abortion

Sex Selective Abortion is… Feminist?

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Ann Furedi, who argues that English law already allows sex-selective abortion.
Ann Furedi, who argues that English law already allows sex-selective abortion.

Sarah Ditum writes for The Guardian “as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter why any woman wants to end her pregnancy. If it’s to select for sex, that’s her choice.”

That’s a radical enough opinion that most people will be repulsed by it without further comment, but further comment is warranted to really explore the tragic, schizophrenic, unscientific, and ultimately misogynistic logic behind it. First: there’s the routine set of mental contortions necessary to deny that abortion is, in fact, the killing of a living human being. No matter how much Ditum may talk about ending pregnancy or refer to the unborn human being as “what’s growing inside you,” the reality is that the sex of your unborn child is determined at conception. It does not “end up as a man or a woman.” He or she (not it) starts out that way. It couldn’t very well be a sex-selective abortion if the gender-fairy didn’t arrive until birth, now could it?

Secondly, Ditum admits that sex-selective abortion couldn’t really be covered by current English law because ostensibly abortions are for the sake of the mother, and the specific sex of the unborn human being shouldn’t have any impact one way or the other on the mother’s health. Then she considers the global perspective:

But what about when a pregnant woman lives in a society that gives her real and considerable reason to fear having a girl? The kind of society where dowry systems mean an inconveniently gendered child could bankrupt a family, or one where a livid patriarch deprived of a male heir could turn his fury on both mother and daughter? In those situations, a woman wouldn’t just be justified in seeking sex selective abortion; she’d be thoroughly rational to do so.

This is a micro-version of the entire feminism/abortion debate, and it illustrates perfectly this plain, simple, uncontestable fact: elective abortion is acquiescence to patriarchy. What does Ditum think you should do in an oppressive society that denigrates the value of women? Clearly the solution, as Ditum states quite frankly, is not to stand up for women’s rights and dignity, but rather it is to enable that oppression. Go along to get along, that’s Ditum’s motto when confronted with rank oppression.

It’s really hard for me to tell the difference between what Ditum calls feminism and what any reasonable person would call collaboration. Rather than stand up for women in need, why not just kill them so as not to rock the patriarchal boat? Apparently feminism really is just code for “concerns of upper-middle class white women” these days, and when it comes to the entrenched power interests of the patriarchy goes, the old saying applies: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

Buzzfeed, Pro-Lifers, and the Streisand Effect

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The Streisand Effect is named after an episode where Barbara Streisand attempted to suppress photos of her Malibu house in 2003 and accidentally triggered much more interest in the story than there otherwise would have been. It now refers to any “phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.”

So a couple of weeks ago Personhood USA, which is a somewhat radical, upstart pro-life organization, put up a list on Buzzfeed on 8 Outrageous Things Planned Parenthood Was Caught Doing.

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The Violence of Abortion

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2013-09-02 Abortion Trauma

LifeMattersJournal has an exceptional article about the violence abortion providers are exposed to when they must take the lives of human beings as part of their daily work. It’s not an easy piece to read, but it’s an important one.

It addresses two crucial points. First, if performing abortions carries such a staggering psychological toll (and it does), why do people keep doing it? The answer, simply, is that coming to grips with what they have done is too painful.

The second point it addresses is violence against abortionists by anti-abortion activists. It ends with a stunning description of a conversation with Dr. Gunn, an abortionist who was wrestling with his conscience, and who’s opportunity to make a change in his life was cut short when he was murdered. And so the piece ends:

Dr. Gunn was denied the chance to come to terms with his life and work to undo the harm he had caused. This is a terrible thing to do to someone. I hope that pro-lifers will join me in reaching out to clinic workers, both current and former, with compassion.

92% Down Syndrome Babies Aborted

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extra-chromosome

Ok, this isn’t a new statistic.  In fact, the video I watched (below) that sparked this post is almost a year old.  But it’s something I think about a lot because it just makes me so sad.  Eugenics is horrifying, and we need to talk about it, and we need to give women support who get these diagnoses.

