WTH, Raquel??

[boston bean]

Raquel Welch weighs in on abortion and birth control and how it's ruined America.

It's sex o'clock in America

On the upside, by the early 60's The Pill had made it easier for a woman to choose to delay having children until after she established herself in a career. Nonetheless, for young women of childbearing age (I was one of them) there was a need for some careful soul searching -- and consideration about the long-range effects of oral contraceptives -- before addressing this very personal decision. It was a decision I too would have to face when I discovered I was pregnant at age 19.

Even though I was married to the baby's father, Jim Welch, I wasn't prepared for this development. It meant I would have to put my career ambitions on hold. But "the choice" was not mine alone to make. I had always wanted to have Jim's babies, but wasn't at all sure how he would react. At the time, we were 19-year-old newlyweds, struggling to make ends meet. But he was unflinching in his desire to keep our baby and his positive, upbeat attitude about the whole prospect turned everything around. I have always loved Jim for how he responded in that moment.

During my pregnancy, I came to realize that this process was not about me. I was just a spectator to the metamorphosis that was happening inside my womb so that another life could be born. It came down to an act of self-sacrifice, especially for me, as a woman. But both of us were fully involved, not just for that moment, but for the rest of our lives. And it's scary. You may think you can skirt around the issue and dodge the decision, but I've never known anyone who could. Jim and I had two beautiful children who've been an ongoing blessing to both of us.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/07/welch.sex.pill/?hpt=Mid

[Captain Hilts]

1. Women are a really, really lousy 'interest group' or voting bloc. They're their own worst enemies.

[boston bean]

2. This was the shocker:

Raquel says:

One significant, and enduring, effect of The Pill on female sexual attitudes during the 60's, was: "Now we can have sex anytime we want, without the consequences. Hallelujah, let's party!"

It remains this way. These days, nobody seems able to "keep it in their pants" or honor a commitment! Raising the question: Is marriage still a viable option? I'm ashamed to admit that I myself have been married four times, and yet I still feel that it is the cornerstone of civilization, an essential institution that stabilizes society, provides a sanctuary for children and saves us from anarchy.

[Captain Hilts]

3. It's dodgy to judge others, isn't it?

[boston bean]

4. She is blaming everything on the pill, and basically stating that if women

were to get pregnant more often, we would keep our legs closed.

So her opinion is the pill made women promiscuous sluts and ruined the fabric of America.

What if the pill was invented for the male species, would there be criticism like this?

[Captain Hilts]

13. No way. Men have a 'get out of responsibility free' card when it comes to sex. nt

[unc70]

27. Fear of pregnancy was strong deterrent. Posts here distort her article

I disagree with nearly every poster so far in this thread. At first, I thought that the CNN story might be different from the newspaper one I read in a hospital waiting room yesterday. Verified CNN version is the same, think few here read the whole article since their posts are inconsistent with or contradicted by what she wrote.

The OP completely misframes her article with the sentence:

"Raquel Welch weighs in on abortion and birth control and how it's ruined America."

Her article makes no mention of abortion, nor does she claim it has ruined America. Her are her key points are stated clearly at the top of the article:

* Raquel Welch: The Pill has altered society in ways good and bad
* An upside has been empowerment of women in life decisions
* Welch: Downside is loss of caution and discernment in choice of sex partners

She is not bitter, excusing herself, or condeming others. Rather, she looks at where things have now evolved and some of the resulting problems:

"Seriously, folks, if an aging sex symbol like me starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards have plummeted, you know it's gotta be pretty bad."

Whether you share her conerns or not, the changes over the past fifty years are dramatic, the implications of evolving current behavior for the future, equally dramatic.


Maybe some of you are too young, ill-informed to understand the status of women 50 years ago. Maybe even a few of you saw this as the older generation condeming a younger one's, little different from the attacks on rock & roll fifty years ago. Or like segregation, things have changed so much that it is nearly impossible for anyone to comprehend who did not experience it personally.

Fear of pregnancy was real, its consequencies interwoven throughout society as justification for the separate and unequal treatment of women in almost every way. Discrimination against women was as great as that aginst Blacks. The civil rights movement became as much about gender equality as about racial equality.

