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Can you be a feminist if you support making abortion illegal?
DarkCrawler
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Registered User regular
Little bit of an background.
So...what the title says.
Homophobia I can see. But misogyny? I don't see how "family planning" issues tie into that at all. It's one of the things I hate most about parts of the modern feminist movement, that they've conflated such things with sexism. It is needlessly divisive and does a disservice to both causes.
Maybe I'm biased here, because my wife is one of those who is strongly opposed to abortion being legal in any form; yet she believes in comprehensive sex education, considers herself a stalwart feminist, and is violently opposed to discrimination of any kind.
DarkCrawler wrote: »...I don't believe you can call yourself a feminist if you oppose abortion in all it's forms. What about where the life of mother is in peril? What about rape and such? Incest?
DarkCrawler wrote: »...I don't believe you can call yourself a feminist if you oppose abortion in all it's forms. What about where the life of mother is in peril? What about rape and such? Incest?
I believe her sole exception is when the life of the mother is at risk; in that case, she believes it is the mother's choice. She believes, and I agree with her, that aborting in the case of rape or incest are a case of trying to force two wrongs to make a right.
Your wife is not a feminist, she's just a self-interested reactionary. Sorry.
Dude, Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist, but for some reason I don't really believe she fits the bill. Any woman in favor of severely restricting a woman's bodily autonomy to just a few extreme cases is hardly a feminist in my eyes. Shit, from what you say, I'm more of a feminist than your wife.
Dude, Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist, but for some reason I don't really believe she fits the bill. Any woman in favor of severely restricting a woman's bodily autonomy to just a few extreme cases is hardly a feminist in my eyes. Shit, from what you say, I'm more of a feminist than your wife.
Obviously she believes that the fetus' right to live trumps the mother's right to avoid nine months being pregnant and a birth.
Which is what it comes down to, really, and this is not the abortion thread. That said, I fail to see how said belief makes you sexist toward women. It is an ideological difference but not one of discriminatory motive.
So...what the title says.
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I don't know if I'd categorize abortion with feminist movements. Sure there are a huge swath of them that agree choice is good, but there are also probably a sizable amount that value the life of children/embryo/clump of cells too.
Just like there's a few group of Christians opposed to gay marriage, if I were to pick an analogy.
Your wife is not a feminist, she is just a self-interested reactionary. Sorry.
I could see a feminist not liking abortions, and even verbally saying that she doesn't like them.
But it would sum up much like the, "I don't agree with what you say - but I will defend your right to say it."
She might not like and wish that she lived in a world where they weren't an issue. But in the grand scheme of things the choice of having the abortion should always be there.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
This is the point you need to support before you can get to point B. The rest of your argument depends on that; if you can't support it, you're still flinging poo.
I think you're able to disagree with the Grand Feminist Checklist of Issues on a few points and still consider yourself a member in the clubhouse. It's not like every individual Catholic agrees with the Church every single time.
Well the real Catholics do. Heathen.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
I thought that was pretty logical. The rest of the article is here:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/10/10/pro-life-feminism-oxymoron/#comments
Thread title changed too to avoid confusion.
Yes.
Even asking the question in the OP only makes sense if you accept the premise that life starts sometime after conception. That's a question unrelated to gender equality. I guess you could posit that it is okay to murder a baby if it's in your womb, but I don't believe most think of it that way.
[edit] P.S.
I'm pro baby murder ('pro choice' to those in the club)
But feminism is not defined in terms of abortion, it's defined in terms of equal rights for women, yes? The idea that men and women are equals and should be treated as such under the law, right? Assume that both men and women could become pregnant - would opposing abortion in that case be anti-feminist? Of course, not, that's stupid - the sentiment would apply equally to men and women. So why is it suddenly anti-feminist when we return to the Real World, in which men are physically incapable of becoming pregnant, and thus having abortions? It's illegal to dick-slap random people in public, and only men are capable of dick-slapping - is this an misandristic law? Of course not.
I suppose you could argue that it's fundamentally against women's rights because you are constraining what they are doing with their bodies while not similarly constraining what men may do with theirs, but it's not like this is the only law of that nature. It's illegal to ingest certain controlled substances - is this a misanthropic law? It's illegal to commit suicide - misanthropy?
Again, I'm not saying that anti-abortion sentiment is not commonly tied to misogyny - only that it's silly to say that it's fundamentally intertwined, unless you start making some pretty specious logical leaps.
Actually the Catholic Church says that you aren't a Catholic if you disbelieve the teachings of the Church, you are a heretic. And being an American is not based on ideology - DarkCrawler might agree with some core American ideology but that doesn't mean he's an American.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Without access to universal health care, people die.
Without a right to lethal self-defense, people die.
Without certain drugs being legal, people die.
This can very well mean that all of these things are good ideas, and that it's foolish to support them. Does it make you a misanthrope if you disagree? Are you necessarily anti-human if you oppose UHC?
