This is the so-called multi-culturalism taken to such an extreme that complete insanity has been unleashed:
The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada said . . . Kale [ a doctor who advocates for stopping the abortion of female fetuses in Canada] fails to acknowledge cultural values that lead some people to seek pregnancy termination based on the sex of the fetus and does not take into account biochemical testing products that can give expectant parents a highly accurate fetal sex determination as early as eight weeks into pregnancy.
Got it? We now need to get behind the right of vile freakazoids who abort fetuses based on gender because such are their cultural values. Cultural. Values. Not a horrible thing to do that should make every sane person spit on them. Not evidence of complete and utter barbarity that no civilized society should tolerate. It’s just their culture. So we should respect it. Even though our values of considering women in no way inferior to men are being trampled on in this egregious way.
The article I quoted engages in all sorts of blabber about rights, values, legislation, and so on. Here is a direct quote from the SOC of Canada:
The SOGC feels strongly that it is the cultural values and norms in specific segments of the Canadian population that must change to ensure that females are not confronted with procedures and intolerant environments before or after they are born.
And how exactly will these horrible acts be stopped if we dance around them “tolerantly” while referring to these atrocities as “cultural values and norms”? Isn’t it obvious to all but the completely brainless preachers of the mind-numbingly stupid “all cultures are equally valid” ideology that these “values” will not change until we start referring to them as acts of barbarity perpetrated by vile woman-hating jerks who do not deserve the name of human beings? Does anybody really think that these vicious “communities” don’t engage in any other ways of persecuting and discriminating against women in their midst?
In the meanwhile, we are sitting by, swooning in our impotent delight at how tolerant we are.
Here is a good post from which I discovered that this was going on.
Clarissa's Blog 
The pattern I’ve encountered again and again represents that Western values should be kept out of non-Western cultures, because it is an essential part of the other cultures’ prerogatives for their men to dominate their women however they see fit.
It’s never expressed in quite these terms, but this is what is meant.
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Am I reading this correctly? Clarissa is outraged at abortion? How can that be – it’s not a person. It’s a disposable part of the body, and the reason for the disposition is irrelevant.
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Well a cultural attitude that pressures women to terminate pregnancies based on the projected female sex of the fetus suggests that that culture is deeply, deeply misogynistic. The moral logic behind supporting abortion breaks down when it stops being about a woman’s freedom to do as she wishes with her body and life, and starts being about an anti-female cultural imperative according to which an expecting mother is under relentless pressure to ignore her own desires and conform to a system that asserts spectral, external control over her body and devalues her gender.
PS “disposition”? I do not think that hword means hwhat you think it means.
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So is the SOGC also down with pruning the lily? Because there’s still some cultures that love that sick ass shit. Better make some tolerance room for them too.
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I live in Canada and we have lots of multicultural insanities like that. What’s even worst is there are self-loathing left-wing feminists that support it. For these people Western culture is evil and all other cultures are great.
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Lots? really? Or would it be perhaps more appropriate to say that there are few, but they tend to stand out since they are so non-sensical.
For these people Western culture is evil and all other cultures are great.
This I agree with. It seems to be the latest affectation among a small segment of the so called intellectual class to argue in favor of exaggerated cultural relativism.
For the most part, the only people listening to them are other members of the so called intellectual class, such as most of us here in Clarissa’s blog.
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Against the possibility of being spit on. . . . . .
If the choice is legal and the justifications for that choice are diverse enough to remove dispute then the right to parse the choice also provides the right to share the choice. Cultural or not the ability to make that choice has been legally provided. If abortion is acceptable based on economic conditions as a predictor why would it be right for one segment of the population but not for another. I do understand the implications of such ethical freedom and the inherent belief in the right to exist. I had this discussion many years ago with a handicapped individual informimg me that in the near future people like him would not exist and he was correct. I cant determine the difference between multiple social influences and a single influence as in cultural or multiple and single as in spouse. Im not disagreeing Im simply looking at the potemtial for one group to curtail the existence of another by the use of specialized language and elitist ethics. The choice as an ethical perogative is dangerous. The right thing does not always equate to identical sums by two people.
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This is the price you have to be willing to pay if you want to have unrestricted abortion. This is also why abortion cannot be seen as a feminist issue. Who is the feminist here the person who supports a women’s right to choose or who tries to protect female fetuses? Your solution Clarissa seems to be to create two classes of women, those with the “right” values who must be allowed to act upon those values and those with the “wrong” values who must be protected from themselves.
