Take away our right to vote next?Follow

So what you're saying is, the men in your family are slow learners. Got it.

Like "scrotus"?

You act as though this is exclusive to men, the way childbearing is exclusive to women. It's not. Society is JUST as harsh on mothers who cannot provide for their children as it is on men--if they apply for welfare, they are leeches and lazy good-for-nothings who drink the sweat off the working man's brow.

Let me give you a taste of my grandmother's world.

When she was pregnant with her third child, her deadbeat husband who began running around on her when she was pregnant with their first beat the living hell out of her, so she divorced him. Her church kicked her out of their "loving community" for being a divorcee, and because women on welfare are considered leeches and scum, she worked 80 hours a week in a donut shop to support her children, who increased in number by two after the divorce because my grandfather saw no reason why a pesky thing like a divorce should prevent him from waltzing back into the house, demanding his "marital priviledges," and waltzing back out usually with my grandmother's cash and sometimes even things like her car.

Finally, thanks be to God, he got shipped off to Korea, and my grandmother took the allotment check the army sent her, filled the floorboard of the back seat of her car with groceries, placed the mattress from the baby's crib over top of it all, placed her FIVE children (all under the age of 8) in the backseat, and made the drive from Little Rock, Arkansas to Flint, Michigan. On the modern interstate, this drive takes 17 hours--there was no modern interstate back then, and she made it in a falling-apart beater car with five kids huddled in the back seat.

In Michigan, she got a job in the auto factories, doing gruelling assembly line work in a factory that wasn't air conditioned while raising her five kids single-handedly. She managed to buy a house and even managed to put two of those kids through college -- a feat she never would have been able to accomplish if the fifth kid hadn't been killed at the age of 11 when struck by a car while riding his bike. It was the settlement from that accident that enabled her to pay off the house and save enough to put two of her daughters through college.




Men don't HAVE to go through that because a woman is pregnant. If they do, wonderful, applause, praise, etc, etc. But plenty of them skip out and don't choose to honor that obligation (like my grandfather). Men have a choice about what to do after a baby is born. Woman DON'T have a choice about what happens to them during the months of pregnancy and even the years that follows--EXCEPT to make the choice to abort.



Yeah, because the auto factory was so environmentally friendly for my grandmother. Boo hoo, women go through this too. Men don't go through the at times life-threatening dangers of pregnancy, PERIOD. That's the point, and in your hysterical rant, you have completely missed it.




And, again, you miss the point. I'm not saying hard-working fathers who choose to honor their obligations are worth nothing. I'm saying that because they don't experience pregnancy, they are not the appropriate people to make the choice as to whether or not a woman must carry a pregnancy to term.

Your friend has a choice. It's admirable that he's made the one he does, that he chooses to honor his obligations and I will never discount that, however...

A pregnant woman doesn't have a choice as to what's going to happen to her body when she'd pregnant--it's going to happen, and it will affect her relationships, her livelihood, and possibly her health up to and including death. This is why the choice as to whether or not to BE pregnant, or whether to abort, needs to rest primarily in her hands. It's as simple as that.



Typical FATHERS, yes, but that means they made a choice to meet their obligation as fathers. Typical MEN, now, maybe not...for every hardworking father out there, I can show you a deadbeat dad sneaking the money out of his wife's purse in the middle of the night and disappearing into the darkness.



And for millenia, women have been suffering and dying in pregnancy and childbirth. Men have a choice to work those jobs and take care of their families--women DO NOT have a choice about what happens to their bodies when they are pregnant. Furthermore, working hard to support a family has NEVER been the exclusive province of men. You think the sole support of a family comes from the male's employment? Do you think women throughout the centuries have never sweated the day out under the hot sun of the family farm? You think women haven't permanently maimed and scarred themselves with such trivial and inconsequential jobs as preserving the meat from the freshly slaughtered farm animals, or making candles? You think urban woman haven't died in droves from lung disease while working in textile factories inhaling fibers all day long? You think the waitress working 60 hours a week in a diner sucking in second-hand smoke isn't going to get lung cancer just as surely as the guys breathing in asbestos from construction materials? You think her body and feet aren't every bit as sore at the end of the day?

Stop worshipping your ***** and wake up to the realization that men aren't the only sex that works hard to keep a family afloat, and have NEVER been the only sex to do so.



A say, yes, but not the PRIMARY say, or the EQUAL say, because ultimately, the man CHOOSES to support the child, but the woman does NOT choose to have a pregnancy go awry and end up killing her, or getting her fired, or whatever.




When you are wrong, you are SO wrong.

Welcome back from the phallus-worshipping dark-ages.



Considering I never did any such thing, congratulations, you just gave a whole long rant about something that's completely irrelevent.


