So not but a few minutes after I posted about stupid attempts to grant men legal ownership over women should they accidentally impregnate them, I read this post by Gabriela at Bitch Blogs about a couple of paranoid, annoying pieces by men who, while granting that coming in someone doesn’t give you legal ownership over her, should at least buy you some moral ownership. Gabriela is far too generous with Conor Friedersdorf, who thinks the “what about child support?!” argument has any validity, and Damon Linker, who is very concerned that feminists are encouraging immoral displays of excessive independence for women who’ve had the presence of semen within their vaginas in recent memory. Conor is less interesting to me. He uses the phrase “your agenda on reproductive rights”, making it exquisitely clear that he doesn’t consider women’s rights to be human rights, and there’s not much you can do with someone whose argument is premised on the belief that “women” are a separate category from “human”. He also buys into the fallacy that child support constitutes 100% of the expense of raising a child, when of course single mothers usually pay far more than 50% of the money and 90% of the time and 100% of the physical creation effort that goes into making a child. Okay, 99.9%, but I’ll get back to that in a second.
Both authors, due to their obvious emasculation fears, fell for the “abortion party” story hook, line, and sinker. As I noted when the controversy first arose, anyone who falls for this story is telling you more about their fears and gullibility than they are telling you about what actually happened at what was technically a fund-raising party for a college student who couldn’t pay for her own abortion. Indeed, I’d say the young woman and her friends were being generous and honorable by raising the money themselves, so that there is more for other needy women that have to turn to abortion funds. (I have more on that subject in this week’s podcast.) The author of the “abortion party” piece made his anti-choice views clear with his digression about the 3-year-old. His belief that the boyfriend was being outcast and abused seems to come more from his hopes than from the evidence at hand, since he admits that the abortion decision was mutual. But he believes, against all evidence, that the boyfriend is being emasculated by a bunch of hard-drinking feminist harpies, and our bloggers today buy that, again, telling you more about their fears than about what feminists do.
Damon Linker was the one who really got on my nerves, starting with his self-congratulatory willingness to extend to women their basic human right to control their own body. At least legally. But he’s incredibly concerned that feminists are misleading women into being immoral towards men’s feelings, which is a legitimate concern, because as we all know, women are particularly weak-minded and easy to confuse, and unlike men, have no native moral sense.
The kind of feminists and progressives who would throw an “abortion party” and insist that the father of a fetus facing possible termination should have no say in its fate are thinking and behaving monstrously, I’m afraid, by applying political and legal considerations to a sphere of life (the private sphere) where morality should set the tone. They believe, perversely, that the best (and perhaps only) way to ensure that abortion remains legal and out of the political sphere is to treat abortion—and demand that men treat abortion—as a matter of moral indifference.
The straw is flying so furiously that it’s hard to see, but it’s still hard to miss his point about how women have so much trouble understanding their moral obligation to their impregnators, just because they have no legal obligations to them. Which is bullshit, even using the evidence he has on hand. Even in the original abortion party story, which was sexist propaganda with obvious truth-fudging going on, noted that the decision for the abortion was mutually reached. The boyfriend was made a part of it. Frankly, I think that the original author and Linker just can’t imagine a man signing off on an abortion , and so they’re eager to believe that any sadness that a man experiences during an abortion process is due to a woman undoing what he did, and not because of other factors, like perhaps that he feels bad that he couldn’t help her out financially and so she had to throw a fund-raising party.