Ruthless: Part 3 (of 3) ~The Endless & Illogical Story: Gender Wars to Control Female Reproductive Biology

by faithgibson on June 14, 2019

in Women's Reproductive Rights

Previous post ~ (Part 2)  Cracking Some Eggs: Does American Citizenship Begin with conceptions ~ why IVF fertilized Eggs get special a dispensation from the anti-abortion policy 

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Part #3 ~ The Endless & Illogical story: Gender wars to control female reproductive biology

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In general, men do not bear any of the burdens associated with pregnancy — not the physical experience of morning sickness, not stretch marks, awkwardness, anxiety over finances or loss of income at a time of greatly increased expense.

They certainly have never been pinned to the floor while being raped by a man pumped up on male hormones.

Instead, far too many men choose one-night flings or have affairs and then go off, leaving the impregnated woman to live alone every hour of every day for nine long months, endure many hours of painful labor and the hard work of pushing an eight-pound baby out and then breastfeeding him or her round the clock. This is inevitably followed by shouldering near-total responsibility to raise the child for 18-plus years.

And yet it is primarily men with power and influence — priests, ministers, rabbis, legislators, lawyers, judges, governors, presidents, and big donors to partisan politics — who insist that the female gender does not have the legal authority to determine their own reproductive biology, nor does she ethically deserve to choose whether or not they are able to take on the life-long responsibilities that go along with raising a child at that time in their lives.

This attack on contraception and abortion is in direct contradiction to the 1972 the US Supreme Court, in which Justice Brennan wrote:

“… it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion  into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to beget or bear a child.” (ref #13, These Truths: History of the United States; J. Lepore, 2018)

It always wonders me when I see a room full of politically influential men in expensive suits, wearing $1,000 watches and pontificating about the woman’s absolute responsibility to avoid getting pregnant, as if men played no part in the act of conception.

My eldest daughter got the man’s part in sex and reproduction exactly right when she said:

If you don’t want a baby, don’t ejaculate in the birth canal! 

A goodly number of these same wealthy and influential men have at some time in their life ejaculate in the birth canal of women they don’t want to raise a baby with. If she got pregnant, they claimed not to know her, or arranged to fly her to Canada for a nice quiet (and very safe and legal) abortion.

Obviously, the way to end unnecessary abortions and irrational shaming of women must begin and end by immediately putting the responsibility squarely where pregnancy has always begun (with male ejaculation) and where it always belongs — with the men who chose have sex.

If any individual or any group wants a focus for their outrage, it’s proper place is on the man who fathered this “unwanted” child.

When a man chooses to ejaculate in the birth canal, he is logically responsible if his female partner becomes pregnant and it is he who logically must bear the cost for caring, feeding and raising the child.

By putting the blame, and shame, as well as the social and economic expense squarely, where it truly belongs — on the man who ejaculated in the birth canal — this debate, which is anti-woman, unethical, frequently fatal for both the woman and her unborn fetus, will no be able to be used and abused as a political football to gain a partisan political advantage.

Once we focus on the REAL ISSUE – men who ejaculated in the birth canal of a woman they don’t care about enough to be responsible for having impregnated them, the partisan issue of abortion will vanish like wisps of fog in the early morning sun.

This is where and how we stop abortions (both legal and illegal) and all their immediate and downstream consequences in instances were the termination of pregnancy was not a medical or personal necessity.

If Alabama or other state legislatures want to eliminate abortions, those 99-year prison sentences for abortions provider should instead be applied to the man who gets a woman pregnant and then bugs out. With access to current DNA technology, we can no longer use that favorite old excuse by men that the woman is lying.

As for the 99-year sentence, I personally like the “nine”, but I want to see such men sentenced to  9 months of working 9 hours a week in a daycare center, homeless shelter, soup kitchen or Habitat for Humanity.

A Certain Class of Men

Until then, we will continue to have a certain class of men — mostly wealthy and in positions of political power, insulated against the effects of their own actions by social institutions they helped to create — that will continue to insist it is solely the woman’s responsibility to prevent unplanned pregnancies. Did I mention that men who don’t want a baby shouldn’t ejaculate in the birth canal?   

And when a pregnancy occurs because the man refused or forgot to use a condom or it broke, and he decided after the fact not to “play house”, a certain class of men illogically insist the woman must demur to her circumstances. She is supposed to gracefully welcome the pregnancy, labor and give birth and then become solely responsible for supporting, raising and educating this man’s child, all with help or acknowledgment from him.

