The Crusty Cult in the New Century
Syne said:
So...let me see if I have this straight. Because men cannot get pregnant women should have unimpeded choice regardless of any consideration of personhood?
I would call that a swing and a miss. I don't know, call it strike one; it doesn't really matter, since we're not actually playing baseball. Indeed, we might as well be curling.
Jokes aside, though, you're demonstrating the problem. The underlying question is the relationship of personhoods, yet the one thing you won't do is settle in that tangle and help people pick it apart. Jumping to the extreme in order to draw the discussion away from that central point is certainly effective if your purpose is to avoid, suppress, or obscure the discussion, but it does nothing toward untangling the knot.
The whole question of men getting pregnant arose in the context of whether or not the anti-abortion movement is misogynistic.
As to unimpeded choice, that is certainly an anchor point, but society has already accepted this is not the acceptable. Even pro-choicers balk at some of the extreme fantasies invented by the anti-abortion crowd, but the fundamental difference there is between finding a functional resolution and religiously-driven absolutism.
Meanwhile, with a proposition on record to formalize the suspension of women's human rights in order to protect the unborn, anti-abortionists are still retreating to absolutist straw men. Or, to put it bluntly, there is a reason I don't support my own proposition. Two, actually, but since one is that a woman's rights aren't mine to bargain away, we can set that aside for the sake of argument. What remains is that I simply don't trust the anti-abortion cult. Reality has
no place in their worldview. The humanity of women has no apparent place in their worldview.
Bells has offered examples of the problem in both the developing and industrialized world. And given that I live in the U.S., where candidates for public office, including a presidential primary contender, find it appropriate to be the arbiters of what is or isn't a "real" or "legitimate" rape. Furthermore, given the anti-abortion cult's devotion to bogus medical theories—Rep. Akin got his magic ninja rape antibody line from the former head of National Right to Life (and founder of International Right to Life Federation), a medical doctor who used his credentials to deceive people and thus receive praise from the 2012 Republican presidential candidate—the less of women's human rights we leave to the judgment of misogynists, the better.
The bottom line is that the anti-abortion cult is simply not trustworthy; they cannot be expected to conduct themselves honestly. Part of this is the changing conscience of the society; like so many other Christian-derived public policy standards, the puritan strain is finally starting to break in American society. And, as in so many social policy concerns, the obsessive prudery is cracking up under the neurotic strain.
To wit, you leap back to absolutes in a discussion intended to explore a declared gray zone. This is somewhat expected, as the risks of exploration always seem greater than the rewards of discovery.
And as the culture finds itself more and more empowered to resist the straw men and magic ninja faeries of the anti-abortion pantheon, the cult is not adapting well. I would expect that when this issue is settled—in favor of women's humanity over that of a blastocyst—part of the diagnosis will be complacency. As with opposition to homosexuality, safe sex, birth control, teen sexual activity, and however many other routes our twenty-first century puritans have discovered to obsess themselves with the idea of other people having sex, the cult does not seem to have been ready for the political ground to shift beneath their feet. They have held out on the same arguments for as long as possible, and as the utterly dishonest core of what the anti-abortion cult actually believes is exposed to daylight, they are, like their fellows—and, in many cases, they are their own fellows, so the reasons why make sense—caught flat-footed in an earthquake, and instead of sheltering under their desks, they're shouting at everyone else that there is no tremor.
Right now, the cult finds itself at a crossroads. It can keep insisting on its clearly obsolete superstitions, and thus find itself left behind as racists and homophobes are experiencing in the twenty-first century; or it can try to regroup and recalculate its course in order to navigate the unexpectedly changing landscape.
