Anti-choice arguments are based on ugly sexist stereotypes
(lengthy, excellent, extremely depressing read)
Anti-choice arguments are based on ugly sexist stereotypes
A couple of interesting things today. ThinkProgress has a report on women who claim they want to ban abortion for “feminist” reasons.
“When I was 16, my 17-year-old boyfriend told me that if I didn’t get an abortion he would kill me,” Aimee Murphy, the 26-year-old executive director and founder of Life Matters Journal, said last week at a #WomenBetrayed rally on Capitol Hill. “It happens all the time… Women are coerced to have abortions, to go through this whole heart wrenching process.”
So the argument is that because some women claim their boyfriends bullied them into abortion, then abortion should be banned to “protect” women. By the same token, then, because men often bully women into having children, then we should ban childbirth, too, right? Yeah, not a lot of logic there. Nor is there an acknowledgement that some women turn to abortion to escape an abuser, probably because, and I’ll get to this in a moment, the hope is that by having a baby with an abuser, you can “reform” him and turn him into a non-abuser. (You can’t.)
Obviously, these women have no idea what feminism is. They heard it was something something about not liking to coerce women and so thought if they could just pretend to be for that, voila! Feminism. But of course, the policy they stand for—literally forcing women to have children against their will—is the essence of coercion. You can’t stop coercion by coercing. Feminists also oppose men who try to coerce abortions, though there is significant evidence that coercing pregnancy is the larger problem. But it’s because of the “coercion” part, not the abortion part.
Also, Murphy, a supposed feminist, says things like, “To devalue the preborn life simply because of their location or of their dependency is an act of discrimination.” Reducing a woman to nothing but a “location” that houses a pregnancy is exactly the kind of sexist objectification actual feminists stand against. Women are people, not “locations”.
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http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/anti-choice-arguments-are-based-on-ugly-sexist-stereotypes/
