What it was like
Ursula K. LeGuin on abortion rights:
My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke….
What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like?
And meanwhile what was it like for that guy, the boyfriend? Nothing. It was like nothing. Nothing happened to him, it all happened to her. He could go on his way rejoicing; she could not.
It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child.
But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents
That’s an aspect of abortion rights you’d think even feral conservatives could grasp. Isn’t it better for children to be wanted as opposed to forced? Taking the long view, isn’t that a profoundly better way to be born? Isn’t it better even for relations between women and men, and among couples, for women not to be basically prisoners and slaves? Wouldn’t you think?
But then you’d have to think.
These are the same people who support factory farming. The inhumanity is beyond belief. Abortion decreases suffering in the world, but women are just another commodity to them. The souls of the unborn must take priority because God Said So. Fecking lunatics.
At the heart of this I think one will find simple, down-to-Earfth honest-to-Goodness control freakery, otherwise known as authoritarianism, and manifested in extreme form by the Hitlers and Stalins of the world; the authoritarian personalities. There is a whole literature on them, understandably because they wreak so much havoc.
For the control freak, control is an obsession, and women in particular are their targets of choice. Though CF is manifested by members of both sexes, allowing and yielding to any woman the power over what happens with her own body is more than their tiny minds can bear.
This story is particularly powerful for me because I actually know Ursula LeGuin’s daughter. She’s a very fine cellist, whom I have worked with in my career as a recording engineer. To think we might not have have had her contributions to the arts. That’s the flip side of “but what if that embryo would grow up to be another Mozart”. Well, what if being forced to carry that embryo to term prevented another Mozart? Nobody knows. Nobody could possibly know. But what we do know is the impact an unwanted pregnancy can have on a woman who’s alive right now .
Making women have children they *don’t* want is the only fitting punishment for those disgusting sl*ts. You can’t truly hate women, all women, and not believe that.
Wow. How interesting. And yes.
Peter @4 Nobody could possibly know except God, with the whole omniscience thing and all. If there is such a thing as God, it would be more malevolent than any Devil we could imagine. God isn’t love, God is eternal suffering. Such utter rubbish.
And this # 8 completes the octave. Sex, politics and religion all in together here in this one B&W thread. Any one of them a party pooper and hostess’ nightmare. Well done.!
(Chuckle.)
As David @ #5 has pointed out, the children aren’t the point, the punishment of women is. The Republicans don’t really care about the resulting children once they’re born. If they did, they wouldn’t be Republicans. No, the fetuses and embryos are all just means to an end, the control and punishment of women. Once they’re born, the children have served their purpose and they’re no longer needed. They’re spent ammunition. They’re on their own. Good luck to them.
They’re out to punish women, but not quite all of them. Not their own women, to be sure. Rich Republican women (and the wives, children, and mistresses of rich Republican men) will still have access to abortion to terminate inconvenient or embarassing pregnancies, so actual opposition to abortion itself is just a smokescreen. It’s those other women who need to be punished. Particularly the brown ones and poor ones. If they’re poor and brown? Bonus! That’s a twofer! And they will forego the warm, fuzzy niceties of inclusive language because they know what a woman is. They know their targets.
That unwanted children suffer as a result is an unfortunate, but unavoidable, side effect of punishing the women. But Republicans, as ever, are ready and willing for others to bear the burden and pay the price for their moral purity. Those children aren’t going to be their children or grandchildren, and, because they are Republicans, they will block any and all programs that would make the lives of the children or their mothers a tiny bit less onerous. Suck it up, butterup. It will be a character building exercise all around. You’ll thank us for it.
The pro-“life” crowd would point out the woman didn’t have to raise a child she didn’t want, she could give it up for adoption. Yeah, that has no downsides, right? And back in those days, her career at Radcliffe would be over anyway, and she wouldn’t be able to complete her education. Even now, it is damned hard to complete a degree while bearing and raising a child. I know from experience. A lot of women do it, but a lot of women can’t. It’s a task wrapped in a task wrapped in a duty. And it exhausts you, not just then but for always. The punishing hours I put my body through are no doubt part of the reason I suffer from so much fatigue today. I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat, and those choices took a permanent toll on me.
I almost cried when a girl sat in my office worrying about her pregnancy, how it was going to keep her from completing her education. Her boyfriend was also in school, and they planned to get married, but they couldn’t pay for two college degrees with a baby, and they couldn’t afford to put the child in day care so they could both go to school. She was able to shift to an online program, but gave up the career she dreamed of in wildlife biology for a future as a CPA (which probably pays better, and some people enjoy it, but it wasn’t what she wanted).