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That’s a good point. What if the woman choosing to abort the baby is doing so without any external pressure? In that case does the reason why she’s having the abortion matter?
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I don’t really care about whether people are pressured into engaging in barbarity or not. They should be denounced, ridiculed and shamed anyways.
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Yep, another reason why “multiculturalism” is a misnomer. There is either a defining culture or subsequent chaos.
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This seems like a relevant place to drop this: http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/01/17/court-strikes-decision-for-mentally-ill-woman-abortion/FnbayuYlwyzjNgowPOfL7N/story.html.
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This is quite the issue of circumstance. I tend to read it differently however. I have experience with abortion obviously not in the first person and my experience informs me that although it is perceived as sacrosanct to use Clarissa’s term the effects of it socially are not.
My experience has been with women who have had abortions and suffer from the guilt of regret. Which to me suggests that the decision in many cases may be preferred to be shared to the extent that it is supported at least.
It further suggests to me that it is not simply a surgical event and may effect mental health in a way in which the ethical contradiction embeds in the psyche. If an ethical imperative is embedded initially. Which speaks to culture as much as religion which I tend to view as a culture that crosses borders or international multiculturalism.
My impression of this particular circumstance is the parents sought control for whatever reason. What I do believe is that a psychotic break can be followed by a psychotic connect not unlike waking from a comma. In a more symbolic tone had the woman had her first abortion without the knowledge of her parents her Catholicism may have caused internal strife. The current circumstance may be her way of determining what their position may have been. Conversely they may have influenced the first abortion contrary to religious dogma and caused her internal strife. It’s a power play certainly with a child as the stakes, bad karma.
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“My experience has been with women who have had abortions and suffer from the guilt of regret. ”
– I had a bad day yesterday. Handed in my midpoint dossier and it was downhill from there. So I made a decision that I deeply regret today and that makes me feel very guilty. I basically flushed a lot of hard work and effort down the toilet and will now have to start from the beginning. Idiot. But if you tried to prevent me legally (or in any other way) from making this bad choice, I would bite your head off. Because it is not your place and not anybody’s place to get between me and my regrets or my guilt.
As for abortion affecting mental health, we are all different. Anything can affect our mental health in a variety of ways. Ultimately, though, we are responsible for what happens in our bodies and our brain as a result of our choices.
Women do not need to be protected from their choices and regrets, just like men don’t.
There is nothing more disgusting, condescending and paternalistic than robbing women of the right to their own body under the guise of protecting them from themselves.
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I do not like this at all, and I do not like the idea of allowing people to detect the sex purely for this purpose, and can’t believe any doctor would go along with it without accompanying it with a stern lecture.
But I also swore as a pro choice person to always protect the right of the pregnant person to choose to abort, for whatever reason. I said what I meant and I meant what I said.
There are people working on a test to detect autism in utero, so that women can abort autistic children if they test positive for it, and while I recognize that it’s a horrible, disgusting thing, I can’t stop someone from choosing to abort under those circumstances. I can work to change the disgusting, horrible culture which sees autism as a death sentence and a life of no hope and no future, however, so that it’s no longer considered a worthy reason to abort. And that’s what I am going to do in this situation as well. Hammer out the nasty misogyny hiding behind sex-selective abortion the same way I’m working out the anti-autism bias permeating the medical and social establishments, and eventually there will be no need to bring it up, because it will not be considered upon pregnancy.
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I’m in no way opposed to anybody’s right to abort. I’m opposed to treating these specific events as “cultural values.” This isn’t something that will be repaired with anti-abortion legislation and nobody is suggesting that either. The only way to prevent this is to stop the quasi-tolerant dancing around such issues.
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I hope you are right that it won’t provoke anti-abortion legislation in Canada, but the timing of the release of this news doesn’t strike me as coincidental; the Harper Government promised to not re-open the debate surrounding same-sex marriage (and look how that turned out) and abortion, but has been making indications of doing so, and I fear that this type of news may be geared towards priming Canada for just that. There have been polls on the CBC asking about “reopening the abortion debate” and anti-choice explosions all across Canada, and this seems like it could be another piece in the agenda to force it open with a claw hammer.
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Did you somehow deduce from the post that I’m suggesting that if abortion is done for the reasons of gender selection it should be banned, or something? Because if so, then you need to reread the post.
The abortion rights are sacrosanct. That goes without question. What I;m denouncing here is the “it’s what their cultural values are like” position. Doesn’t my post directly ridicule the blabber about legislation in the quoted article?
Why are people failing to read this carefully?
