Bucket of Cod
ElectricFetus said:
Not all pro-lifers care about if a women in abstinent or not, uses contraceptives, etc, your generalizing. Very a few of them I'm sure "covet" your sexual organs, quite the opposite I'm sure, many of them are repulsed that you would do anything with those 'dirty parts' outside of strict reproduction and believe your committing sins regardless if your getting an abortion or not, sure I might think those types are unhealthy sexually, but it would be erroneous to call them "perverts", as their problem is not sexual perversion but a sexual repression both of themselves and of others via a varying combination of jealousy and god fearing.
We can certainly ignore the documentable
slow return of the repressed.
Underlying your point is a problematic concept, that one is divorced from the implications of their actions. I wasn't
trying to cause an avalanche, but just set off some fireworks ... in a clearly labeled avalanche zone. Would that be a defense against homicide charges for anyone killed in the avalanche?
Back in the days when
hysteria was a common diagnosis, and forced sexual activity was the prescribed cure for women, would you suggest that this was a natural result utterly separate from underlying attitudes about sex, sexuality, and women? You know, the same periods that produced
coverture, the legal theory that a wife is the property of her husband, but not vice-versa?
If you go back and look at the anti-Catholic literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the detail—scandalous and shocking in its time—about just how perverted Catholics are, doing this and this and this and my aren't we good Protestants who don't do all these perverted things ... one cannot deny the functional question of why perverse ideas are bad to consider unless you're considering them in order to condemn perversity.
Okay, look, the very simple way to look at this part of the issue is an old joke from British comedian, historian, and leftist Mark Steel:
There's hardly a month goes by without some prominent judge or politician being found in suspenders and stockings, being hit with a stick of rhubarb and stood in a bucket of cod; which, personally, doesn't really bother me, except that it always turns out that the day before they've stood up in the House of Commons and said, "If there's one thing that makes me sick, it's people who dress up in suspenders and stockings and get hit with a stick of rhubarb, stood in a bucket of cod!"
The slow return of the repressed. Sublimation. What Freud called ego defense, and religious folk often refer to as wrestling with demons.
This is not a mystery; we see it all the time. The extraordinary assertion here would be that being anti-abortion somehow exempts one from this particular human condition.
It is easy enough to accept that one need not be a pervert in order to dive into these political cultures; it can happen as easily as having a favorite football team or through complex consideration. But once one dives in, they are awash in an environment in which those who have a certain set of negative aesthetic preferences about sex and sexuality are constantly seeking out sordid ideas and events to make their point.
It's kind of like the
rape fantasies spun by infinite protection advocates, or
gay sex fantasies devised by paranoid homophobes. The seem to have a much sexier—albeit dirtier—idea of what sex is like among their neighbors than those of us who really don't give a damn how the neighbors fuck.
If you revisit the annals of anti-abortion advocacy, you'll find all sorts of twisted inquiries. You know, what if a woman decides to have an abortion after the baby leaves her body but before the umbilical cord is cut in order to take revenge against a boyfriend she thinks cheated on her? That sort of thing. And it really does occur to one to wonder how another might come to that question. I mean, really, what kind of doctor would actually do that? Well, we have an idea, because it seems Kermit Gosnell was perfectly willing to kill children after they emerged from the womb.
They get one every few years. Indeed, if we held "Christianity" to the same standard, what would we say of the steady, low-key barrage of arson and terrorism that occasionally peaks in a murder? We can no more imagine that deviant bloodlust to be representative of Christianity than a Kermit Gosnell would represent doctors who perform abortions. Certainly, such terrorism is becoming more prominently recognized as part of the anti-abortion movement specifically, but that transference to Christianity in general would be inappropriate.
All the signs are there; we are in a familiar, predictable behavioral pattern.
Still, though, you cannot separate the anti-abortion movement—especially in the context of LACP—from the other obsessions inextricably connected to the abortion question; the overlap is too great. The reason the anti-abortion advocates seek this kind of comparmentalization is ego defense, either conscious or subconscious. In Freudian terms, this is Id and Superego thrashing the Ego.
I would instead wonder how it is you think you can rationally separate generations of societal conditioning and its evident results from the discussions those outcomes affect?
This is just another aspect of ownership. From the shiver-inducing coverture to the common refrain, "No daughter of mine ...!" and those insanely proprietary
purity balls in which fathers pledge to guide their daughters sexuality, what women are still, in the twenty-first century, working to escape is
ownership culture.
And look at the result. Many people are so desperate to retain some authority over women that they will dive into fallacious assertions that would redefine existentialism and ontology in the human experience in order to invoke "personhood" and reiterate their authority over women.
Furthermore, as even
you have reminded, a woman's human status is measured by society as a reflection of and comparison to a man's human status. That is to say, women in the United States do not have a human status in their own context; their humanity is subordinate to how we define a man's humanity. Or, to put it into simplistic terms:
If men could get pregnant? They can't, so it's irrelevant.
And even if we entertain such stupid questions by pointing out predictable behavior—
i.e., if men could be pregnant abortion would be legal, which can only be doubted by presuming that men in general would, on this one subject, say, "Of course you can have governance authority over my body"—people are so desperate to find a port in this storm that they would posit an extraordinary result as the mundane expectation.
A woman's conduct with her sex organs is the last bastion for the ownership culture. That those caught up in the throes of sexual obsession don't want it known that they are sexually obsessed does not change the facts.
____________________
Notes:
Steel, Mark. "Sexuality". The Mark Steel Solution. BBC Radio 4, August 4, 1995.
edit to add except that seems to have been written based on common law generally rather than looking at specific legislation like this