You’ll have to excuse what I’m about to write. But under the present circumstances, when I want my doctor to avail herself of the most effective and efficient course of action to return me to the land of the pain-free, I am short of patience for anti-abortion men.
Here’s the sentence all you dudes need to practice saying, “At the end of the day, it’s your body and you have to make the best decision you can for you as to what you should do. I can’t tell you.”
Go ahead. Try it now.
See?
I probably shouldn’t get this worked up, but this is where the line is for me, and where I come down firmly on the side of the gender essentialists. You, as a man, cannot know what it is like for me, as a woman, to have the reproductive tract I do. And I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe that you can imagine exactly what it’s like to have organs designed to stir a human being out of a mush of genetic material. You cannot imagine the wide-ranging emotions we feel when they do what they’re designed to do and the great mix of emotions we feel when they don’t.
You might be able to sympathize, greatly, but you cannot know.
And so I’m going to clue you in. All this?
Even if it’s all true–that having an abortion can make a woman depressed, suicidal, etc., etc.,*–so fucking what?
No, seriously. So what?
Women are adult human beings and adult human beings have to make decisions that are difficult, that might be the least shitty choice out of a lot of shitty choices, that THEY MAY COME TO DEEPLY REGRET.
So what?
Arguing that abortion is wrong because some women come to regret it only makes sense if you believe that women shouldn’t be and aren’t capable of living with their tough choices and must be protected from having to make those choices.
And the fact that some of you seem to think that you should be the ones making those choices instead, when you will never, ever feel the full weight of the decision? In a fair world, that should seem so ludicrous on its surface as to not even be up for discussion.
*Though let me be clear that many of the things Mr. Cassman is claiming as true are just lies, lies, lies, designed to bolster his point.
Filed under: abortion
Unless you’ve defended your nation by putting your life on the line for it, you have absolutely NO RIGHT to say ANYTHING about the military or national defense.
And what about the women who staff Rachel’s Vineyard who cited the research you challenge? How about the women across the nation (and they are legion) who agree with Cassman? Is their right to voice an opinion on reproduction cancelled out because they hold the wrong opinion advanced by men with “no right” to do so? Perhaps it is not if it differs from your own opinion, apparently.
You folks are pathetic. You are moral cowards & intellectual lightweights. Have the moxie to stand up for your position without shriveling into a feminist puddle when both males AND females disagree with you.
What’s the matter? Can’t find a rational argument to support the taking of inconvenient human life? You have to fall back on telling others to keep their opinions to yourself? It must be frustrating for you, so you offer a petulant (or is that flatulent?) hissy-fit to substitute for your lack of intellectual firepower.
It’s hardly surprising you don’t base your position on principles found OUTSIDE yourselves that can be applied universally without regard to one’s personal preference of the outcome. What’s surprising is the echo chamber you’ve concocted to reinforce how right you are to insist that others accept that they have no right to free speech. You look within yourselves and find only your own preferences, with which you then override those objective principles that prevent the outcome you desire.
I’d be tempted to say that women like you are a perfect illustration of why women should have the vote stripped from them and be banished from political office and from positions of authority in the church.
I’d be tempted, except for the HUGE number of women who disagree with you because they are not enslaved to re-styling their minds to justify whatever pleases them. These women have brains, beauty, personal integrity, and the ability to see the big picture – and that ALWAYS takes the ability to look outside your self.
Fortunately, real women do not use such pathetically weak “logical” structures to justify their desire to get and keep their own way. Like strong men, truly strong women establish a set of “first principles” to govern their own lives and the decisions and actions giving those lives value & essence. Then they LIVE BY THEM, applying them and dealing with the natural impact they have on the outcomes in question – without regard to the outcome they privately prefer. You ought to try it some time.
It’s called integrity, and THAT takes true courage – of conviction.
You folks are cowards. You obviously would not apply to issues involving the military the same “principle” or “logic” you apply to the question of men opining on abortion. However, to support your desired position you must apply one set of logic to the one situation, and then toss it and find a replacement set that will yield the “preferable” position on a different issue.
