I haven’t seen anyone point out the obvious yet, but I’m just going to say it. There is absolutely NOTHING surprising about Steve Waldman advocating trying to come up with a small, suitable, not unseemly fee we might pay pregnant women who would otherwise have abortions to have their babies and then give them up for adoption.
Because, after all, saying “paying women who would otherwise have abortions to have their babies and then give them up for adoption” is just a long-handed way of saying “let’s buy babies from women.”
And what’s surprising about this?
The core belief of the pro-life movement is that it’s okay for the State to step in and take control of a woman’s body for nine months in order to force her to give birth, if she gets pregnant. In other words, that there are some circumstances in which your body is not intrinsically you, but is instead a thing that the State might need to own and control if you yourself cannot control it properly.
Well, if the pro-life movement already believes that women’s bodies do not belong to ourselves, but can under very ordinary circumstances, belong to the State, what’s so surprising about learning that some pro-lifers believe that a baby’s body might also be up for grabs? Also available as a commodity to be bought and sold?
If you believe you have the right to commandeer a woman’s body and force her to give birth, it is not at all surprising that you believe that you then should be able commandeer the baby’s body, too?
No. It’s extremely consistant.
Filed under: Fun with Feminism, abortion
oh. my. fucking. god.
Wow. I don’t know if it’s the way you phrased it, or if it’s that I read this post right after I read the post at Alas about how the analogy to slavery is misappropriated by some pro-lifers, but I was just now deeply struck by how this scenario resembles that other scenario in which individual bodies of women are required to bring children to term so that a collective body can take the babies and redistribute them.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying pay-to-push plan is like slavery – the conditions and causes of slave breeding are a whole other level of horrific, and I don’t want to minimize that. But it just seems so glaringly obvious that it’d be a good idea to avoid anything that lies on the same spectrum of forcing human bodies to be a means of (re)production…. and that this plan for systemic pregnancy inducement and infant reallocation is about anything but personhood.
Besides, there’s something just eye-clawingly aggravating about seeing a couple of fauxgressive dudes pair up to mull over solutions for women’s bodies. What did they do, have a cup of coffee and ask themselves “Now what would it take me to bring a baby to term if I got pregnant?” I’m not saying men are incapable of empathizing with women’s issues. It just takes a little imagination and care. This is a failure of both.
Oh, god, I want to be smart enough to talk about this. I’m going to try, but if I’m not clear, understand that I’m still working it out in my head. Because I do think that the problem, at its core, is slavery. And like you, I’m not interested in drawing an equivalency between slavery and abortion.
But I think that, because we, as a country, took a “time heals all wounds” approach to the horror of slavery, we have a lot of people in this country who, by now, get that it was wrong to enslave black people but who still do not understand that all people have the right to their own bodies, that they have a right to decide what happens to their bodies and to make their own decisions about them without coercion.
I don’t think this is the equivalent of slavery, but I do believe that it is the legacy of slavery–this idea that maybe perhaps sometimes as long as we do it better or different than we did before, it’s okay to take control of another person’s body.
We can talk all day about how racism is bad and slavery is bad and most folks at least get it, even if they get defensive. But talking about how the paternalistic commandeering of others’ bodies?
And I would also argue that there’s a way that this line of thinking… I don’t know if it would call it outright racist… but I feel like it plays on racist tropes. Because who in our society is constantly blamed for being poor and for all kinds of sexual excesses and who is either seen as having too many abortions (or why else would the clinics be located in “those parts” of town?) or too many children (especially for the money)?
Black women.
I want to talk about this some when I’m over at Feministe, about how white people talk about black people without being forthright about it. Sometimes, I know it’s at a completely self-aware level–like when folks here get that little sneer when they talk about people from Memphis and you suddenly get that they mean black people–but other times, like this, I think it’s barely conscious that they’re talking about giving black women money for black children. But I do believe that it’s there, right under the surface, this idea that we have not let go of that there might be some times when selling (black) children is okay.
And we need to figure out how to drag that stuff into the sun and bake it out of our souls.
Unfortunately, you guys are missing a key point that the pro-lifers keep pushing at me when I try to counter their points… pro-lifers do not see their movement as having anything to do with the “woman’s” body… they are trying to “advocate for the life of the child.” Ergo:
Removing choices from women regarding their reproductive health is OK because it helps save a BABY.
Forcing women to carry a child to term without any regard to the woman’s mental or physical health is OK because it could possibly (no matter how infinitesimal the odds) save a BABY.
Paying a woman to carry to term and then buying the child is OK because it saves a BABY.
As long as the pro-life movement can justify saving a BABY, any anti arguments for their methods fall on intentionally deaf ears. They could start building “labor camps” (parallel intended) and literally become birth Nazis and as long as they can justify their actions with a BABY, it won’t freaking matter.
Even when you ask them bluntly about a woman’s life versus a fetus, they will just go into the cycle of “the woman made choices and now has to deal with consequences and why should the BABY be punished”… etc. etc. ad nauseum. But the answer is the BABY always takes precedence.
So until the pro-choice movement can find a way to actually subvert that thinking, the battle will rage and people will keep suggesting otherwise inane things like paying mothers for their children and making it OK.
i will love 2 do that cause i like 2 see people happy at all times and if u would call me 2 have a baby 4 women who cn not have kids i will do it so call me or email me asap my number is [yes, an actual phone number--ed] i m so happy i just did dis so do not let me donw t all call meeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[Either this commenter is a dumbass or a fraud. Not sure which.--b.]