Edited, Jul 5th 2006 at 5:57pm EDT by Ambrya

And, by-the-way, the Phallus Worshipping Dark Ages was the peak of this world's civilization. There's nothing like a woman on her knees paying homage to the Staff of Life, eyes closed, mouth open to receive a generous blessing from the beneficent male in her life. If you doubt it, just ask him...

Totem

The source of your bitterness is revealed.

That's when I stopped reading and tried to clear the memories of working in a country with a no abortion policy.

I've worked in UK healthcare for quite a while and we see very few backstreet knitting needle and Gin victims, but they're not what you want to see.

In 6 months working in a Catholic country 20-odd years ago we saw dozens every week.

Dolt

I think it's a fairly safe assumption that if abortion ends up banned in most states, the statistics on back-alley abortion mortality today will actually be WORSE than they were in the 60s.

Why? Because there will be witch hunts. The few reputable and consciencious doctors still willing to perform them will quickly be sniffed out. Back then, there was a fairly effective conspiracy of silence protecting the providers of back-alley abortion and the women who suffered complications, and no one was actually hunting for either of those parties all that hard. However, information dissemination today is much more efficient than it was back then, so back-alley abortions will need to go MUCH deeper underground, with all the attendant risks that entails. There will almost certainly be penalties imposed upon women who have back-alley abortions, making them reluctant to seek medical care, and with documentation being as subject to scrutiny as it is today, the paperwork will be that much harder to lose by a doctor who treats such a woman and doesn't want to report her.

And before you argue that this is just assumption, take a look at the numbers on modern-day illegal abortion mortality in countries where abortion is still illegal today. They're huge. In the day and age where penicillin IS available, they're significant. Can you honestly say that has nothing to do with the fact that consequences for illegal abortion are much more severe now than they were in the US pre-Roe?



Edited, Jul 5th 2006 at 6:39pm EDT by Ambrya

FTFY

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Oh boy!

Ah hah hah hah!

You are one funny fellow.

Not to quibble or anything, but wouldn't your Granny's experiences be more of a reflection of a life spent making bad choices in men rather than being a cautionary tale on abortion/women's rights? The whole "the man in my life is a rotten *******" wears thin after she just finished dumping the previous one while he was off in Korea, only to find a worse one who molests her children. Where'd she find these stalwart pillars of the community? The want ads?

Did it never occur to her to perhaps take her time and discover just who it was she was attaching herself to? Granted, I don't know your grandmother from a hole in the ground, but each and every woman whose story I hear where there is a bad dude who beats, rapes, molests them, does drugs, or never finds a job, I always wonder whatever happened to personal responsibility, wherein the woman accepts it's her burden to either go it alone or if she absolutely has to have a guy, then pick one C-A-R-E-F-U-L-L-Y.

Utterly amazing the bad choices people make and then blame it on the system.

Totem

It's not meant to be either. It was meant to demonstrate that females carry just as much obligation for the support of a family--and suffer just as harshly in the execution of that obligation--as males do, contrary to the rant of whatever numbnuts that was that posted about men being the ones who carry such a heavy burden to support a family.



The first one she married because her father basically told her she had to marry because at the ripe age of 18, he'd met his obligation raising her and wanted her off his hands. As for the second one...it's not like men wear flags announcing they're going to try to get into a child's pants (more's the pity...) And back in the 60s, child molesters didn't get as much press as they do today, so single mothers weren't exactly as vigilant as they are now.

None of which changes the primary point of the tale, which is that the wacky belief that the obligation of supporting a family is somehow more burdensome on men than it is on women is a bunch of hooey.



Since I wasn't alive at the time, I can only offer supposition here, but imagine being a single woman with five kids working 60 hours a week in a factory to support them--and barely succeeding--with an ex-husband who occasionally wafts in, steals your money, and wafts out again. If some man who seemed to have a decent job and a seeming willingness to help shoulder that burder offered to marry you--which would have the added benefit of FINALLY convinced your ex that being divorced does not mean he can drop by for a booty call and some pocket cash whenever he feels like it--do you think you're gonna be all "Hmm, I dunno, he SEEMS like a decent guy, but can I be sure?" or do you just do a Hail Mary and take the plunge, hoping that just this once, you'll get a decent break? (figuratively--she's Southern Baptist, not Catholic)



Sure, that looks great on paper, but when there's starvation around every corner, Goodwill-reject shoes on your kids' feet, and sheer honest-to-God desperation of the "Please, Lord, let something finally go RIGHT!" variety, maybe, just maybe, you end up rolling the dice and letting wisdom be damned...



Yep, desperation drives people to do wacky things when they cannot foresee the consequences. We can agree upon that.


Edited, Jul 5th 2006 at 7:12pm EDT by Ambrya