Saturday, September 16, 2017

Why Abortion is Patriarchal Oppression

Cis men often pressure, force, or coerce women and pregnant people into abortions. They threaten us into it or otherwise try and manipulate us. Men (not all but too many to not talk about) use abortion as a way to use women as reusable and disposable sex objects so that they can have sex with them all they want without having to take care of their responsibilities. There are even movements called "bro-choice" and “men for choice” that ironically point this out, with "bros" talking about how abortion is good for them specifically because of that reasoning....and somehow the “no uterus no opinion” idea conveniently doesn’t apply to “pro-choice” men. It treats our bodies as garbage disposals; as in, what you put into us can just be chopped up into little bits and the bloody mess taken out so that you can use us over and over again. Abortion is a deadbeat dad's favorite thing.

Rapists use it to continue to rape and control their victims, as it gets rid of the “evidence” (not only DNA evidence to prove he was the rapist on trial, but suddenly having a child is evidence that she is being raped to everyone around her as well) and thus they can get away with raping her for longer, and pressuring her to abort is another way to control her too. This happens with standard rape and statutory rape as well, and some abortion clinics have even lied about the age of statutory rape victims or didn’t contact social services when she comes in with an older man, so that they can give underage girls abortions. Alice Paul, the feminist who created the Equal Rights Amendment act (ERA) has stated, “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.” There are so many ways in which that rings true.

Men also have killed many women and pregnant people for not aborting, or otherwise harmed them by throwing them down stairs etc. to try and cause a miscarriage, or slipped them the abortion pill without them knowing it. Without men and the patriarchy, abortion wouldn't exist. Not only that but it was the men of NARAL who sold abortion to feminists and the world in the late 1960s by making up lies. One of those men, the abortion doctor Bernard Nathanson, flat-out admitted that they lied. And it was men who were the ones to vote on Roe V Wade and men have always been the abortion doctors, and prey on women by telling them that their children are not children but clumps of cells etc., so that they can get their abortion dollars. Some of them have admitted they make lots of money from abortion.

Also, male bosses make women feel like they can't be mothers while working and that abortion is what they should choose, which is just another way to coerce. Same with being single or poor or going to school or what have you. Women get abortions because of the mother shaming society we live in making them feel like they have no other choice. If men could get pregnant, abortion wouldn't exist, because people don't tell men that they can't be career men and fathers at the same time yet women get constantly told that we can't be career women and mothers at the same time so abortion is necessary for our success. This is one of those tactics that those men from NARAL used to get support for abortion. It's just sad that it worked.

The abortion-and-pro-choice-industry tells us that the wombless male body is normative and that in order to have equal rights to men and compete in a male-dominated world, we need have abortion so that we aren't "bothered" and "bothering them" with the concept of having children. Instead of raising women to the equal rights level of men as we are, we are taught to get rid of what makes us uniquely female because it is a "burden", and that we should lower ourselves to what we deem as the worst kind of men--deadbeat dads. Instead, we should be empowering pregnant and parenting women, and telling them we CAN do it. You CAN be pregnant or a mother while going to school, you CAN be pregnant or a mother while working, you CAN be pregnant or a mother while a teenager, you CAN be pregnant or a mother while single, and you CAN be pregnant or a mother while poor. Rosie the riveter is a great example of the "yes we can" concept yet somehow when it comes to pregnancy we have turned it into "No you can't, have an abortion." Having kids does not mean you have to give up a life worth living, yet that is what the abortion industry wants us to believe, but it goes against everything feminism stands for.

There are many women who regret their abortions, and have depression from it, PTSD from it, suicidal tendencies from it, or have actually killed themselves from it. You can find their videos on youtube or their stories in writing, just by looking up "I regret my abortion" or "abortion regret" on google or youtube. Because women are basically told in various ways that we have no other choice to abort yet people turn around and say it is somehow “our choice” when debating abortion, we are the ones who end up as the scapegoats and thus have to deal with all the heaviest feelings from it. We are told we can’t regret it because it was “our choice” despite the fact that we choose it because we are told we have no choice. The men who pressure us into it get out without having to deal with it because it reinforces old-fashioned stereotypes that anything having to do with babies is “women’s work.”

There are so many women who feel this way that there are endless amounts of organizations around to help women with post-abortive regret, which wouldn't be able to be around if women never regretted it, yet these women constantly get ignored so that the abortion industry can act like women rarely regret it to keep women supporting pro-choice politicians and coming into the abortion clinics and giving them their hundreds of dollars for each abortion. Women's voices of regret are being swept under the rug like crazy. That is what misogyny looks like. Although not all men do the things I am describing in this article, and in fact abortion can hurt men and make them regret lost fatherhood just like many women regret their abortions as well, it still happens far too much.

Also, it truly shows we are oppressed when people act like somehow we need to have a right to treat our children the way we have been treated by men, by oppressing them and treating them as our property to be disposed of as we see fit, and instead of giving us actual help for our situations. Offering abortion is an easy way for people to blow off our problems and act like they helped us. An abortion doesn't make a poor woman not poor or a raped woman un-raped or an abused woman not abused etc., it just throws women right back into these situations after she leaves the clinic. All it gives her is a dead child on top of the problems she has, it doesn't help the problem at all. It doesn't solve the root problem.

On top of all of that, sex selective abortion kills females in the womb just for being females because people want sons. This happens in various countries including our own but in the ones where it is most prevalent, there is a gap between the amount of men and women, as a decent chunk of women were killed in the womb. This has led to young women being kidnapped, raped, trafficked, and forced into marriages because the men of the population have a lack of women to choose from in terms of coupling. Pro-lifers believe in women's rights, we just go one step further and say that ALL women should have rights, not just the born ones, for we truly don't have rights if they don't start when we first exist. Women deserve better than all of this. We deserve better than being given a bad choice that no one really wants and we basically just choose because we are told we need to choose it. No woman walks into an abortion clinic happy to do it. This is something that both pro-choicers and pro-lifers agree on. We just need to understand that that horrible choice that no one likes or really wants shouldn't be held up as an example of wonderful women's rights. It's something that comes from our oppression and is something we should always be fighting to end, because it hurts us too.

All of these things are why when I was 14 and found out what abortion was, I was pro-life *on the specific basis* that I am a leftist feminist. I started off by having many feminist reasons to be against abortion before I could even know the politicizing strategies of each side. And when I started to hear the stereotypes that abortion was supported by feminists and opposed by those who aren't, I automatically assumed people were joking, because that would never make any sense. Abortion is pure violence, on our children and us. It would never fit in with feminism. It is just more evidence that we are oppressed.

For more information on Pro-Life feminism, google or facebook search (or enter in the websites of) out the organizations
Feminists for Life : http://www.feministsforlife.org/
Feminists for Nonviolent Choices : http://www.ffnvc.org/
New Wave Feminists: https://www.newwavefeminists.com/
Feminists Choosing Life of New York Action: https://www.fclnyact.org/
and Pro-Life Feminists: https://prolifefeminists.wordpress.com/
These are the organizations that have helped me realize that I am not alone and that Pro-Life feminism has existed since feminism began, as it started off Pro-Life to begin with. All the early feminists, such as Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Victoria Woodhull, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Mary Wollstonecraft etc. etc. and even Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood) were pro-life. It was the men from NARAL who made up lies that turned some of the feminists pro-choice. Let's not let men get the better of us, and return to understanding that the violence of abortion is not fit for feminism and a world where we champion peace and equal rights. It is the destruction of everything we stand for. It is the destruction of us.

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