Give them babies, not necklaces - the key to maturity.
Response to Feminist Current piece about "crass" attitudes to abortion, a piece that contained insidious anti-choice themes.
Few things are more irritating than someone pulling the ladder up behind them. One way to make it more infuriating is doing that act with a muddled explanation of why they are very righteous in doing so; they turn around, peer over the edge and shout down, “trust me, it’s to teach you all a lesson!”.
It was good for me but not for thee, in this case, the ladder to freedom is the right to choose abortion. Feminist Current recently published1 a commentary piece by Jenny Holland titled “It’s time to rethink the abortion debate”, which embodies the politics of many anti-choice activists: “I had an abortion, but I don’t think you should”. Those weren’t direct quotes above, just humorous paraphrases of the confused and bitter anti-choice piece that seemingly advocated for forcing liberals to stay pregnant to teach them life lessons.
Ad hominems are best avoided but the piece hinged on the author’s own experiences, actions and opinions, so it is necessary to highlight her hypocrisy. The author describes how she had an abortion when she was 22, it was an elective bookend to an “emotionally torturous long-term relationship. I made the decision to have an abortion, carried out at eight weeks, so I could move on and start my life with a clean slate.”
That’s all well and good, something that every woman should have the right to do. That is, unless you are an obnoxious trans activist who is foolish enough to think that men can get pregnant.
The author advocates some sort of twisted re-education of dim democrats by lowering the limit on abortion time scales to try and inhibit young women’s frivolous attitude to abortion.
Following the admission of her own abortion she goes on to say, “...Twenty plus years later, however, advocates for legal abortion have made this deeply serious issue into a chic lifestyle. And it’s gross.”
The glaring hypocrisy of this statement is overt, she seems to think she was justified in creating a life without a child, and since she knows of that tormented experience in her relationship, it was a reasonable choice. She apparently omnisciently knows that every other young woman does it as some sort of casual, selfish, and a touch murderous, social rite. She says, “...in the conversation of the moment, which seems to take a bizarre, girlish delight in the woman’s power to end a life she is responsible for creating.”
If a woman is this infantile and allegedly a bit sadistic, and so gleeful at exterminating a life, is she really the type of woman who should be punished with the forced encumberment of a full-term baby? What sort of mother would she be to a child if she is this “crass” and “immature”? Are new individuals to be created just to spitefully force a young woman how to bear responsibility as a mother?
Part of the author’s argument is that the viability of a foetus is directly linked to how murdery the act of abortion is. She discusses the increasingly early-term viability of foetuses, “coupled with the fact that in wealthy countries foetuses are becoming viable at ever-decreasing ages, has got me thinking that greatly reducing the term limits on abortions, except when the health of the mother is at risk, would actually be a good thing.” She inadvertently - or consciously with an insidious motive - shows the inevitable argument for the full abolition of women’s right to abortion.
It will soon be entirely possible to argue that a foetus is viable from conception. IVF involves the freezing, storage and selling of potentially completely viable foetuses as pronuclear cells and blastocysts up to 7 days post fertilisation2. With the enhancements in surgical technology for key-hole surgery, hormonal inducement and the potential transplantation of foetuses into other women (whether new mothers or the dehumanised “gestational carriers” in “surrogacy”) that with the soon-to-be advent of the human replacing “artificial womb”, there will soon be no “logical” argument to defend abortion within the parameters of “viability”.
We must therefore maintain that women not only have the right to terminate a pregnancy for whatever reason (or no reason) they so choose, they must also maintain the right not to be mothers.
Try as people might to determine it otherwise, the mother of a child, be it the woman who created an egg, or the woman who gestated the baby, these women are still the mothers. No matter how much companies try to sever this connection rhetorically, it is still the truth. Therefore, it doesn’t matter that you have delicately sucked a foetus out of an unwilling womb at 12 weeks, that woman has been forced to create a potential new human, she has been forced into motherhood.
This forced mothering will be weaponised to absolutely destroy women’s ability to defend abortion and preserve this “gross” and “chic” lifestyle of being free to choose. In the Feminist Current article, the author determines that this is a good thing and it’ll force these woke youngsters to confront just how shit it is to be women sometimes, the sex who does actually carry the risk of getting pregnant. In a wild inversion of feminism, she apparently argues that to show women that sex is real and not a social construct, and to show that we must not squander our sex-based rights, we must weaponize the fundamental emancipatory right to abortion and subject them to forced pregnancy. Every time a woman has sex would eventually be an absolute risk of becoming a mother and all the psychological torture that would create. We must own the libs and defeat their cringey political attitudes by making women’s rights even more tenuous. That’ll show them.
The comments on Facebook3 where the article was shared were split between pro-choice women who were quite appalled by the piece, and “pro-life” women who liked it or screamed about irresponsible women having “unprotected sex”, in response to my comment where I asked, “do you think immature women are suitable mothers?”, a woman replied saying:
“No one who is pro-life believes in forcing any woman to raise a child. We ALWAYS promote adoption. There are 36 couples standing in line for every infant put up for adoption. The demand is high and the supply low because of selfish women choosing to murder their children instead. And if you're "immature", what are you doing having unprotected sex in the first place? Amazing what toxic feminism will defend in order to murder innocent children.”
That comment was yet another example of the commodification of the foetus, someone’s potential purchase or acquisition that must be kept in existence, destroying something “viable” is argued to be inherently selfish.
The author of the article’s disdain for young women and her advocacy or the erosion of our rights seems to be spurred by her disgust at some arguably distasteful jewellery:
“How can you claim to be a mature, thoughtful movement when you sell silver necklaces that say “abortion” in cursive script? Because nothing says you take your grave moral responsibility seriously like abortion-themed jewellery!”
Kitsch jewellery purchases be damned, whoever spends $40 dollars on such a necklace4 should be reprimanded for grotesque ornamental choices and be chained barefoot and pregnant to the cooker and get an education in morality and responsibility.
In the concluding paragraphs of her article she states, “Until the wise, grown-up women return to mainstream feminism and stop the destructive kids running amok, it might actually be safer to allow 12 robed justices decide what is best for women. At least now they are not all men.
We have lost moral high ground in trying to be edgy and inclusive — in so doing we became monstrous.”
In 2022 women will apparently sell out our right to choose based on a seemingly bitter resentment of sartorial choices. Do you want your rights given away by those dressed prim and proper, or Trans Activist and tacky? I pick neither.
By Bryndís Blackadder
2022.03.20 published 2022.03.21
P.S The author of the Feminist Current article is based in the UK and refers to 12 Justices, as are in the UKSC. The USA has 9. It isn’t clear if this was the author’s error. I however describe democrats as the article was published on a North American site, and I liked the alliteration.
END OF ARTICLE
Thanks for reading.
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2022/03/20/its-time-to-rethink-the-abortion-debate/
(https://archive.ph/7y3N1)
https://advancedfertility.com/fertility-treatment/ivf/embryo-freezing/#:~:text=Embryos%20can%20be%20frozen%20at,different%20stages%20of%20embryo%20development. (https://archive.ph/wip/qUO63)
https://www.facebook.com/FeministCurrent/posts/5108950765809728
https://shout-your-abortion.square.site/product/abortion-necklace/8?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=6 (https://archive.ph/wip/3N1A4)
Excellent, thank-you. A whole other post could be written about MM's callous comments to the piece.