General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOhio Republicans declare motherhood "necessary," want to make it mandatory
https://www.salon.com/2018/11/21/ohio-republicans-declare-motherhood-necessary-want-to-make-it-mandatory/In the stampede to ban abortion, Republican politicians don't always bother to keep up the pretense that their opposition to abortion is about "life." All too often, they let slip how much it's rooted in contempt for women having control over their own bodies and their own futures.
Last week, the Ohio state house passed a bill that would ban abortions at six weeks. That would effectively a ban on most abortions, since performing the procedure before a pregnancy shows up on an ultrasound, which happens at just about six weeks, is not medically recommended. During debate over the bill in the Ohio state house, Republican state Rep. Christina Hagan brought her infant twins onto the floor to shame women who aren't mothers about their alleged selfishness.
"Motherhood isn't easy but it's necessary," Hagan dramatically declared when arguing for her bill to make motherhood mandatory.
Perhaps we should be grateful to Hagan for using her floor time to unsubtly suggest that women who have abortions are lazy and selfish. There should be no doubt that this is the belief that motivates the anti-choice movement in general, but most abortion foes have become media savvy enough to realize that they get more sympathy if they ascribe views to a religious delusion that equates embryonic life to that of actual babies. So at least Hagan showed her true colors, revealing the resentment of childless women and desire to exert control over other people's lives that lies at the center of the anti-choice movement.
Still, this rhetoric is enraging on a couple of levels. First, there's the deep sexism of assuming that a childless woman has nothing to offer society, that our value is only in the womb and not in the brain and the heart.
Furthermore, Hagan's insinuation that forced childbirth is needed to ensure the continuation of the human race simply doesn't reflect reality. The majority nearly 60 percent of women who seek abortions are mothers already. Among the rest, plenty plan to have children in the future, but are waiting for stability in both their economic and romantic life because that's best for the child. Women have abortions because they take motherhood seriously and believe that it's better for children to be raised in homes that are ready to accept them.
That's why it shouldn't be controversial to point out that anti-choice views are rooted in misogyny. These people actively choose to ignore the carefully collected evidence about women's lives, in order to cling to sexist stereotypes painting women who have abortions as lazy and slutty. The only reason to choose ugly stereotypes over facts is because you want to believe the worst about women.
RELATED:
Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding
https://www.thenation.com/article/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding/
This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Toms Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: If we could get a breed of gals that didnt care, now, for their young uns would be bout the greatest modrn improvement I knows on, says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.
The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewaters argument, which continues thus. If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.
Zoonart
(11,832 posts)Me.
(35,454 posts)while I make no judgment, I'd like to point out that planet earth is already overcrowded without forcing women to have babies they have decided, for whatever reason, not to have.
Jeffersons Ghost
(15,235 posts)DBoon
(22,340 posts)Nazi ideology was biased against women in several ways. The Nazis used a simplified and exaggerated mythology about German life, needed a growing population to fight the wars that would unite the Volk, and was inherently misogynistic. The result was that a Nazi ideology claiming women should be restricted to three things: Kinder, Küche, Kirche, or children, kitchen, church. Women were encouraged from a young age to grow into mothers who bore children and then looked after them until they could go and conquer the east. Developments which aided women in determining their own fates, such as contraception, abortion, and laws about relationships, were all restricted to create more children, and fecund mothers could win medals for large families. However, overall German women did not start having any more children, and the pool of women who were invited to have children shrank: the Nazis only wanted Aryan mothers to have Aryan children, and racism, sterilization, and discriminatory laws tried to reduce non-Aryan children.
https://www.thoughtco.com/nazis-and-women-1221068
Ferrets are Cool
(21,102 posts)exboyfil
(17,862 posts)Just suggesting it.
BootinUp
(47,078 posts)I know, not funny.
blueinredohio
(6,797 posts)I think we're good until January at least because Kasich said he would veto it if it came to his desk. But will McSwine? I hate all those fuckers.
MissB
(15,803 posts)NEOBuckeye
(2,781 posts)These guys win a supermajority here, thanks to their built-in advantage, and abortion, abortion, abortion, is the first thing they jump on.
So many other things we could be dealing with, that this state needs, but these misogynistic bastards can only focus on abortion. I wish we could run the whole lot of them out of power, and run that wretched ass-backwards party out of existence.
Ohiogal
(31,909 posts)I couldn't have said it any better. You expressed my thoughts exactly. I hate these misogynistic old fuckers with a passion.
You know they are hoping to keep chipping away at women's rights until they can bring the case of states making abortion 100% illegal come before the SCOTUS, now that they have the rapist frat boy on board. I am truly sickened over it.
msongs
(67,361 posts)WhiskeyGrinder
(22,307 posts)This is in reference only to aspiration abortions, I assume -- medication abortions can be done earlier than aspiration, and two-thirds of all abortions are performed before eight weeks. While the situation is indeed urgent, the writer muffed it here.
Ohiogal
(31,909 posts)to make medication abortions illegal too. They'll stop at nothing to force their agenda down womens' throats.
WhiskeyGrinder
(22,307 posts)people tend to believe that most abortions are aspiration or "surgical," when almost half of those before 8 weeks are induced by medication.