t Americans of have white skin. We still maintain MFN status with China even though they force abortions, use prisoners to make merchandise for us, execute prisoners (even petty and political) for their organs to use in China’s burgeoning transplant trade (documented), and their brutal repression.

You hear nary a word from Dubya, that lover of liberty and freedom, on these issues. In fact the he says nothing about Saipan may do more to illustrate him as a greedy industrialist, dispassionate capitalist, insincere opportunist, than anything else.

Yes they have defunded UN health clinics for women in Africa because abortion advice may be given and abortions may be preformed, but all that has done left women even more powerless and more subject to many pregnancies, AIDS, poverty and beatings or death from husbands if they refuse to have sex.

That inturn increases poverty for children, not only to live in a house where resources are scarse as they must cover many children, but also risk loosing one or both parents to AIDS and complications in childbirth. Thereby making the cycle and well of poverty even deeper.

These conservatives “compassion”? has doomed many children to parentless poverty and a short and hard life.

But who cares, they aren’t Americans!

Similarly, abortion isn’t a natural endowment, but the ability to have an abortion certainly is. Women have it, men don’t. Get over it.

It’s true that technology has made abortion safer over the centuries, for which I’m thankful; but the basic fact remains, women have had abortions for centuries. If no other means are available, some women will self-abort - beating themselves on the stomach, throwing themselves down stairs, or worse. Technology makes having abortions safer, but technology is not the source of the ability to have an abortion.

As for what changes would have to happen before I could favor C4M, I already hinted at the answer to that question, back in post 18. If we had a much fuller safety net - enough so that no single parent or child would risk lacking economic security for lack of a second parent - then I could favor C4M.

To me one of the many important parts of feminist world is that the work of reproduction is carried socially, not individually. The resources, both of time and physical things, that are needed to raise a child do not just come out of an individual’s pool that they could otherwise spend snowboarding, or being a political activist say. Instead the physical things come from the community, the option of childcare comes from the community, and individuals who want to parent a child are supported by the community in doing that (yes the red in my name refers to my political beliefs - or at least where I come from where red stands for socialism). I believe that true equality between men and women can not be achieved without the work that has traditionally done by women being valued by the community.

In those circumstances, when role of parents was the act of nuturing, and not required to provide resources, then there’s no problem with a man not wanting to be a father even if he was biologically a parent of the child. Indeed under those circumstancess the concept of a parent become something very different based on who is doing the actual nuturing.

I personally don’t think it’s in the child’s best interest to force someone to be a father if they don’t want to be based on DNA (particularly because that usually mean the opposite that they cana force themselves to be the father based on the DNA). But I live in New Zealand, which has a marginally better social welfare system than America does. I’ve been convinced by people on this blog, and others, that a decent social welfare system is a minimum pre-requisite before you can have the kind of opt-in system of parenting that I envision as ideal.

Now I’m grumpy that I’ve participated in the thread drift which has changed a thread about women to a thread about men.

Women have the right/privilege of ending their pregnancies via safe (to them) technological means. This is socially constructed; there’s no two ways about that. It’s what our legal system has decided, and I know that you’re in agreement with that decision.

So at the end of the day in Ampworld, women have a twofold superior position vis a vis men in the reproductive arena - they can bear children themselves (exercising that power has serious costs, I acknowledge), and they have the right to choose whether or not to terminate their pregnancies. Men don’t have the latter power, and you won’t grant them the functional equivalent of saying “nope” and forfeiting their parental rights/responsibilities (a position with which I agree, in the world as it is.)

Hey, just as a speculation - since Ampworld is a LOOONG way from coming around - let’s assume that we have an egalitarian, non-sexist society where gender relationships are so positive and fruitful that “feminism” is an unread word in a dusty dictionary. At THAT point, can the MRA request to have an opt-out clause for unwilling/unwitting fathers be honored?

You could say, I suppose, that the fact that we fail to outlaw abortion is a “socially constructed privilege.” But that leads us right back into Harrison Bergeron land - failure to pass a law forbidding people from using their natural endowments is not an example of “socially constructed privilege.”

Amp, I know that you aren’t trying for perfection. I just find it interesting that a socially-constructed female privilege will be the last remaining such construction in your utopia.

:D

I’m looking forward to finding a random chauvinist who wants to fund my surgical sterilization procedure. You know– in the name of helping me become as “equal” as he is. Or somethin’.

There’s no reason to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Feminism is incapable of making everything perfectly equal, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t make things better than they are now.

I don’t care about an equal society; you do. I think you have to consider the actual outcome you’re working towards, however, which seems to end up being non-equal on its face.

So at the end of the day, in Amp’s world, we’ll have a situation where women have more power than men, overall, and one justification offered for that hierarchical state of affairs will be “well, women do die for future generations”?.

So you’re saying that in order to have an equal society, we need to deprive women of any ability to do anything men can’t do, and if feminists don’t favor that ridiculous form of “equality” we’re hypocrites? It turns out that you do favor the world of Harrison Bergeron, after all.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

Funny, how libertarians suddenly start favoring Harrison Bergeron policies when what’s being discussed is women’s bodies. If we’re really going to apply your notion of using the law to eliminate biological inequality between the sexes, shouldn’t we also outlaw men peeing standing up? And use sandbags and restraints to take away the unfair biological advantage of the biggest people, most of whom will be male? And create special devices that will produce cramps and bleeding in men once a month?

Look, in a feminist world, women and men will have unequal abilities regarding pregnancy and childbirth; and the biggest people, on average, will be male; and women but not men will have monthly periods. Feminism cannot eliminate these inequalities. Only a fascist state of the sort Vonnegut described can do that.

You say I offered the “justification” that “women die for future generations.” But you’re wrong; I didn’t justify it at all. It’s not justified that women face the abortion decision and men don’t. It’s just a fact.

I logically have to justify policies I advocate. That women get pregnant and men don’t is not a policy I’m advocating; it’s a biological fact. Logically, I don’t have to justify it any more than I have to justify gravity or friction. (I might logically have to justify my claim that it’s because of biology that women get pregnant and men don’t, but only if you contest that claim.)