Ambrya wrote:
I don't think that you are correctly reading what Lady DSD was saying. In fact, I am sure you are not.
Lady DSD wrote:
When a woman chooses on her own the majority of the time it is because the man who impregnated her is no longer in the picture, thereby losing his "right" at the choice, if he has already abandoned the woman pregnant, and therefore, the potential child.
I'm sick of hearing how women who believe in the right to choose are women who are loose, immoral, and the steryotypical feminist. I am sick of having the blame laid soley at our feet when it is not just the women who gets pregnant. I hate to break it to yu but women need the men for it to happen. And the men are either right beside their women making the decision alongside them, or they have left because they fear the responsibility, leaving it ON the womans shoulders to bear alone.
What Lady DSD is saying is that frequently, the women who make the decision alone do so because the man in the equation makes himself unavailable to participate in the decision making process. I mean, at the risk of generalizing a bit,
which scenario is the most common? 1) Girl meets boy. Girl sleeps with boy. Girl gets knocked up. Boy wants to keep the baby and offers to marry girl. Girl tells him to take a hike and aborts.
2) Boy meets girl. Boy sleeps with girl. Girl gets knocked up. Boy:
A) forgets he ever knew her number
B) denies responsibility for the paternity of the child and tells her to take a hike
C) fobs girl off with some lukewarm, namby-pamby, mealy-mouthed, halfhearted platitude like
"It's your choice, I'll support you whatever you decide to do" (which is essentially code for "I don't want the kid, but I'll feel like an as
[/i]shole if I recommend an abortion and it turns out you don't want to have one.")
I mean, really, which situation do you think transpires MUCH MUCH more often?Lol! It's funny how often people think that by stating a question in a certain way, the answer to that question is assumed.
Um. How about we look at the sentence
immediatly before the start of the DSD quote and in the same paragraph!. I assume you had to have read it in order to choose to start your cut right after that point, so I'm a bit baffled how you missed it's relevance to my response. Even more so since you then run off for 5 paragraphs asking the very qestion it answered.
DSD wrote:
It's a choice that in the majority of cases is decided by both the woman and the man together. When a woman chooses on her own the majority of the time it is because the man who impregnated her is no longer in the picture, thereby losing his "right" at the choice, if he has already abandoned the woman pregnant, and therefore, the potential child
That's what I was responding to. She's saying that most of the time the decision is made with both participants. I don't happen to agree with her (and apparently, neither do you). But she was using that statement to support the idea that it's not an unequal choice because both partners make the choice together.
I was responding to what she said and playing devil's advocate. I'm not saying her original assertions are correct. I'm not even saying my response is correct. I'm simply stating that the argument I used *is* a valid one and is a reasonable argument for an anti-abortion person to take. If most women who choose to have abortions choose to have them because the guy is nowhere to be found (somewhat my assertion, but there's a bit of that in her post as well), then asserting that it's unfair to stereotype women getting abortions as "loose' for example is not really that accurate. Isn't the definition of a "loose" woman someone who has sex with someone outside of any sort of commited relationship (we'll define it a bit more broadly then marriage here)? If the guy is *not* involved in the decision to have an abortion, then how well did she *really* know the guy?
And certainly from a moralists perspective, the argument would be that if you made the guy commit *before* having sex with him (through a process like marriage), then he wouldn't disappear when you got knocked up, and the problem wouldn't exist.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a hedonist. I think free sex is good. I have no problem with women as sexual objects. I have no problem with sex outside, inside, and around marriage. I think that if two consenting adults want to do something, they should be free to do so and should have the tools available to do so as safely as possible. However, I can certainly appreciate that many people do *not* hold those same views, and I can certainly see the logic of their position.
Quote:
You assume that it is social services that somehow opened the door for women to start getting pregnant out of wedlock. But you are ignoring the fact that, completely independent of social services, the quality of education, job opportunities, and salary potential for single women increased manifold during this same era in which birth rates among unwed mothers increased. Furthermore, the social stigma attached to premarital sex and unwed motherhood was virtually eradicated in western cultures. A woman's prospects for marriage and security were no longer obliterated by a single bad choice.
So your attempt to shoehorn in a complaint about the welfare system is really based on a false and incomplete assumption.
Heh. Well so much for my attempt to just make a broad comparison between two social issues. Are you trying to suggest that the rise in social systems to assist unwed mothers and the removal of the social stigma associate with being an unwed mother had *nothing* to do with eachother? They just happened to occur at the same time? The social stigma was eradicated in western cultures by the same movements that put the social support structures in place. They are two components of the same thing.
The point though is that regardless of whether it was the removal of the stigma, or the generation of a support structure, *something* changed that made being an unwed mother less undesirable, right? And the result of that is that we have *more* unwed mothers. It's a pretty obvious relationship.
All I was trying to do was state that by legalizing abortion (and heck! destigmatizing it along the way), it is ridiculously naive to assume that there will be no resulting increase in abortion rates as a result. Thus, we change the perception of the need of abortion by the mere act of legalizing it.
When arguing for abortion, don't most advocates at some point take the statistics of abortion today and say that if it were illegal that's how many would end up either in dire financial straits trying to support a child, or would end up getting backally abortions? That's what I'm trying to counter. The numbers of abortions needed change based on the legal status of abortion, so that's not a valid argument to make.
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Edited, Thu Sep 15 01:00:55 2005 by Ambrya[/quote]
