a Blog for Choice from Liberal Street Fighter
People are often suprised how strongly I feel about Abortion being legal and freely available to women. I’m a white guy, middle class, raised in the “heartland” … I look like I could be a talk radio fan. My “extreme” liberal point of view often suprises people. “Why do you care?” questions alternate with a suspicion that I just want to make sure my options are open if an “accident” occurs.
Well, I do have a selfish reason, I guess, but not in the way people would think. My life, ALL of our lives, are enriched when people are free. I honestly and deeply believe this basic humanist principle. Who can say how many poets, writers, doctors, scientists, engineers, entrepeneurs, singers and so on NEVER CAME TO BE, all because we as a culture have insisted for most of our history in making half the human race slaves to biological imperative?
There’s an old story I read when I was a kid, The Lady or the Tiger.
When a subject was accused of a crime of sufficient importance to interest the king, public notice was given that on an appointed day the fate of the accused person would be decided in the king’s arena, a structure which well deserved its name, for, although its form and plan were borrowed from afar, its purpose emanated solely from the brain of this man, who, every barleycorn a king, knew no tradition to which he owed more allegiance than pleased his fancy, and who ingrafted on every adopted form of human thought and action the rich growth of his barbaric idealism.
A barbaric idealism demands that women either conform to some demand for “purity” preserved through abstinence OR be punished for having sex by being forced to carry it to term. Those two words: conform or punish … how can any modern person NOT look upon that simple-minded system of values as anything other than barbaric?
We are at our best, our most fully human, when we have options and opportunities in life. ALL of our options are limited when we limit those of our mothers, our sisters and our daughters. How can people not see this, or is that the problem? It is, after all, easier to follow a well-trodden trail than to strike out on our own, and perhaps those who take comfort in the deep trenches they walk upon feel a little tug of envy, of hatred, when they see people breaking off and blazing new trails. Is this where all the talk of feminists “disrespecting” women who choose to become mothers comes from? What a strange projection. What better way to make sure that this never happens than to MAKE women be mothers, whether they like it or not? What better way to inculcate to children that there are “proper” paths to follow than to have them be raised by women who themselves were denied choices. To control us all, what better place to start than to control women and the choices they would make?
It’s more than choice though. One can only choose if one is FREE. Autonomous, open and curious and well-informed … from THESE conditions come true “choice”. This man knows that his life is better because his three sisters are all very different and very strong women who made their own paths in life. This man knows that his life is better because he had a mother who asked questions herself, a woman who taught me early and often to read and explore and push boundaries, even when my pushing and questioning made life harder for her and my dad. I know that my life has been enriched, and my own options expanded, because the female teachers and coworkers and friends and lovers I’ve known have lived in an America that gave them the freedom to choose their own paths. How enriched my life has been to live in a time of flowering freedoms for women!
So my support for women is indeed selfish. Forcing women to choose between two doors in life, either motherhood or maidenhood, is to rob the world of thought and beauty and creativity. Such a world was a darker place, a darker place that is coming back with a frightening speed.
How can people not SEE this?
is wrong on so many levels. We cannot save the world by our singular actions or condemn it either whether we are male or female. If we bring a child into the world how much better off if we, the world, is prepared to deal with that child. If we just insist on bringing children into the world willy nilly without any thought to the child’s future it is a crap shoot whether the child will be successful at life or miserable in prison.
We have so many children now who feel unloved or neglected or abused. At least 25% of all children are living in homes under the poverty level in income. That gives us as a nation a handicap in the world’s literacy, scientific and mathematical races. We haven’t worked out so many problems and so we can only pass on problems to children woefully lacking in skills to deal with them. We don’t even acknowledge some problems as problems – i.e fast food/obesity, loose credit/bankruptcy, deception in business/loss of benefits, etc.
I’ve always sought out your diaries – been behind a bit due to the move..
Anyways, soon we wimmim will have to ask our “big daddy’s” for all types of permission. Underwise or cross your heart? Tampons or napkins?
