Long live planned parenthood and so on. But eliminating pregnancy doesn't solve the problem. It just shoves it to the side. If women must always choose between being mothers and being anything else, eliminating pregnancy only means that women get to have a life only to the extent that this life is like the life of a man.
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Ancillary threads started blooming; things were getting heated. This almost always happens when abortion comes up which is why Doug called a halt.
Moving beyond the question of abortion, pro or con, I'd like to spend a few moments focusing on the unspoken assumptions of gendered virtue and perfidy bound up with your statements.
You start by hand wavingly, and faintly, praising planning, as if women's ability to determine when they'll become pregnant is well established around the globe, instead of what it actually is: a still hotly contested topic. Given real-world conditions, which you're surely familiar with, this puzzled me at first but perhaps that damnation via faint praise was by design. I say by design, because you go on to write: "eliminating pregnancy doesn't solve the problem. It just shoves it to the side." An astounding statement inasmuch as it merges contraception use, which is usually employed to merely *delay* pregnancy (and thereby put the *planned* in planned parenthood), with the final sounding "eliminating pregnancy"; yet another in a series of loaded phrasings which imply the sinister intent of those who disagree with you.
Moving forward, things get even more muddled.
You continue: "eliminating pregnancy only means that women get to have a life only to the extent that this life is like the life of a man". Another head-scratcher because it seems to ignore the past few decades of pop culture propagandizing re: women 'having it all' - career, children, mates, etc. Perhaps women working as traders for Goldman Sachs and allied tradespeople are compelled to live this "life of a man" you vaguely describe. Outside of such rarefied and gender role exaggerated circles, I doubt too many people expect women to routinely "eliminate pregnancy" or "choose between being mothers and being anything else" in precisely the way you seem to mean. In other words, taking your words at face value, one could be forgiven for thinking that women - at least in the US - were being discouraged from having children. Even a cursory glance at pop culture artifacts such as movies and commercials would show this to be incorrect. In fact, at present, the situation is quite the opposite.
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Having said all that, I'm going to stop here because really, what's the point?
First of all, per Doug, it probably isn't fruitful and definitely tends towards flaming. And second, as I said in my previous post, I'm really, really put out by your assertion - heavily implied though concealed enough to retain deniability - that contraception and access to abortion services are not, as many women unequivocally state, positive developments but are in fact primarily (and perhaps only) boons to irresponsible men. Of course, you're entitled to hold an unpopular POV, (unpopular that is, in lefty circles), and who knows, you may yet be proven right.
What galls however is your apparent dismissal of the experiences and carefully arrived at opinions of other women. You appear to be arguing that their conclusions are delusional, even though you show little evidence of real familiarity with the meat of those conclusions and the thought process leading to them.
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This reminds me of the proceedings of one of the list's past debates re: sex workers. At the time, you insisted that no one understood or appreciated your strong objections because this space is dominated by men. You wrote this, despite the fact that all the people opposing your view in the strongest terms were women and some of your staunchest defenders were men (including former list hot head, M. Dawson).
It was almost as if the topic tripped a switch which compelled you to assume the worst of the men on-hand (the worst, in that case, being a lack of horror at the thought and reality of sex for money) and ignore any evidence to the contrary.
This is what I keep in the back of my mind whenever I read your posts on gender-centered topics which almost always seem to have a dark cloud of Haversham-esque disapproval hanging over them.
.d.