That's a pretty weak argument. It's comparable to the way some people insist that any bad law must necessarily be unconstitutional.
In the larger framework of the political landscape, I put forth that it isn't necessarily always about misogyny and religion. but it almost always is. In terms of politics, the same party that rallies the pro-lifers is also the party that rallies death penalty supporters. In fact, pro-life people very often are in favor of the death penalty. These positions are mutually exclusive. If you believe the death penalty is ok then you don't believe life is inherently sacred, you believe it to be conditionally sacred. At which point you need to argue why it's ok to kill criminals but it isn't ok to let a woman abort what works out to be a 300k or so 18 year old ball and chain.
Going further with this, this isn't the only logical inconsistency in the Republican platform. Instead of teaching comprehensive sex-ed in an effort to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, they latch onto ab-only, which has done nothing but fail miserably again and again, as areas that adopt it have all seen huge spikes in unwanted pregnancies. Instead of funding programs that would help a mother deal with raising a kid in suboptimal circumstances, they cripple them. Things like Welfare and the school lunch program, all of which are disincentives to people keeping a child instead of aborting it. Instead of allowing gays to adopt and raise a kid who would otherwise go unwanted, they not only ban them from doing so, they have actually stripped them of their adopted kids.
None of these policies are logically consistent with the end goal of reducing or eliminating abortions. But they are all very effectively, "punishing the whores and making them sleep in the bed they made, those filthy sluts." This is basically the litmus test for whether or not a particular pro-lifer actually gives half a shit about the fetus or is just a misogynist.
LoL: failboattootoot
This is one of those debates that is going to go in circles until we tackle the core issue, which has already been discussed extensively in the abortion thread. It comes down to whether you believe the fetus is a person. If it is, and you support abortion rights, many more people, male and female, will die because of its legality, than would otherwise die if it was illegal. That also brings up the issue of whether it is acceptable to forego fetuses' right to live because practically speaking people will break the law and kill themselves in the process of committing a crime.
Regardless, let me say this: This issue was first brought up in connection to the idea that opposing abortion rights is somehow inherently misogynistic. I would argue that for it to be misogynistic it must stem from misogynistic motives. I personally think this is a moronic link to draw.
Believing the fetus is a person may be ideological, it may not be provable, it may even stem from religious beliefs. That is up for debate. What it is not is inherently misogynistic.
Bollocks.
Anti-abortion sentiment is (allegedly) based on the premise that a person is, at conception, a fully realized human being and should be granted full legal rights. Why would that suddenly stop if the kid was conceived through rape or incest? It's still a person. Fundamental opposition to abortion in all cases except when the life of the mother is threatened is one of the more consistent and intellectually defensible flavors of anti-choice out there. It's way wrong, and it fails spectacularly on pragmatic grounds versus the garden-variety anti-choice beliefs, but it's not more anti-feminist.
Was the Grandfather Clause voting restrictions in the Jim Crowe South not racist because it just happened to be that only whites had grandfathers could vote? Would a law restricting praying towards Mecca not be discriminatory because it would be possible for Catholics to do so too?
A restriction is discriminatory when it applies specifically to a protected class, some distinguishing feature of that class or is otherwise disproportionately targeted at the class. The ability to get pregnant and thus to get an abortion is a unique feature of females and restrictions on that are specifically aimed at pregnant women.
It is not illegal to cock slap someone, and that's where the other side of your argument falls apart. Its illegal to commit assault under which cock-slapping could fall as a category. It is also illegal to perform a medical procedure without a medical license, but that does not constitute a restriction on abortion despite the fact that abortions fall under medical procedures.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
So how many real Catholics are in the world? I'd say the Church prefers the billion-strong estimate of Catholics in the world versus however many Catholics measure up to strict guidelines. A billion is an impressive number.
And being a 'real' American is an ideology, going by Fox News. :P
A friend of mine in a very Baptist community in the South became pregnant by her boyfriend when she was 15 years old. Her parents were ashamed so they threw her out of the house. So she decided to go to the only other place she'd ever felt truly safe growing up: she went to church. When she got there, though, the preacher thought the sin of her promiscuity was a danger to the parish, so he told her to go away and never return.
She had the baby. She could have had an abortion, but she didn't believe that was the right thing to do. And she kept her little girl rather than give her up for adoption because she felt like the girl needed her mother -- bear in mind, she'd just been thrown out by her parents, so she felt pretty damned strongly about the importance of staying in her daughter's life. And even though she actually hated the son of a bitch by the time she turned 18, she married the father anyway because she felt like that's what her daughter needed, a mother and a father.
The church still won't let her come back anyway because she got knocked up as a teenager, and they can't get over their hatred of that.
Here's the thing: if you hate women who have abortions, and you hate women who don't have abortions, what you actually hate are women. I absolutely refuse to be drawn into the debate with the likes of the misogynistic assholes who dominate the discussion, so for me it remains a personal choice. But my pro-choice feminist girlfriend has absolutely no problem with my feminist credentials, nor does my mother (who's in a history book somewhere about being the first woman to do something pretty cool).