Untill men are forced to look at their bodies as part of the goverment’s property…
But… here’s a side to this all that surprised me and my husband. In order for Mr. Damnit to get snipped. He must undergo “counseling” that involves me, his spouse. I also have to sign a form that states I agree and have been consulted about this.
WHAT?!?!?!?! It’s his dick. He should be free to snip if he feels like it. He should be able to tattoo it, pierce it anything he sees fit to do with it.
Of course we talked about it. Because we love one another. But what if…
I just don’t get it “the land of the free” anymore.
OH and Mr. Damnit was a military man so he was already Uncle Sam’s property at one time.
((((MadMan)))) so glad you’re fighting.
I’m sure that consent thing he had to comply with was put in place to help pass the same thing regarding abortion. I wonder how common is that requirement is.
You know I’m not sure Madman.
He was going to have it done in CA and then we lost insurance and … voila now we do here in OR… so we’ll see (and ask) if there’s a difference or a law about it and I’ll let you know.
Was good to read this about our bodies and see Bush’s “sanctity of life” BS. They don’t care about life. They only want CONTROL and POWER.
I got my snip job in FL a long time ago, about a year after our second child was born. All the doc said after he did the first one was, “Still time to change your mind…”.
It was the best money we ever spent!
Hey DJ, if you can make them cite the law to you, tell you which statute it is, please do post it somewhere here at the blog. I hear about these spousal consent laws regarding vasectomies all the time in internet debates about reproductive rights, and I’m dying to see one (I object to them categorically, of course), but no one can ever produce the actual statute number so I can never look one of these beasts up.
At the last office, it was called a spousal consent.
Well.. duh… don’t they think most couples will talk it over and make a decision together? But if not there’s a reason and it’s
NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS.
I stand firm.. ahem… that it’s his dick, he should be able to make the decision himself. Married or not.
Yeah, most loving couples will talk it over.. but I don’t think some nurse she have to ask for you to sign a consent form. For one it’s insulting to couples who do talk with out the “nurse nudge” of a permission slip.
Bibles and Bush – I forget – it’s children we’re talking about. Children who need big daddy and a big g-d to tell them what to do. G-d forbid we’re ever treated like adults.
Some medical providers are afraid of how a wife might react, so they want a note from your wife or mother. Its not required by any medical or legal statue in the United States. Just say NO. If that’s not good enough for nurse Ratchet, change doctors.
thanks bay!
I did a quick google search, but nothing came up. Thanks for the update.
Still… if/when they ask me for consent, I’ll make a stink about it. If enough of us do, maybe they’ll rethink it and realize that our bodies are our own. We don’t need no steeeenking conseeent forms. 🙂
Bayprairie, that’s what I was thinking — that it’s not actually required by law anywhere, but that a damn lot of people wind up thinking it is due to whatever they’re being told at the doctor’s office. Men should be raising holy hell about that with their doctors and/or the docs’ staff, I know I sure would.
nicely said ,MitM.
My credo is Nobody is free unless everyone is free.
of controlling a society known to man. Time-tested and proven over the millennia, it has no equal in this regard.
As you so eloquently point out, when women are chattelized, so, in a subtler, darker way are men, which is why you are asked by some “Why do you care?”
As Diane Rehm would say, indeed! Having huge families meant that men had to be the providers for all of those kids, spreading whatever resources they could muster over many mouths versus fewer mouths. Yes, certainly their wives were providing too, especially in an agricultural society where there was not a rigid separation of the adults by gender, e.g. men going off to work elsewhere while women stayed at home. Children were truly essential assistants to production, and their mothers were the engines that produced them.
But struggle was the result in any case, whether city or rural life: Many mouths being cared for by few adults with few resources equals poverty. Occasional wars and available empty territories are good for pruning the excess people. But the worst is simply the invidious luck of random life: people who got first to the best resources worked to keep others from those resources. It is still happening.