As
I ponder it, it seems to me that the insistence on thinking of a fetus
as part of a woman’s body, and not as a baby, a human life, is one more
instance of the habit of Feminism of trying to make women into men.
Feminism,
at least the sort which proliferates (largely among unmarried women or
lesbians) in academia, is really just one more instance of Cultural
Sadeism. It does not seek to advance women, per se, at least
CULTURALLY. It does not seek to make them happier, to imbue the lives
of ordinary women with meaning.
Rather, like all
forms of Cultural Sadeism, it consists primarily in both an assault on
traditional cultural norms, and a devious, Machiavellian quest for
power. Feminists want special treatment. They don’t want to be treated
as equals, but rather MORE than equals.
The
relationship between a mother and her baby is primal. It is mythic. It
is primordial. Women are hard-wired, we can assume without too much
concern about later contradiction, to nurture babies. More generally,
they are hard-wired to nurture those around them. They are born
socially more skilled, more aware, than men. By nature, they tend to be
peace-makers (although I am well aware of the cattiness/bitchiness that
characterizes women at all ages). I think women are much more
intuitive than men, more aware generally of just about everything that
cannot be put into words, in an equation, or on a map.
But
these advantages are not what Feminists seeks to capitalize on, in
general. They want to pretend women too have penises, are quite capable
of being assholes like men, and have the same rights to boss people
around as men do.
Obviously, as I just said in the last
post, I myself have mother issues; but I do think that one can, in a
somewhat methodical way, deduct ones own emotional shading, and still
see wider patterns.
Do mothers in our culture nurture
our children as well as they do in some other nations? Has the nature
of mothering changed in the last 50 years? Have the changing “roles” of
women had both negative and positive effects, both on women and on
men? These are all valid questions.
With regard to
abortion specifically, I just asked a pro-abortion woman this question:
is there a moral difference between killing an unborn fetus and having a
gall stone removed? If the answer is yes, what is it? If no, at what
point does there become a difference? At what point does it become a
baby and not a mass of tissue?
For his part, Obama
seems quite willing to let full term babies die. He supported a bill
(which was not passed, in my understanding) which wanted to legalize
“aborting” full term–or at least viable–babies by putting them in a
chilled room without food or water until they died.
If
this is moral, why stop there? Why not give women a three month or one
year period in which to decide if being a mother makes them feel
“actualized”, or empowered, or if it suits their lifestyle, and if they
decide it does not, give them a public incinerator in which to throw
their baby? Why not shred them and use them for organic fertilizer?
After all, they are not human lives.
The more I think
about it, the more I feel that our cultures (and I use both the word Our
and Culture understanding neither is fully capable of encapsulating the
reality) treatment of unborn children hardens us in ways which are not
desirable. We do not have hard decisions to make which affect the
survival of our civilization, as for example primitive people living in
the jungle did and to some extent do. And at that, those societies
usually only kill defective babies. We kill viable, healthy babies by
the thousands every day.