In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Wherein A Young Anti-Choicer Explains Abortion

I do hesitate to be this petty, but I think someone needs to quit masturbating in the shower and then crying his eyes out afterwards because of all the lives he’s ended.

The abandonment of ideals, even wrong ones, leaves each to define his own existence, which leads to a miserable narcissism that turns to hedonism. Having found that heaven on earth is elusive, modernity seeks consolation in pleasure; if we can’t achieve utopia, we can at least have many toys and orgasms before death.

Orgasm and die, bitches.

Especially if there are toys involved.

And a final note to self: Don’t spend any amount of a time with a person so miserable that he considers an orgasm to be an example of unfettered hedonism which must be thwarted.

Abortion is a symptom of a corrupted liberalism. Liberal visions formerly had some nobility, however wrongheaded the ideology may have been when taken as a whole. But even their limited virtue has been obliterated by the insistence that we must be allowed to murder our progeny to create a better world for them.

This contradiction arises because liberalism is a dying faith. All the various liberal catechisms that were formed in the Western world were attempts to fill the vacancy left by a receding Christianity. They attempted to solve the problem of sin, each promising that if we followed their social program, the wrongs of the world would be removed.

But wickedness has not been so easily vanquished, and thus the West has become ever more hopeless.

Which explains why nations based on liberalism, like the United States, Great Britain, Norway, Belgium, and Sweden have been such spectacular failures.

Existence without meaning is a horror, and it is now accepted that man is but an animal, and an animal is but atoms assembled by random chance. Those who believe this may still seek to gratify themselves, but they haven’t the will to procreate.

Moral of the story: No, little Johnny, all dogs don’t go to heaven, because they don’t go to church to find meaning like the good animals do.

Reproduction is a defiance issued against ennui. To welcome children is to assert that life is meaningful and worth living; voluntary sterility consummates the opposite.

The culture of contraception and abortion bespeaks Western civilization’s belief that it neither deserves nor wishes to exist. Like Ivan in “The Brothers Karamazov”, we shall squeeze what we can from this life, and then “dash the cup to the ground.” The difference is that the West does not contemplate suicide with violence, but with the caresses of impotent copulation. The dream of barren sexuality is a dream of death.

Having sex for pleasure is deadly. Gritting your teeth through sex and viewing yourself as simply a reproductive instrument at the will of your husband, getting pregnant as many times as nature dictates (or, excuse me, as many times as God dictates) and giving birth as many times as you get pregnant is, in fact, not deadly at all. Which doesn’t exactly square with maternal mortality statistics, but whatever. Dying while in labor with your 16th child is as life-affirming as it gets. Thank you, Nathaneal Blake, for showing me the light. I wish upon you dozens and dozens of pregnancies, which, as a pro-life man, you will undoubtedly relish as you see all the wonderful things that dozens of childbirths will do to the body. Because we are talking about your body, aren’t we?

Friday Random Ten

The “It’s just not the same without Lauren” edition.

1. Elliott Smith – Angeles
2. Neil Young – Star of Bethlehem
3. Mariah Carey – Shake It Off
4. The Flaming Lips – Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell
5. Tom Waits – Looks Like I’m Up Shit Creek Again
6. Ray Charles and Betty Carter – Baby It’s Cold Outside
7. Janet Jackson – Rhythm Nation
8. Ani Difranco – Beautiful Night
9. Sigur Ros with Mogwai – Luvstory
10. Portishead – Biscuit

God I am so uncool. Apparenly zuzu is uncool too. Piny, can you help us out here?

Also, I need an iPod. Doing this thing on iTunes every week just exemplifies how uncool I truly am.

Ms. Lauren, you must figure out a way to send me your entire music collection so that Feministe doesn’t become the uncool music blog. I’d hate to see that insufferable music snob beat us out.

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What A Pro-Life International Policy Looks Like

I posted briefly yesterday on the efforts by anti-choice groups to keep women in developing nations poor, pregnant and uninformed about their bodies. These so-called “pro-life” groups will tell you that it’s good for women in developing nations to submit to their husbands or male partners, and that being pregnant is the best thing a woman can be.

Now, I’m certainly not anti-pregnancy. I think pregnancy is great. I’ve never been pregnant myself, but it’s probably something I’ll choose one day.

However, as a woman living in a developed nation, as a person who has the ability to control her own fertility and plan childbirth, and as someone with access to very good medical care, I have a lot of privilege. And the anti-choice folks who assume that all women worldwide are able to have problem-free baby-loving pregnancies are either ignorant or willfully blind. Because there’s this.

“There’s a saying in one of those countries, ‘To be pregnant is to have one foot in the grave,'” Roenneburg explained. Even if the girl survives labor, she may be left with a vesicovaginal fistula – a hole in the tissue separating the bladder from the vaginal canal.

Because of the fistula the victims constantly leak urine, and because of their foul smell – which one of Roenneburg’s patients described as being like “walking death.” Frequently, the girls are abandoned by their husbands, families or entire villages.

Although usually forestalled by cesarean section in the developed world, fistulas affect about 2 million women in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia, where adequate health care is often unavailable for women in labor, according to estimates by the World Health Organization.

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Missouri: A Case Study

The New York Times covered it a while back, but now Time Magazine has jumped on board to examine Missouri’s extreme limits on abortion rights — to the point where getting an abortion in Missouri is nearly impossible.

Consider, for example, the case of a 22-year-old unmarried woman we will call Lisa, who missed her period last November. Lisa, who was managing a restaurant, decided to have an abortion. Her timing could have been better. Just the month before, Springfield’s only abortion provider, which had been operating five days a week just 15 minutes from her home, closed its doors. “The environment here in Missouri is so hostile,” its administrator told the local paper. With four abortion doctors left in the state, compared with 10 as recently as 1996, Lisa’s closest alternative turned out to be the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis, an eight-hour round trip by car. That meant Lisa, who has no car, not only had to ask a friend to drive her but also had to come up with an excuse for missing two days of work, because she was afraid to tell her boss the truth. Two weeks later, she had to make the trip again, for a follow-up exam that lasted about five minutes. She figures the whole episode–the clinic’s bill, the prescription for the abortion drug mifepristone, gasoline, food and incidentals–cost her a little more than $600. “It was all very frustrating,” Lisa told TIME a month after her abortion. “I only recently paid back everyone I borrowed money from.”

All that, for one of the most common surgical procedures in the United States.

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Friday Cat Blogging

No FRT from me until I perhaps get with the times and get some kind of device to play mp3s on.

And maybe some mp3s, for that matter.

God, I’m so uncool.

Anyway, some cat pics!

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Exporting the Culture Wars

Working fervently to take away the rights of U.S. women just isn’t enough for domestic anti-abortion forces; now they want to infringe further on already limited rights of women in developing nations.

“We don’t expect to see the United Nations change, or Western Europe change,” said Joseph d’Agostino of the Population Research Institute, a Virginia-based anti-abortion group. “But with the Bush administration, pro-lifers feel there’s a real opportunity to stop the U.S. government from promoting abortion and sex education and population control in the Third World.”

Well, at least he was clear that we aren’t just talking about abortion here, and that the bigger issue involves basics like sex education, knowing how your own body functions, birth control and family planning. Better to just keep those “third-world” women in the dark about that stuff.