That church behaving like that toward your friend is totally fucked up, but not at all surprising. It's not even remotely Christ-like. I'm not sure it's conclusively misogynistic, though; it sounds like they can't get over their own hatred for premarital sex. Then again, there's probably a proper dose of misogyny thrown in there too, because I doubt they would have cared if it was a guy who had slept around.
What the hell does the law have to do with this? Who cares if it's a legally discriminatory action? We're talking about whether it constitutes misogyny, which is defined entirely by intent and motive.
Moreover, your comparisons are retarded. Jim Crow laws were specifically set up in order to discriminate against blacks. There was no other possible motive. The Grandfather Clause? No possible motive other than racism. Banning praying towards Mecca? No possible motive other than anti-Islam.
With abortion, the core justification for opposition is that people deserve full natural rights at conception, including the right to live. Now, explain to me how that belief in itself is misogynist.
It specifically requires pregnant females to forgo a medical procedure in the interest of another individual. It is not legal to make a parent give blood to save a child or a unique donor to give marrow to a dying Saint. Even if one concedes that a fetus is equivalent to an infant, prohibiting the pregnant female from ending her pregnancy - a medical condition that does pretty severe short term damage, potentially does significant long term damage and that is potentially fatal - through a safe medical procedure when authorized or prescribed by medical professionals is a special restriction on females.
The fact that it is a restriction on females is not solely what makes it wrong but that doesn't mean its not a restriction specifically aimed at females. Restricting blacks from voting was wrong both because it was discriminatory and because it stripped them of a fundamental right. Restricting abortion is primarily wrong because it strips a fundamental right but also because it is specifically aimed at females, both pragmatically and historically.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Exactly!
Why else would a group that is anti-abortion oppose contraception?
It's not at all the same as race because there is no actual physical difference between black people and white people beyond surface issues. This has to do with a fundamental physical difference between men and women and ruling one way or another is still addressing it, because it has to be addressed.
Regarding whether requiring pregnant females to forego a medical procedure for another individual is a violation their rights, the situations are not the same as the comparisons you mentioned. I would argue that there is a definite difference between action (killing the fetus) and inaction (not donating blood/marrow/whatever).
First, you're attempting to move the goal posts. One can be a non-feminist and not a misogynist. A feminist is defined very generally as advocating equal rights between men and women, not as someone who doesn't hate women.
Second, your claim that the core justification of restriction of abortion involves the idea of natural rights at conception is historically unsupported.
Third, restrictions don't have to be specifically set up in order to discriminate in order to be discriminatory. Japanese Internment during WWII was intended to prevent sabotage by Japanese-Americans - still incredibly racist. Does the existence of another justification change that?
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
The reason we tend to be suspicious of this is because anti-abortion sentiment, as it exists in the larger culture, isn't really motivated by the core anti-abortion argument about life starting at conception. The pro-life movement, as many have observed, is essentially a response to the women's movement. It's persisted as long as it has because it has the benefit of a crypto-scientific argument that doesn't explicitly rely on any misogynist premise. But it still draws its energy from popular resentments against feminism. The pro-life argument is emotionally satisfying to many of its proponents largely because it permits them to judge and punish those irresponsible selfish feminist women.
But individuals don't always march in lockstep with the larger cultural dynamics. I think we can give an individual who claims to be a pro-life feminist the benefit of the doubt, and assume she's motivated by principle. But we can also recognize the larger sentiment that exists in the culture for what it is.
I moved the goal posts, and for that I apologize. That said, what, exactly, is preventing someone from advocating equal rights between men and women and still believing that violating a fetus' right to live is wrong?
But we're not talking about the historical core justification of abortion. We're talking about whether it's possible for a person to be against abortion rights and still be a feminist.
because some people see abortion as murder, and murder is worse.
to them it's the same reason that there's a law against me robbing a bank even though it would help me out a lot.
When there's a system where pregnant women can take their pregnancy and let volunteers and donations bear it instead of her like soup-kitchens your analogy will be relevant. And at that point I will say that yeah I do think it's okay to let a starving homeless person get away with snatching a loaf of bread. I also think it's okay to kill someone to stop them from permanently blinding or otherwise crippling you, even if they're only trying to cripple you for life and not actually kill you. And that's without getting into any of the contextually unique situations that come up with abortion like daughters of abusive fathers not being able to abort their father's grandkid without him finding out and punishing her face into a Van Gogh painting.
They don't have to conform to the traditional social roles of wife and mother to bring a child to term. That's why we have an adoption system with many couples eagerly awaiting an infant to adopt.
fixed
See, justifying restrictions based on gender because there are real differences between men and women is pretty much the definition of not being a feminist.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
well those people are probably also against men getting abortions.