For instance, a married women employed as a bank teller was "expected" to resign several months before she would deliver her baby, with no insurance or other benefits, and would not return to work. With rare exceptions, women denied consideration for promotion, training, or better-paying jobs because it would be wasted on them since they would just be getting pregnant anyway. In the same job, a man might be paid more because he had a family to support. In large measure in 1960, the role of women as helpmate to their husbands was little changed from that proscribed by Puritan Cotton Mather 250 years earlier.

The civil rights movement, the pill, and coming of age of the Boomers were critical elements that started the sexual revolution and put women on a more-equal position in the workforce. And also in their relationships and in many marriages.

As an early Boomer, I was in the middle of all this and remember before and after. I just went to my 40th college reunion so many of the memories are recently refreshed. My freshman year, women students were confined to their individual dorm rooms beginning at 8:00 on week nights, and were required to wear dresses or skirts on campus. In four years we changed all that, and how.

But even by our standards(?) during the sexual revolution, I find it hard to think of oral sex as no big thing (especially in middle school), much less as reported elsewhere that anyone considers having anal intercourse instead a good strategy for retaining ones virginity.

As Lewis Black said Saturday night, our country has serious problems when someone like him is now considered a main-stream comedian.

[boston bean]

30. WRONG. She does speak of "choice" meaning abortion.

secondly, this is her opinion on the effect the pill has had on society (remember only women take contraceptives)

"One significant, and enduring, effect of The Pill on female sexual attitudes during the 60's, was: "Now we can have sex anytime we want, without the consequences. Hallelujah, let's party!"

It remains this way. These days, nobody seems able to "keep it in their pants" or honor a commitment!


There's non judgmental raquel for ya.

[unc70]

31. Maybe meant abortion, maybe not. Irrelevant to the point she was making

Raquel's article really needed some effort by a competent editor. It is a jumble of poorly organized and often incomplete pieces that get in the way of each other and of the points I think she was trying to make. Several things need clarification for anyone much younger than 60. I suspect this article is derived from some interview of Raquel by a much-younger writer, possibly for one of the Sunday newspaper magazine inserts; seems like what you see on a TV interview show.

If she had said "have the baby" it would certainly have meant the alternative was to have an abortion. Since she used the term "keep the baby", the alternative was probably giving the baby up for adoption rather than having an illegal abortion. Either meaning works in support of her points regarding the importance of being selective in one's sexual partners.

While we don't usually think of giving a baby up for adoption when its parents are married to each other, it happened routinely.

[boston bean]

32. I think you are butchering what she wrote, in an attempt to agree with what raquel wrote. nt

[WeDidIt]

5. She's blaming her own personal misgivings on an inanimate object

She has some serious issues with herself that she is unwilling to face, therefore she blames an inanimate object for her moral failings.

[unc70]

28. Show me the place she says that.

I see nothing to support your claim. What particular part of the article are you referring to?

[seabeyond]

16. my sons and i had conversation this morning matter of fact. except inevidably people look to connect

one on one. i listen to people say monogamy cannot be, is not the answer, marriage is too confining. yet i hear the same people say, i am so lonely, i want one of my own, i want that connection, i dont want to share.

41% of marriages end in divorce. not all of those are from cheating. finances is the number one cause for divorce. 16,17 % of women cheat. 20% of men cheat. the vast majority of people do not.

talking about personal experience, i got married late. at 32. i played prior to marriage. commitment has not been tough or a struggle for me at all. nor husband.

i guess it all depends....

[sufrommich]

6. Unlike men. nt

[boston bean]

7. That doesn't enter the equation, per raquel. nt

[Captain Hilts]

11. But no one assumes that men all think alike on political social issues as they do with women. nt

[Alcibiades]

8. Pretty classy

A swell thing to let your kid know that you considered aborting them. WTF? Anyway, that's probably bullshit: whatever mixed feelings she may have had about her pregnancy, in 1959 a married woman in America probably wouldn't seriously have considered abortion. And even if that was the case, how does it bolster her argument that we are in some sort of new state of moral decline?

[Skidmore]

10. You know, I'm more offended by your comment than I am by hers.

Women, married or otherwise, did consider and had abortions performed in the 1950s and in all other eras and locations in the world. They still do. If a woman truly does not want to be pregnant and abortion is something she is willing to do, she will find a way. I lived in a nation where abortion was punishable by death to the mother, and abortions still happened.

[Alcibiades]

21. My mother had one

It was not 1959, but 1962. It was illegal, so obviously I know they happened back then.

