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pastwatcherI'd heard the phrase "war on women" used recently and thought it was hyperbole; looking at the article below, I'm actually scared. Trigger warning: repeated mention of forced childbirth, and failing to deal with medical emergencies. No seriously, looking at it made me shudder.
The GOP house is waging war on women and poor people.
A friend of a friend related to most of the people in a remote village in China (and I've already forgotten which province), spent a summer there doing thesis research about the One Child policy. Some things she told me:
1) Women were accustomed to having mandatory ultrasounds every 3 months. They described appointments made alphabetically, that you could /maybe/ move but could not skip, and they were in-and-out ultrasounds. Even "approved", i.e. first, pregnancies would be noted; others would probably be aborted.
2) There were forced-abortion campaigns in China in several provinces a couple of times, most recently in 1991. My *sister* was born in 1991, and I'm proud to say my mother believes becoming a mother should only be the woman's choice.
3) Nevertheless people would have more children, having to bribe and use connections to get away with it. That's probably why the measures were so extreme.
I know it's not rational to feel sick when I think about the laws forcing ultrasounds on women who want abortions, but it reminds me of nothing so much as that. It doesn't make sense to be triggered, either, in that no-one's ever tried to force me to have a baby or not to, but I've imagined it, sometimes wonder if it will happen to me, and it's horrifying.
Compare that to the Romanian dictator who would force women to get pregnant, imposing some high "fertility tax" nonsense and also checkups. The resulting larger population, when in their twenties, were the ones to tear him down. I heard this from Ana; I suppose I don't go looking for stories like this, nor have I come across them in most discussions.
I don't even /know/ which would be worse, being forced to abort or forced to birth--both are highly physically and emotionally traumatic. But controlling the country's population by using its women like chattel--very sickening.
The GOP house is waging war on women and poor people.
A friend of a friend related to most of the people in a remote village in China (and I've already forgotten which province), spent a summer there doing thesis research about the One Child policy. Some things she told me:
1) Women were accustomed to having mandatory ultrasounds every 3 months. They described appointments made alphabetically, that you could /maybe/ move but could not skip, and they were in-and-out ultrasounds. Even "approved", i.e. first, pregnancies would be noted; others would probably be aborted.
2) There were forced-abortion campaigns in China in several provinces a couple of times, most recently in 1991. My *sister* was born in 1991, and I'm proud to say my mother believes becoming a mother should only be the woman's choice.
3) Nevertheless people would have more children, having to bribe and use connections to get away with it. That's probably why the measures were so extreme.
I know it's not rational to feel sick when I think about the laws forcing ultrasounds on women who want abortions, but it reminds me of nothing so much as that. It doesn't make sense to be triggered, either, in that no-one's ever tried to force me to have a baby or not to, but I've imagined it, sometimes wonder if it will happen to me, and it's horrifying.
Compare that to the Romanian dictator who would force women to get pregnant, imposing some high "fertility tax" nonsense and also checkups. The resulting larger population, when in their twenties, were the ones to tear him down. I heard this from Ana; I suppose I don't go looking for stories like this, nor have I come across them in most discussions.
I don't even /know/ which would be worse, being forced to abort or forced to birth--both are highly physically and emotionally traumatic. But controlling the country's population by using its women like chattel--very sickening.
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Date: 2011-02-27 08:04 pm (UTC)It really just doesn't work that way.
I mean, on just a totally superficial level, most pregnant folks are so fat by 6 months that they have to buy a whole new wardrobe. You don't go through all that just to go get an abortion.
By the third trimester, most pregnant people have decorated their nurseries, picked out names, notified the relatives, and generally come to think of themselves as parents and the fetus as their baby. The vast majority of third-trimester abortions, therefore, are really tragedies, precipitated by extreme physical defects or significant threats to the mother's life. They aren't undertaken lightly, and most of the people who get them have already sat down and had real, serious, heart-to-heart talks about the ethical and practical ramifications.
The gov't forcing people to get ultrasounds or otherwise interfering isn't going to make people more thoughtful or make better decisions. It's a short-sighted and rather stupid response to the assumption that women who get late term abortions are simply idiots who forgot to schedule their abortions until they were 8 months along and lack the moral and intellectual development to understand that a fetus is a baby, or a calculated attempt to make abortion inconvenient and difficult enough that people who actually need one won't be able to get it.