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Clarissa I believe that the term sacrosanct is an implied standard of choice that is not holding up. Culture does play a role the moment the choice is shared and sharing may only constitute a conversation regarding that choice. Women who seek support in making a choice are subject to outside stresses. The choice is sacrosanct but who makes it is not.
In many cases women defer their choice to others, I agree with your position and denounce undue influence but there is no social support for an impartial choice even at a clinic. I don’t think it’s an issue that will ever find impartiality. For this reason services to achieve the proximity of impartiality would be more suitable.Education.
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“Clarissa I believe that the term sacrosanct is an implied standard of choice that is not holding up.”
– I’m not getting understood today, for some reason. 🙂 I meant it’s sacrosanct to me, which is why interpreting my post as promoting an assault on abortion rights is wrong.
“Women who seek support in making a choice are subject to outside stresses. The choice is sacrosanct but who makes it is not.”
– And so are men who choose to smoke, drink, engage in extreme sports and damage their health horribly as a result. Why is nobody proposing we make these choices illegal?
I was hoping to talk about whether all cultures should be granted equal respect and whether the word “barbarity” should be recovered for public discourse. And this is turning into an abortion debate, which I really don’t see the point of. My position is clear and well-known. I support complete bodily integrity of people. Of course, if people choose to debate abortion instead, I don’t mind. But there is something else going on here that is very important, too.
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If it helps I, as a Privileged White American Woman, feel that respect for human life and freedom is not, or should not be, a matter of “culture”. That such things as slavery, mutilation, human sacrifice, blood feuds, child brides, honor killings, and, in the OP’s case, the targeted devaluation and destruction of women because they are women are not excusable simply because they are traditional. That such things should never, ever be condoned in a society that professes to respect human life and freedom, on the ridiculous grounds of respecting cultural values.
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” That such things as slavery, mutilation, human sacrifice, blood feuds, child brides, honor killings, and, in the OP’s case, the targeted devaluation and destruction of women because they are women are not excusable simply because they are traditional. That such things should never, ever be condoned in a society that professes to respect human life and freedom, on the ridiculous grounds of respecting cultural values.”
– Exactly.
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In the case of barbarity no there should be no public discourse in a multicultural society. Cultures have lineage and history and it is a form of elitism to parse the significance of that lineage under the guise of barbarism. There is however a requirement to adhere to the law of the land. If that law provides medical access nobody has the right to curtail that access on what they may perceive as a moral imperative.
Either remove or change the law or shut up. Denigrating cultures with ethical imperialism leads to genocide.
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“What lurks at the horizon. . . is the nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct preachers of tolerance and respect for the other’s beliefs: a society immobilised by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel and superstitious this other is.” – Slavoj Zizek. (While I am still allowed to quote on this blog.)
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Well I know I left this once or twice before but it so sums up how screwed up all “cultural” values really are. The funny thing is, like this guy says, its awfully quiet out there in feminist land. Shhhh, I wonder why.
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“The funny thing is, like this guy says, its awfully quiet out there in feminist land.”
– Have you missed all of those posts I wrote denouncing the burqa and all the flak I got for doing so? I feel about it exactly the same as I do about the subject of this post. As for the video, I agree completely that feminists who support burqas on some sort of weird feminist ground are ridiculous hypocrites. I wrote an angry post precisely about that quite a while ago.
It is also kind of strange for people to talk about feminists being silent on this issue when I am sitting right here and my posts on this subject can be found quite easily.
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The point here is that this is yet another way to police women’s bodies. And *that* is a feminist issue. I don’t think this has anything to do with the right to abort in particular. It is more about reproductive freedom. I come from a country where a son is considered a greater asset that a daughter because, after all, the daughter is going to get married and cost a great deal in terms of dowry. Sex determination of the child is done so that female fetuses can be aborted. We now have laws in place that make this practice illegal. I believe that is a positive step and that laws against sex determination can be in place without violating a woman’s right to abortion.
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Women do not need to be protected from their choices and regrets, just like men don’t.
There is nothing more disgusting, condescending and paternalistic than robbing women of the right to their own body under the guise of protecting them from themselves.
I happen to agree with you completely. I for one believe strenuously in experiential learning. I believe also in compassion and from time to time choices require convalescing. This is a social play after the fact. I had a partner that wanted a child. She felt she may not deserve to parent because of a previous choice to abort. How f^%cked up is that? I believe that it pained her, I believe if we seek redemption from past choices we are free to make choices for our future. In this case IMO the right to her own body was curtailed by inappropriate ethical judgement. I believed that she should maintain her right and freedom to choose exclusive of her ethical beliefs.