Still, I think most married, Catholic women of that era would not have seriously considered abortion. Maybe someone of Welch's class background, because those folks always had more options, but I'd guess that was not the case: she's just fitting her story to the narrative she's crafting.

[Captain Hilts]

12. Wow. A man who knows how women thought about birth control in the late 1950s! nt

[Alcibiades]

22. Yep

Books are swell time machines. Plus I've actually spoken to women who were alive back then.

[Captain Hilts]

25. Our associations are very self-selecting and rarely indicative of the general population.

Anecdotes don't necessarily comprise data.

[Alcibiades]

29. So what are you looking for?

A subjective understanding of what women felt in the 1950's, or data on the frequency of abortion before Roe? Most of my understanding of that time comes from my reading of second-wave feminists. This is an era before women had their consciousness raised. My mother was one of them--a girl who grew into a woman who joined the feminist movement. We spoke about this sort of thing a lot, about how, when she got pregnant in 1962, at the age of 19, her boyfriend scraped together the money to marry her, and how he also paid for the abortion she had at that time. Not because she didn't want kids: she did, and a 19 year old being married and having a baby wasn't so unusual then, but she didn't want to give birth to a child to whom she would also, biologically, also be an aunt.

OK, I know, that's an anecdote. Only one data point. Suffice it to say, though, that I've thought a lot about this subject since I was eight and had this conversation with my mother, who was also struggling with depression. But when I think about her situation and that of Raquel Welch, three years earlier, who was married to the father of her baby, who wasn't subject to years of sexual abuse at the hands of her own father, and who did, in fact, deliver the baby she was carrying, I think it's safe to say that she didn't entertain the idea as seriously as my mother did.

The problem with someone like a Raquel Welch is that they project their own cases onto other people--exactly the issue you raise. Maybe she did flirt with the idea of an abortion at the time, or maybe it occurred to her years later, when she was bogged down with two young kids and not enjoying the glamorous life which she had imagined she would lead, and would actually get to lead later. Looking back on it, she may think she was frivolous, and may even imagine that most women who get abortions do so for reasons she would consider frivolous.

I have no fucking problem calling her out on her bullshit, because I would rather have a hundred women get legal, safe abortions for reasons Raquel Welch would consider frivolous than to force one daughter to carry her abuser's child to term.

[slackmaster]

17. Just a data point or two for you - Elective abortion was not legal in California when Raquel was 19

I don't mean to say that it didn't happen illegally, or that women couldn't simply go to Tijuana or another state to get one, or that the Tejada family couldn't have afforded to do any of the above; but it was very much frowned upon by society in general.

Raquel first became pregnant at 19, one year before the pill became available.

She grew up in a very different time than most of us did, and in a Catholic family.

[seabeyond]

18. i dont know about moral decline. i do know that we have sexualized our female to such an extent

too many of them feel that is their worth. and too many of men see women as merely their fuck. that needs to change.

[Captain Hilts]

24. BINGO. nt

[Heidi]

9. If she wants to get persnickety, she should admit sharing the blame

for women being seen as sex objects. And her calling us "girls" in the last paragraph just about made me barf. My grandmother is a southern woman, nearly 90 years old, and she wouldn't dream of addressing other women as "girls."

[okieinpain]

20. so true. n/t.

[tomg]

14. Wow, I wish I was a former

celebrity. Then I could say any weird nonsense that came into my head and they would publish it on CNN.

I hate it when serious social issues are reduced to banalities:

"These days, nobody seems able to "keep it in their pants" or honor a commitment! Raising the question: Is marriage still a viable option? I'm ashamed to admit that I myself have been married four times, and yet I still feel that it is the cornerstone of civilization, an essential institution that stabilizes society, provides a sanctuary for children and saves us from anarchy."

[spanone]

15. i set my moral compass by what raquel welch says ...bwahahahaha

[lunatica]

19. She did her part to objectify women as sex toys

Her opinion is valuable but only if she speaks for herself.

[redqueen]

23. Did? She still does.

Have you seen her lately? Some surgeons are making a boatload of cash thanks to her.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

26. She's a bitter person

Her career petered out when she couldn't get by on her looks anymore.

[Tabasco_Dave]

33. I'm getting bored with self repentant baby boomers

If they had a pill that could make them twenty years old, they'd do the same shit all over again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgqTS3XcAuI :eyes: I'm not knocking all baby boomers, just the hypocrites.