Do you support the president's expensive pharmaceutical benefiting Medicare bill? We didn't, Kerry didn't. Bush bragged about it today in his weekly address.
He also mentioned parental notification laws. I was surprised how that pissed me off, but the more I learn about parenthood, the clearer I see the child as an individual. I strongly believe that young women who become pregnant and who are estranged from their parents should not be required to tell their parents if they get an abortion.
First, a young woman who becomes pregnant may not have been nurtured in a healthy way by the parents to begin with, and if she's not inclined to tell them her situation it is most likely because of self-protection (she will be thrown out, shamed, abused, punished, etc.). It must be really bad, because even girls in such a situation end up telling their parents (I would have). If the relationship is so unplugged that the girl remains mum, the parents have already given up responsibility for that girl, and she probably perceives them as trying to control her. On the other hand, if it's safe for her, she'll tell them!
I can't stand how people can treat children like property (we used to treat adult women and slaves like that) and this is such a blatant example of treating a young woman's body as if it is not her own, it is instead her parents, and extending that ownership to the next generation, her unborn child. I could not imagine a more fundamental disrespect for an individual's privacy. What, children don't have a right to privacy (I'm going to look into this)? No young man would stand for it if he could get pregnant.
Wow, I just used slavery as analogy for the unhealthy attitutude of ownership of children by parents. It occurs to me that "pro-before-lifers" use slavery as an analogy for abortion. I never "got" the analogy except that slavery has been outlawed so now, they argue, so should abortion be outlawed. One could also say that slave owners abused slaves and "mothers" abuse an aborted fetus. It still didn't work for me as a clear analogy, after all, the woman isn't using the fetus for labor or anything. However, it does work as a better analogy with the anti-stem cell arguments (using fetuses to treat disease). It does trouble me, but not if we're using fetuses that are going to be destroyed anyway. The fertility clinic world is such a weird and oogey thing to me...
The clearest analogy for slavery is the ownership of an individual by another individual (or institution). To make abortion illegal gives the state ownership of the pregnant woman and her body, just as the slave owner had ownership of the slave's body and health, just as the state is on record for enforcing sterilization on hospitalized, mentally disabled, and poor women.
So I'll say it, outlawing abortion makes pregnant women slaves to the government. It's an issue of ownership and there's no way around that.
This is the first time that I've seen it so clearly, but abortion rights are absolutely part of the right to privacy--anyone who doesn't believe that needs to make a serious assessment of their attitude toward woman's self determination.
"W"-is-for-women-Bush doesn't believe this. He's for a culture of life though...WHAT AMERICAN ISN'T?
Everybody would love to see a world where abortions were never needed. How about relationship classes, after shool programs, and birth control in schools W? Yeah, right, life through rose colored glasses...
No comments:
Post a Comment