Look at me, so articulate (and brief) for a change!

[trinityvixen]

This is so cute. Bittersweet, but cute That's right, haters: these gays is married. The mention of the two women who are in their 70s and who had been together for forty years almost made me cry. Remind me why we have to defend against that kind of dedication in marriage again?

No God? No problem! You can still hate on women and bid to control their bodies! Except, of course, it helps if you mention women nowhere in your article. Seriously, Amanda pointed that out at Pandagon, and I wouldn't have clicked the link to it if not to check for myself. He uses the words "conception," "fetus," and "childbirth," and that's as close as he gets to even inferring about the existance of the baby-making containers. Of course, he is diligent in mentioning TEH BEBBIEZ every opportunity he gets. This is, abstracted to absurdity, what pro-lifers sound like without their cooing platitudes or Justice Kennedy's patronizing devotion to protecting females from abortion-related regret. It is terrifying when you strip down their false canonization and see through to the true force driving them: women are not people and they might as well not exist except to push out babies.

Last but not least, birth certificates for stillborns: the movement, the pain, the legal consequences. Oh wait, ha-ha! Just kidding about that last one. I support a rational solution to the problem of what to do for people who are--reasonably--aggreived to lose a planned and wanted pregnancy. I say, give them a Word-document piece of paper that looks really nice and has the doctor's signature and the hospital's name (but no other identifying details) to go with the details of the birth. This would give the sort of closure these women claim to need, which I sympathize with a lot more than people who have spontaneous miscarriages and carry around bloody pictures of their "missing angels" (::GROAN::). Plus? There'd be no sticky need to create separate legal documents for dead babies (sure to get messed up by either government or hospital bureaucracy and lead to dead babies with full birth certs and live ones without); avoid the thorny issue of forcing legal recognition of a non-person (and avoid anti-choice kow-towing); spare taxpayer expense to fund the various committees to regulate these documents; and escape the possibility of issuing 25,000 birth certs a year that might then be used to perpetuate fraud, identity theft/illegal change that might, you know, aid terrorists in eluding authorities and getting into the country? Those things we're supposed to be really, really adamently opposed to said terrorists doing? Anyone? Bueller?

Comments

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Here, I'll even indulge you in a little bit of feminism:

Did you like how the Boston Globe editorialist implicitly compared women considering an abortion to slave-owners?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I did enjoy that, actually, because it makes the absurdity of his rant even that much more obvious to all and sundry.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

I believe life begins at conception. I just believe that that life isn't very special because life is EVERYWHERE, it happens ALL THE TIME.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Given how easily the body will turn over "life" by the life-at-conception definition--because it implants improperly, because of defect, because it was Wednesday, because why not?--I tend to agree.

Still, scientist in me refuses to believe that diploidy is reason to celebrate life. I know plenty of ferns (personally--we're on first-name basis and everything) that would take umbrage at the insistance that they're only ever "alive" when they're shooting off spores. I say we join Amanda's team and demand equal right-to-life status for all our poor haploid gametes and punish any masturbating (or just plaing ejaculatory) men and women with periods (women on the pill will get a pass because they are protecting their poor ova by not flushing them down the pipes every month).

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

There was a glorious parody in Princeton's Tiger Magazine a number of years ago, (It's not online, unfortunately) titled "Life Begins at Moment of Horniness." The piece's author then went on to describe how many terrible women were killing babies by not having sex with him.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Hooy-boy.

While I get the humor in it and I appreciate that such a thing is satirizing the right-wing "birth begins when we say it does," I can see a few problems with said parody. Mostly because I worry that the satire wouldn't be overdone enough not to seem perfectly reasonable to the people who actually think that way...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Actually, that parody reminds me of a comic strip that got the joke newspaper at Columbia into a lot of trouble. The artist, on the issue coming out for Black History Month, drew "the history of black people" and started out saying they were invented in the 1600s to be slaves for lazy white people.

Columbia fairly exploded.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

There really is no reason to believe human "life" is particularly more special than any animal life without a religious undertone to it. The dividing factor being human intelligence, which, as TV and I discussed a few days ago, definitely doesn't appear until after birth.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The dividing factor being human intelligence, which, as TV and I discussed a few days ago, definitely doesn't appear until after birth.

And even then, I could think of some people who show less intelligence than a baby aardvark, so I dunno that that's even the watershed factor.

[earthrise.livejournal.com]

My main beef is still the statement that "I don't know when life starts, there isn't even a shadow of a consensus, so let's legislate against it as if there was a consensus!"

The thing is, his "err on the side of caution" bit almost made rational sense, until you factor in the point that he doesn't mention women even once. How about erring on the side of protecting lives that we are SURE are alive, erring until we reach consensus on fetuses be damned?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

But women aren't people, therefore their lives aren't worth saving. Duh.

[negativeq.livejournal.com]

We don't know, for sure, when life begins. I don't think the author was hating women and wanted to control their bodies. He's pointing out that this society has "agreed" by the courts that life begins at birth, and he is personally not comfortable with that. He's concerned with the possibility that thousands of human lives (which he deems valuable) may be snuffed out annually.

The missing angels thing is creepy. I never did think about what documentation was created for stillborns, I just assumed death certificates, if anything, by default.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't think the author was hating women and wanted to control their bodies

Failure to acknowledge women's existance in an article about their reproductive capacity and who should control it? That's fairly overt sexism. Sexism, just like any bias, has a basis in envy, fear, or anger or all of those things. He didn't deem women worth mentioning, dude, because women aren't people. Once upon a time, blacks weren't people, and look at the legacy of hatred that grew out of that thinking and tell me the parallels aren't there.