Roe v. Wade

Why Do Americans Hate Women So Much?


Suffragettes on way to Boston (LOC)

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

A record number of anti-abortion bills emerged this legislative season at the state level with South Dakota, predictably, leading the vindictive pack with a bill that essentially made it legal to murder doctors who performed abortion or women seeking them under the guise of a “self-defense” law.

And while I am still waiting for the inevitable day when right leaning legislatures seek to impose a dress code and assign us seats at the back of all public transit, the Florida State Legislature takes top prize for the sheer number of assaults on female reproductive autonomy with a record 18 bills struggling to meander the process and land on the new GOP governor’s desk.

While some could claim that this is not about women’s rights at all but protecting human life, the proof against this tired clichéd defense is a bit too overwhelming because it’s not just our plumbing that concerns the GOP. Reducing women to 1950’s standards at every level appears to be the goal.

Wisconsin’s union busting tactics are aimed point-blank at female dominated professions, and the dismantling of higher education largely affects young women who are now the majority of students and are graduating in greater numbers than their male peers.

While the feministing 20 and 30 somethings were angsting over non-issues like whether to change their name or not when they married or how to ensure that men carried their share of the household and child-rearing chores, those who prefer women barefoot and pregnant have been making steady progress in their hamstringing of Roe V.Wade and limiting women’s access to birth control, emergency contraception and even basic reproductive health care.

We fiddled and Rome caught fire. The question is – will it burn down around us or can we roll back the lash the right is using to back slap us?

Let’s make a few things clear. This is not about the right to life or babies.

The people so intent on forcing women to carry children to term have no interest in those children once they are born. They are the same people who flushed Headstart down the toilet and are defunding state health care plans for children at every opportunity. They are crippling public education through budget cuts and unrealistic measuring standards. The goal is – and always has been – about using children as a means to cripple women and tie them to home and hearth, ensuring their dependence and subservience.

What is going on is no less an attempt to prevent equality than forcing women to bind their feet, be circumcised or swaddle themselves when out in public.

Whenever God or sanctity or family values are invoked, the end result is never good for women.

American men hate women just as much as their counterparts in the Third World and just as much as Muslim fundamentalists and just as much as those who tried to smother the early suffragettes by jailing and force feeding them did.

Every man who professes a “right to life” is proclaiming his belief that women are chattel to be possessed, ordered about and controlled.

And women take it.

Do we hate ourselves as much as we are hated?

We dress like whores and desperately maintain weights that damage our health while flocking to every beauty product and medical intervention that promise to freeze-frame us in a manner acceptable to men and societal standards set by men.

We work at the expense of our sanity, health and children because men expect us to pull half their load and all of ours too. Women have known since the get-go that “having it all” is a myth but it’s one that men still whole-heartedly support and push down our throats – with our help.

I have daughters. There are wonderful – witty and smart – but their lives will never be as easy as the boys they grew up with because it is still an XY world and with males now the making up more than half the population, how can things get better?

Margaret Wente at The Globe and Mail wrote an idiotic diatribe for International Women’s Day that stated the misguided opinion of too many women in the industrialized world. She wrote that we (women) have won the fight for inequality so shut up about it already.

It’s that attitude that has allowed the legal assault on women to ratchet up this year. Complacency and a preoccupation with crap that is distraction more than substance.

Men have been the dominant race since the beginning of time. They have no reason to share power and have done so only when forced and only reluctantly.

Wake the fuck up, Ladies.

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Personhood? Really? Sigh


fetus 10weeks

So here in Alberta the municipal  elections have come and gone.  In my own county of Strathcona and in the city of Fort Saskatchewan there are new mayors.  Both women.  And Calgary, to our south, now has a Muslim mayor, a Harvard grad who lives in his parent’s basement.

We are indeed the liberal utopia sometimes.  Aside from the long waits at the walk in clinic, the pig shit smell from basically unregulated mega-hog farms and the kow-towing to big oil. Little things really, “n’est-ce pas?”

But even with its imperfections Canada/Alberta rarely make me cringe in horror the way politics from down under does, and it makes the American mid-term election in a couple of weeks so much harder for my ex-pat self to stomach.

We bask in the light.

While they get ready for The Handmaid’s Tale.

What I don’t understand is how an ad that is more lie than fact gets aired, or what kind of mental defect a person must have to believe that granting legal status to fertilized eggs and embryos is a good idea.

Cue the goose-stepping pregnancy police, and get ready to smuggle birth control pills across state lines because the madness isn’t contained to Colorado. Nebraska is hell-bent on stripping women of their right to reproductive control as well. And I believe Montana is hatching up some personhood scheme along with a doubt-digit handful of other states.

Why? Because they’ve run out of other options. Unless they can somehow upend Roe v. Wade – not impossible but clearly too much work with Obama stacking the court with women – personhood is their last stand.

There isn’t a scientist or doctor worth his/her degree who agrees with the insane notion that life – people life – begins at conception. Not one. Not a shred of credible science to back it up. It’s all based on notions of God and soul, a realm that invites multiple interpretations as a matter of course with nary a hint of agreement anywhere unless it’s the Supreme Court giving the nod to the idea that businesses are a notch above the unborn in the eyes of the law.

And this is so not about saving babies. That’s the ruse. It’s about controlling women. Stripping of us rights and autonomy. Period.

How this is any different from the “socialism” people quake in their slippers about while huddled around the flat screen cheering on Hannity, I don’t know.

Clearly infringing on the rights of women of reproductive age doesn’t bother anyone on the right. But so much doesn’t bother them that I wonder if they’d even notice a regime change from “democracy” to “totalitarian state”. Maybe if the news preempted “Glee” or “Dancing with the Stars”.

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