Beyond your basic right to exist (more than you accord the unborn), I simply do not respect you. Frankly, you aren’t worthy debate adversaries at all. You can’t debate or exchange views. Like most lefties, your visceral instinct is to tell the other side to “shut up.” You’re like teenagers who advance similar “thinking” patterns. I expect it from them; they’ve yet to grow up. What happened to you?
Oh, my God. Teh crazy.
I imagine that some women do suffer the choice, at least short term.
I imagine that others suffer the choice to keep the child. Could we compare the incidents of post-partum depression and conclude that no woman should ever give birth? Or the incidents of child abuse at the hands of a woman gone a little nuts from stress and poverty and unpreparedness for motherhood and conclude that no woman should have a child?
Maybe if we didn’t, as a society, shame women who seek abortions (or just enjoy sex), then less would experience depression, etc?
You know what’s really cowardly, “Phil?” Calling someone names, attacking their integrity and whatnot while you don’t use a real email address or name or some way for the person you’re attacking to reach you.
It’s easy to bully someone when they can’t reach you. Try using your real name and/or email address where Ms. B. can call you out personally on your personal attack of her.
Before you say she doesn’t use her real name, everyone can reach her via email, including you.
I think anonymous commenters…as in really anonymous (who no one knows or no one can reach, etc) are the real cowards when they use their anonymity to attack others.
B.
Google “Jeff Cassman Nashville” and you’ll see who you’re dealing with and what his surrogates will say and/or do to attack those who disagree.
He was a swift boater in TN where he tried to nail Harold Ford. Check the Daily Kos entries in 2006 listed on the first page of Google.
It wouldn’t surprise me if “Phil” is Jeff or one of his surrogates.
Oh, yes, Miss Cobb. This is election season, so this sort of coward is out in force. And brace yourself, good citizens: if I’ve learned one thing about this sort of coward, he isn’t the type to accept either victory or defeat with grace and magnanimity. Whether McCain or Obama is the next resident of the White House, he and his fellow cowards will make themselves busy attacking their perceived enemies (as opposed to working with the rest of us to seek mature solutions to our collective problems). We’ll be lucky if the vast majority of them continue to spew their vitriol from behind anonymous electronic personae.
But I don’t think we’ll have to worry about ‘Phil.’ Someone who accuses others of ‘moral cowardice’ and admonishes them to have “the moxie to stand up for your position”– doing so anonymously, no less– probably has vertebrae made of marshmallow.
Phil gave a pretty long speech about how B has pathetically weak logical structure, all the while not presenting any evidence of his own.
So Phil, if you’ve got some evidence of when a zygote becomes a citizen with rights, that doesn’t come from your invisible grampa in the sky, lay it out.
[...] Aunt B. rebukes those who lack female plumbing for making their views known on issues of human life: Arguing that abortion is wrong because some women come to regret it only makes sense if you believe that women shouldn’t be and aren’t capable of living with their tough choices and must be protected from having to make those choices. [...]
I just followed the link to the “source” of the study that contradicts the AMA study.
Turns out, this source PROVIDES the service that they claim that ALL WOMEN NEED.
Conflict of interest much?
Yeah, what The Professor said.
But let me be the first to applaud Phil’s remarkable restraint and personal fortitude in overcoming temptation…
I’d be tempted to say that women like you are a perfect illustration of why women should have the vote stripped from them and be banished from political office and from positions of authority in the church.
Well done, Phil! I’m glad you didn’t succumb, otherwise people might have discounted everything you said as froth from the mouth of a crazy caveman.
On the other hand, he has a point…just because someone hasn’t gone through a certain experience doesn’t mean they can’t have a valid opinion. I mean I haven’t served in the military, but I can have an opinion about force readiness. Of course, I don’t actually get a say in deployment.
I posted a resonse to Phil over at Kleinheider’s before I realized he said the same thing here. So just in case he comes back…….
I find it rather disturbing that he doesn’t consider “It’s my body so I decide what to do with it” a ‘rational’ argument.
visceral instinct is to tell the other side to “shut up.”
That entire comment was one big shut up. And I envision a two year old with his fingers in his ears shouting shut up at the top of his lungs.
Scroll, scroll, scroll…waiting for something substantive…shaming, shaming, religious invective, hectoring, still waiting for something substantive, screeching…Some people could serve their cause better by shutting the fuck up. Mr. “Don’t source me or you’ll readily find that I’m full of shit” is one of them.
