Wherein I read things, laugh, and pass them on to you…

Anti-Choicers Still Just Want to Control Women’s Sex Lives:

Opposition to abortion today is about the same thing it has always been about: not the humanity and personhood of fetuses, but the humanity and personhood of women.
Historically, abortion—as well as all forms of contraception—was typically seen as an evil not out of concern for the unborn, but rather out of the belief that allowing women to separate sex from child-bearing would lead to a complete collapse of womanly morality, allowing women to have sex willy-nilly for no other reason but pleasure. In other words, contraception and abortion would allow women the same sexual freedom enjoyed by men. There also was a widely accepted view that any woman who wished to avoid motherhood was inherently some kind of deviant; shunning the “natural” role of mother was viewed as a serious gender transgression. And of course, no attempt to maintain gender roles has ever been merely about preserving tradition for the sake of it, but rather about upholding the patriarchy. Social and economic equality are virtually impossible for women whose lives are circumscribed by compulsory motherhood.
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When we respond to anti-choicers with our own counter-arguments about the life of the fetus, we have already allowed them to win a large part of the victory simply by allowing them to take the woman and her autonomy out of the equation. For too long, we’ve been willing to fight this battle on the opposition’s turf. As feminists, it’s our responsibility to bring women back into the discussion. We need to reclaim this argument, to focus on the fact that equality is unimaginable in a society where women cannot choose how and when and if to bear children.

I am firmly convinced that at its core, the anti-choice movement has never actually stopped being about the enforcement of traditional gender roles.

[RH Reality Check Angi Becker Stevens November 6, 2011]

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