Bear with me. Most traditional feminists would say that being pro-life is an automatic disqualifier for calling yourself a feminist. I find this argument dramatically uncompelling. Fetal personhood is a quasi-empirical value judgement that should not be made for instrumental reasons--we can't decide that six year old children aren't persons simply because this would possibly make it easier to advance female equality.
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To be sure, it's obvious to me that slaves are persons, while I find the personhood of fetuses deeply problematic. But I don't think it's facially ludicrous to declare that they are persons. To me that means that "Feminists for Life" cannot, as I've heard declared, be an oxymoron; it seems perfectly possible to embrace all the other tenets of whatever you want to define as feminism, and also regretfully believe that since fetuses are persons, we cannot embrace this particular means of women's liberation.
Megan is not a feminist because she she doesn't think about or understand power. She's an authoritarian, and assumes power belongs to the powerful. The question is not "is a fetus a child." The question is, who decides what a woman does with her body, she or someone else?* Who owns a woman's body? The answer is pretty obvious, to a feminist.
*Women will kill their children, legally or illegally. Abortion doesn't disappear when it's outlawed. And if all abortion were magically eradicated somehow, the child would be killed after birth instead. That's reality. Just as men (and women) will kill foreign babies if they want to wage war against a country. If every baby's life is sacred and none must be allowed to die for any reason, war must be eradicated as well as abortion. Good luck with that.
6 comments:
"Quasi-empirical"? What in the hell does that even mean? If it's empirical, it's not a matter of value judgement, it's a hypothetical or definite result derived from experimentation or evidence. I really wish she'd stop using big words when she doesn't understand their meaning. Her writing might improve a tad.
"Quasi-empirical"? I would assume that's sort of like "relatively factual" and "conditionally demostratable".
Words is fun when you knows how!
Susan, btw, I see that Crooks and Liars has sort of absconded with the literary references used in your blog title/sub-title.
Don't you hate that when that happens? I once had a pretty neat idea for a blog post, and about a week later, Keith Olbermann "just happens to come up with the same idea". Huh. I somehow doubt that KO ever had looked at my blog, but that sure is mighty suspicious, you know?
Demonstratable...
It also helps matters considerably when you know how to spell.
CP, I hope she never stops. It's my favorite part of her posts.
Zeppo, I saw that and did a double-take, but I think they're just quoting what the judge said. I got a kick out of it, though.
Adamgv, when you look for someone else to empower you, you are not becoming empowered. Women who try to manipulate others through sex are not good people, and aren't likely to help anyone but themselves. Plus the whole quasi-prostitution aspect of what you're sggesting is off-putting to a feminist.
But I'm all for turning a bad into a good. It's why I try to use my smart-ass attitude to fight the wicked.
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