That being said, I am both convinced that women have a unique bodily experience that men don’t share (and I didn’t want to wind up an essentialist in my old age, so it’s not like I am happy to be stuck with that philosophical bright line) and that women differ wildly in their bodily experiences from one another. So there’s the first problem — that women are different from men, sure, but not very similar to one another.
Second, to me, I see a difference between what humans discuss and decide between themselves and what the law permits and forbids. I have no part of your discussion with your partner — that’s your bidness as baby-making individuals. However, in a society governed by law in which I am an citizen, damn skippy I have a right to be involved in the passage of laws that I favor. Because my brother is also a citizen and in theory citizenship is a universal category that transcends sexual identities, doesn’t he too have a place in the “thinking, talking, passing, and amending laws we all live by”?
I am worried, too, that essentialism (the idea that all women are unique to each other and uniquely situated as citizens based on their collective identity as women) is really limiting and can be really hateful in its practice as a political vehicle because a lot of women get thrown off that speeding car as “not the women we’re really talking about because you’re infertile, you’re disabled and presumed sexless, you’re black, you’re a lesbian, you’re MTF…”
But this is all a little deep before my first cup of coffee. The Olympics are doing my thinker in, maybe.
Just to dwell on the whole “that means people who’ve never served in war can’t have an opinion on the war” idiocy for just a second, too. It’s not analogous.
I mean, do I really care if men have an opinion one way or another about abortion? No. I would expect that, as human beings, of course they do. And I don’t blame them for being uncomfortable with it. A lot of women are uncomfortable with it. Human beings have conflicted feelings about taking that action to keep from bringing a baby into the world, regardless of when they think life begins.
My problem comes when men think that their discomfort with abortion should count for so much more than a particular woman’s needs that abortion should then be outlawed.
It’s more close, if we wanted to use a war analogy, to this. I feel free to oppose the war in Iraq. I think it was wrong for us to go in there and it’s wrong for us to still be there and it’s enacting a toll on everyone involved, including our own soldiers, that I find unacceptable and I wish with all my heart were different. But, I’m not going to say to an individual soldier “You are wrong and evil for shooting the people you shot.” Because that would be bullshit, for me to try to second-guess a difficult decision made under circumstances I’ll never be in.
And, Exador, I’m tickled to see that you’ve discovered that these are dudes who are making money off the model of “women who suffer after having abortions.” Ha.
Right, Exador. How are you supposed to argue with someone who believes opinion pieces on a website designed to convince women that they should be upset about their abortions is equivalent evidence to a rigorous review of the existing science on the topic? Most such folks don’t have the specific skills required to adequately critique the published scientific literature in the first place.
Bridgett, good points. And, really, I feel “that women are different from men, sure, but not very similar to one another” to be so true when I read it that I’m taken aback and kind of feel caught short in my own reasoning.
So, hmm. I’m glad we ended up here, because that’s something I need to think on carefully.
Huh! when I check the contact names for “Rachel’s Vineyard”’s Nashville location, the top of the three names is:
Contact: Phil Trevathan 615-790-8541
Could this be the same Phil, drumming up business?
I feel for the women who do, after the fact, regret having abortions. But it reminds me of mental/emotional work I had to do myself to get past having been abused: figuring out that not everyone who had experiences more or less like mine had the same reactions to them or the same ways of coping with them. And that those other reactions were no more and no less valid than my own. Which makes me lose my sympathy for those who regret what they’ve done but insist that everyone else feels just the same, really.
Also I feel for readers who can’t distinguish between a study being inconclusive about causality and a study being inconclusive about numbers of people affected. But that’s a rant for another day.
One of Phil’s first comments is:
And what about the women who staff Rachel’s Vineyard who cited the research you challenge?
Gee Phil, know them personally?
They aborted his baybeez?
[...] B. over at TIny Cat Pants thinks I have no place to discuss abortion because I’m a dangler. Apparently it got under [...]
“Phil” is the classic drive-by troll: He just swings by to drop his stinkbomb, then goes away, never to return. We get a lot of them over at MR. Too bad killfile doesn’t work in WordPress.