These same men, and many others like them, boldly insist that it is “right and proper” to pass laws that make safe abortions either illegal or inaccessible. The politicizing of anti-abortion law began in 1971 when White House senior advisor took Nixion that publically pretenting to be anti-abortion of “moral grounds” would guarantee him the vote of Catholics and fundamental Christians in perpetuity. Nixion won reelection in a landslide and the GOP concluded that an anti-abortion stance was the goose that laid golden eggs.

As they say, “The rest is history”. 

This class of men even insists they are doing God’s bidding by sponsoring laws that permit the criminal prosecution of women they suspect of directly or indirectly causing a miscarriage or doing something while pregnant they believe might be risky to the developing fetus.

This kind of propriety, “Father/Doctor Knows Best” thinking, extends to term pregnancies when the obstetrician’s preference or the hospital protocol is to perform an elective Cesarean over the mother-to-be’s objections. If the laboring woman continues to refuse this advice, the hospital’s attorney simply calls a juvenile court judge and to get a court order to perform Cesarean surgery without the mother’s consent.

All this is promoted by well-meaning people, as well as politicians seeking votes, and others who don’t know the real facts about unsafe abortions, don’t believe women should have the same rights to bodily integrity that men insist on, or just don’t care what happens to women as a class.

The result of this 48-year electoral politicization and demonization of abortion is hundreds of thousands as patriotic citizens who devote their life to collecting and disbursing many millions of dollars in order to convince state and federal legislatures to close clinics and criminalize abortion services.

This “play to pay” wealth is then used to finances election campaigns that promise to bring about more favorable abortion-related rulings by the US Supreme Court (i.e. more restrictive and punitive, including criminal charges). 

Apparently, they want to be sure that other 7-year olds (read “The Ultimate Nightmare in yesterday’s post) somewhere in America become orphaned and permanently traumatized when their mothers, desperate and in dire financial straits, attempt to end an untenable pregnancy, only to die on the bathroom in a pool of their own blood, leaving behind their orphaned children and a bottomless pit of sorrow.

God help America, land of dispassionate, clever, mean and heartless hoards of arrogant, uber-rich and politically influential men who have convinced themselves that they alone know what is best for girls and women.

They believe they have the final say over all female reproductive functions, thus reducing the status of adult women to property, like breeder cattle, with all “ownership” rights in the hands of male relatives, doctors, lawyers, and judges.

But these ‘alternative facts’ are flat wrong. Furthermore, no self-respecting man would stand for this if the gender roles were reversed.

The Critical Missing Ingredient – Civic Virtue

This is illogical and wrong for so many reasons, but the biggest of all is that it leaves out civic virtue — ethical principles that apply to a fair and functional government and the simple verbs of human compassion and caring for the weak and vulnerable with empathy and tenderness.

It leaves out the Golden Rule: 

Do onto others, as ye would have them do onto to you

 

 

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Me on the occasion of my 76th birthday with my eldest daughter — the one born in the back seat of our Renault in the hospital driveway due to my attempt to avoid Twilight Sleep drugs, general anesthesia, episiotomy, and a most unnecessary  forceps delivery

 

 

A Personal Note for those who wonder:

I am a religiously conservative Judeo-Christian. I go to Torah study and Torah Services on the Sabbath and attend a silent Quaker Meeting on First Day (Sunday).

Historically, my mother’s side of the family were Mennonites who emigrated to the American colonies from Bern, Switzerland (via Amsterdam) in 1737.

My father’s side of the family were Boones who emigrated from England to colonial America in the early 1700s to escape religious persecution. They were early members of the Religious Society of Friends (know as Quakers). One of Daniel Boone’s brothers — Charles — was my 8th great grandparent.

Both of my ancestral families were motivated by a genuine religious belief that arose with the Protestant Reformation.  In 1517 a Catholic priest by the name of Martin Luther nailing a list of 95 religious questions to the door of a church in Worms, Germany.

Protestantism was a direct result of the Gutenberg printing press, which made the first Judeo-Christian Bible available (and affordable) in the vernacular and meant that new reader began with and spent far more time in the Jewish or “Old Testament” than the new.

My always ancestors named their first three sons “Abraham”, “Isaac”, and “Jacob”. My 8th great grandfather was Jacob Shantz (originally spelled “Tcshantz, then morphed to “Schantz” and finally to “Shantz”).


Sorry, but this is the temporary end of my story — more later if the Creek don’t rise and the Stork does not dive bomb me all at once with laboring women!

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