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Actually, choice means just that, choice. It is irrelevant what the reasoning is and that means “cultural values too”. Pretty fucked, but like free speech you have to listen to a lot of shit to have that right.
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Which is the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, a scathing prediction for what awaited the U.S if anti-pornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin continued their alliance with far right evangelicals to scrub sexuality from the public eye.
Same song, different singers?
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“Which is the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, a scathing prediction for what awaited the U.S if anti-pornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin continued their alliance with far right evangelicals to scrub sexuality from the public eye.”
– Oh, I love that novel. Atwood is the best.
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It is also kind of strange for people to talk about feminists being silent on this issue when I am sitting right here and my posts on this subject can be found quite easily.(Clarissa)
I guess I need to go into your archive’s. 😉
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No need. I love to self-promote. 🙂
https://clarissasblog.com/2011/01/30/the-liberating-potential-of-the-burqa-or-the-future-of-gender-studies/
https://clarissasblog.com/2010/10/19/clothing-choices-and-tolerance/
https://clarissasblog.com/2010/03/20/quebec-against-the-niqab-finally/
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This is a social vice, not something we see as a cultural value in South Asia. Considering this a part of our culture is insulting to our society and damaging to the cause of the activists in our communities who are working to create awareness about this (Dr. Kale is of Indian descent himself). Also this gives the right wing another excuse to cry foul about “multiculturalism” which in its original sense is a great idea.
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Yes!
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In fact this kind of callous “pseudoliberalism” might have an element of racism to it. Let these ethnic minority communities do whatever they want, as long as it does not affect us. We don’t want to trouble ourselves by cleaning their crap for them. The British colonials pursued a similar agenda in India.
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“In fact this kind of callous “pseudoliberalism” might have an element of racism to it. Let these ethnic minority communities do whatever they want, as long as it does not affect us. ”
– Agree completely.
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Speaking of callous cultural barbarity, Clarissa:
http://news.yahoo.com/women-banned-speaking-gynecology-conference-israel-002600627.html
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I have no words. WOMEN are not allowed to speak about GYNECOLOGY? Do we all remember what the root of the word gynecology is?
This goes beyond barbarity. I can’t find the right terminology right now.
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Well you know how emotional women get when it comes to ladyflowers. We can’t expect female gynecologists to get a patient all splayed out in the stirrups and not begin chanting in praise of the Mother Goddess.
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Yes, God forbid folks who actually have ovaries will get to discuss them at a medical conference.
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In any case, if there isn’t it, the emotionally vindictive cultural relativism can certainly bring it out in a person. Some while back, I spoke on a Zimbabwean community Internet radio station about self defense and women. I received a fairly hostile response, which didn’t really phase me, as I’m not actually a do-gooder liberal, as I was assumed to be. I just do what I feel like; what gives pleasure to me. So, I had people phoning up to the station to lecture me on cultural relativism and how I really had to respect it. They were even telling me what it was — the tone was very condescending. One woman phoned in and said that in her culture it was perfectly acceptable for a man to rape his wife. I think she was trying to invoke the squeamish liberal in me — but, once again, I’m not a liberal.
I was very reserved about my views at that time because I was still writing my thesis and didn’t want to jeopardize the outcome any more than I already had due to my contrarian tendencies. But, I really thought it amazing that someone or a group of people would jeopardize their own well being just to spite what they had wrongly perceived as white liberalism. I have to say, this brought out the sadist in me, just a little. The punishment of rape within marriage seemed appropriate for adopting the idiocy of the cultural relativist position.
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” They were even telling me what it was — the tone was very condescending. One woman phoned in and said that in her culture it was perfectly acceptable for a man to rape his wife.”
– Yes, I just love this “But this is my CULTURE” in a voice that betrays the expectation that I will immediately drop down on my knees and ask forgiveness for criticizing the sacred cow of CULTURE.
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This is somewhat related: When I was a kid, there was a children’s-targeted sketch comedy show called All That, and one of the recurring sketches involved a character named Ishbu (not sure on the spelling) who was from a made-up foreign culture with bizarre customs. Whenever Ishbu did something unusual (it was a kid’s show so it was typical slapstick stuff) he would preface the explanation with, “In my foreign land, we…” And people went along with it because questioning it upset him greatly.
Now that I think about it, it takes on another bizarre, amusing level as an adult.
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Sorry — I meant, ” in any case if racism isn’t already there..” I need to wake up more fully and partake of some coffee.
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