I particularly loved this comment on a LifeSiteNews article about the video:

it’s so odd that people want “perfect” children, I was briefly pregnant at age 46 (had a miscarriage) and had refused pre-natal testing because by then my other children were teenagers and I had learned there is no pre-natal test for tantrums, bed-wetting, climbing out on the roof, jumping out of 2nd story windows, driving 89 mph in a 40 zone, driving a car 15 miles without oil, failing math or physics, losing a brand new Starter jacket, or pooping on the sidewalk after church. There is no prenatal test for any of that, so why bother?  No child is perfect!

Watch the ESPN video below about a marathon runner who wanted his wife to choose abortion when their second daughter was diagnosed with Down and instead learned a lesson about perfection.

Child custody rights for rapists?

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rapists custody rights

I’ve seen the claim that most states allow rapists custody rights to children they fathered through rape. In this context I wasn’t sure whether “rapists” meant men found guilty of rape or men accused of rape. Apparently it is the former. According to the recently introduced Rape Survivor Child Custody Act:

Currently only 6 States have statutes allowing rape survivors to petition for the termination of parental rights of the rapist based on clear and convincing evidence that the child was conceived through rape.

This CNN article discusses the estimated tens of thousands of pregnancies that result from rape each year in the US. The article claims about two thirds of these pregnancies are terminated, which still means thousands of rape victims choosing to carry to term each year.

These women should not have to fear being tethered to their attackers for the first 18 years of their children’s lives.Removing a rapist’s parental rights seems to be the obvious choice for women’s rights advocates, as well as people on both sides of the abortion debate; neither pro-lifers nor pro-choicers want women to feel coerced into getting abortions.

If we were talking about taking away parental rights from men accused of but not found guilty of rape, I think there would be a significant concern that such legislation could take away parental rights from innocent men. However, if the legislation only applies to cases involving “clear and convincing evidence” of rape, what could be the arguments against such legislation?

Should all medical procedures be safe?

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George Weigel has an excellent piece over at First Things, On Really Not Getting it.  In it, Weigel discusses media and abortion advocate’s disgust at having any safety regulations on abortion procedures, responds to a WaPo piece that claims, after Gosnell, the evidence of a need for any such safety regulations “is weak,” and makes a few other great points surrounding the debate.

It’s all good (please read it!!), but one of my favorite parts is this:

Marcus noted that, irrespective of what was happening in state capitols, a 1973 Gallup Poll “found 64 percent agreeing ‘that the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.’” And here is another of the canards of Those Who Really Don’t Get It.  The abortion decision is most frequently made, not by a woman and “her physician,” but by a frightened woman talking with a “counselor” in a clinic run by an agency like Planned Parenthood, which has a deep financial interest in abortion. That frightened woman, who has often been abandoned by an irresponsible man, is then remanded to an abortion “provider” who is no more “her physician” than he or she is “her hairdresser.”

Bam.  Here’s the link again, so you can check the whole thing out.

abortion_on_demand
& without sanitary conditions!

Wendy Davis and the Sainthood of Planned Parenthood

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2013-07-02 Davis

So, America’s conception of Planned Parenthood is really, truly bizarre. This is an organization founded by a racist eugenicist which today has basically two reasons for existence: to prevent pregnancies or end pregnancies. And yet, with copious use of the color pink and little else, the organization has managed to pass itself off as some kind of women’s health organization, despite the fact that, you know, it doesn’t actually provide many medical services at all. Everyone went nuts when Komen temporarily pulled their Planned Parenthood donations because Where are poor women going to get their mammograms!? I don’t know, but since Planned Parenthood doesn’t offer mammograms it’s kind of a weird question. In face, they don’t do any cancer screening of any kind. Why was Komen giving them money again? Who knows, but here’s your pink ribbon. 

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DailyBeast: I Don’t Stand With Wendy Davis

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2013-07-02 Davis 2

So I’ve got my own take on the Wendy Davis / Texas abortion law thing coming out tomorrow, but in the meantime this is another great piece on the topic.

One can assume I am also not the only woman in America who is really tiring of the Wendys of the world claiming to represent “women’s rights” in their quest to mainstream a medical procedure—elective late-term abortion—that most of the civilized world finds barbaric and abhorrent. In many European countries, you can’t get an abortion past 12 weeks, except in narrow circumstances.