(A) The dominant ideology among the US general public is indeed that women must fear the possibility that we may end up "paying" for sex. A good number of Americans have yet to fully accept the view that women should be able to have sex just for fun, not for procreation. The puritanical attitude toward sex is tied up with a punitive attitude toward women, who must be made to pay, and children, whose existence is made to serve as a punishment for errant women. That is why the anti-abortionist view goes very well with the anti-social democratic view in the USA. If involuntary motherhood were to be as punishing as it could be, the state ought not to provide income support and social services for mothers. That's the match made in hell -- between social conservatives + fiscal conservatives in the USA.
At 11:12 AM -0500 1/30/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
>You say things like "fetus killers," then claim you're prochoice.
(A') The dominant ideology among the anti-abortion leftists in the USA is that women should have the right to have abortion, but if we exercise the right, we should feel bad about it.
(A') is less punitive than (A), but the former is derivative of the latter.
At 1:38 AM -0500 2/1/03, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>You know, the rare woman who does feel bad about abortion (and I've
>heard hundreds of testimonies) it's generally that she wanted to
>have a child but other things in her life were making that too hard.
>In those cases abortion's not causing the problem, abortion is
>ameliorating the problem--though it remains a problem. I think a
>lot of the guilt is piled on by stuff like your link there. If you
>trust women to know what's best to do in these circumstances, piling
>on guilt is worse than worthless. Most women, I should note, feel
>nothing but relief.
It's a myth that most women feel bad about abortion, but the myth lives on in part because many women are made -- by those who espouse (A) and (A') -- to feel defensive about it and don't often speak up about the feeling of "nothing but relief" in public and in part because the Right spend mega-bucks marketing the myth: see Cynthia L. Cooper, "Abortion under Attack," <http://www.msmagazine.com/aug01/pas.html>.
Marta rightly criticized the portrayal of disability in _Frida_ and other products of mass culture. What may be even worse than representation of disability is that of abortion. First of all, just how many products of mass culture have ever portrayed abortion? Very few, and those few that do mention it either manage to avoid portrayals of women who actually have abortion -- e.g., _Citizen Ruth_, _The Wedding Banquet_ -- or present abortions as harrowing experiences -- e.g., _The Cider House Rules_. Here's an interesting article on the portrayal of abortion in movies: Audrey Fisch, "Abortion at the Movies ," <http://cobrand.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/05/15/abortion/>.
The "pro-choice" propaganda tends to emphasize the horrors of women's deaths and injuries when abortion was illegal. It is important to remember that illegal abortions were sometimes unsafe, though even illegal abortions weren't always unsafe and gruesome reminders do not really serve the "pro-choice" purpose well. It is even more important to highlight the experiences of women who have abortion and "feel nothing but relief." -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>