The ethics of ethics: The personal is political - or is it not?

[wynn]

The ethics of ethics: The personal is political - or is it not?


When is the personal political, and when is it not?


The feminists promulgated the maxim "The personal is political" in order to raise awareness of issues that were until then deemed personal or private and not suitable for public, political attention: such as personal happiness, reproductive rights, job satisfaction, relationships, etc.

But some people display a peculiar choosiness in when they consider the personal to be the political, and when they demand that politics stay out of the personal.

One hot spot for that is in the abortion debate, where the pro-abortionists hold a stance like this:

I would imagine some of the few who have a right to comment would be the survivors[of abortions]. But then again, they are not in the position to determine or make that decision for all women, and neither are you.

No one is except the individual woman herself. Which is what 'pro-choice' is about. Letting women decide for themselves and not have overbearing twats try to force it on them..

Why is in this case that which is deemed personal (namely, pregnancy and possible abortion) not also deemed political?

Why is it the woman's own thing whether she has an abortion or not?
Why should this not be political?

If women's claims to equal employment rights are political, if pedagogy is political, then why isn't pregancy political, why isn't abortion political?



So: When is the personal political, and when is it not?

 

[Mrs.Lucysnow]

This thread is pointless unless you can give synopsis of what YOU think is meant by 'the personal is political'. Do you even know what it means?

Abortion has always been considered a political issue because there were always men who were trying to control women and their bodies and ATTEMPTING TO USE THE LAW AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS TO DO SO. Go figure

When you use institutions in order to exclude or disempower a group or the other sex then its political.

It usually looks something like this:


Fact: 70% of the activists, and nearly all of the leadership of the forced-birth movement are men. Photo documentation from clinic protest pictures and records of non-profit organizations associated with the movement show that most names associated and faces associated are male faces. (Amarillo Globe News, www.cpforlife.org, www.cnn.com, IRS records for Operation Rescue West, Operation Save America, google image searches.) In one famous case of hoodwinked leadership, 75% of the leadership of Concerned Women for America (an anti-feminist and anti-choice organization allegedly for women) is male.

In the documentary, Fetal Positions (a documentary about clinic violence), 85% of the protesters seen were male. Since footage was shot not only in Milwaukee, but in Boston, the representation is decent.

Photos taken in 2002 at a clinic in Wichita, Kansas by clinic escorts show that 66% of the protesters were men, and of the "hard-core" protesters, 90% (18 of 20 who had protested repeatedly) were men.

In my personal experience as both a clinic escort and a Planned Parenthood client, the ratios of 2 to 4 men for every woman protester holds true. Other times I have encountered anti-abortion types, they have been primarily male; the women are usually cowed wives or children who are forced or brainwashed into participation.

Yes, there are women who oppose and protest abortion. But since the leadership is primarily male, and the funding is overwhelmingly male, the situation begs the question: Who controls the movement? From looking at the data, it's not women.

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